New horse Jet arrived at the weekend. He is an ex-racehorse who has successfully competed in endurance and eventing more recently and went lame with a diagnosis of navicular bone oedema on MRI.
He has the relatively weak digital cushion and under-run heels that are not only typical with this diagnosis but which are also common in ex-racers; its no surprise therefore that he is landing flat on this foot though he has a marginal heel first landing on his right foot.
He has worn shoes up until 4 weeks ago, when he was put onto box rest; happily he has a fairly relaxed outlook on life and, like most horses coming off box rest, has taken well to a more active life on our tracks.
Its yet another useful feature of tracks that they encourage regular, gentle exercise rather than the sort of high intensity, hand-brake turn, stop-and-start galloping that can occur when horses are first turned out after restricted movement.
Jet is landing better on this foot even though its the foot he has historically been lamer on. One possible explanation which I see fairly frequently is that the "better" foot has been overloaded to the point that it then becomes lame, even if it wasn't the worse foot to begin with.
You can see that he has a better frog on this foot as a result.
Jet's initial footage is here and you can see the difference in his landings in front as well as the fact that he has a slight medio-lateral imbalance, leading him to land laterally on both front feet.
https://vimeo.com/225983728
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