If you always do what you've always done then you'll always get what you've always got

When I post, as I did on Monday with the great photos of Sophie and Felix, my thoughts about navicular prognoses I will often get a comment from someone who has had a horse whom they were unable to rehabilitate. I never know exactly what has been tried with that horse so its not something I can usefully respond to but usually the comment carries an undertone of "you can't really rehabilitate horses from injuries like this after all".

Of course, there is no "magic wand" which will give a miraculous result with every horse and that's true of any therapy you try with humans or horses. It disappoints me though when people write off navicular rehabilitation on the basis of the one horse they know of who did not improve. By contrast, I'm a proponent of rehab because I have seen so many horses who DID improve.

The vast majority of the horses who come here return to the same level of work as before they went lame. I have always been transparent about what we do here and have posted the collated results of all the rehab horses over the years so that there is evidence and data in support.

It's true that what we do here follows a specific protocol and that we have specific facilities - I suspect that is why we often get good results which aren't easy to replicate. There are elements of what we do which will be the same for each horse - the base line minerals, the assessment of landing and soundness - and the principles of rehabilitation are always the same - to encourage and increase sound movement while protecting the horse from injury and preventing bad movement.

Beyond that, though, what each horse does here, day to day and week by week, is different for every horse and if something is not working for one horse I will try something else. Its pointless to persist with an exercise or methodology which is not benefitting the horse and horses will always tell you (if you listen) what is helpful and what is not.

This is why its so essential to monitor our horses regularly and check whether they are improving, deteriorating or staying the same. If we keep on doing the same thing regardless - whether that is trimming, shoeing, exercising - without checking whether it is working for the horse - then we should not be surprised if we are unsuccessful.

In my case, I have over the years changed the way I feed, the way I trim, whether I trim at all, the way I exercise horses, the tack I use (on numerous occasions!), the surfaces I turn horses out on, the amount I turn them out on grass, the surfaces I exercise horses on and so on. For every horse there will be tweaks that are needed to optimise things for that horse and I am constantly learning from the horses themselves with the aim of making rehabilitation the best I can for each horse.

We don't always get it right and we are far from perfect but we are constantly learning from the horses themselves. Its a sobering thought to think that if I had stuck with what I had always done my horses would still be in shoes, only intermittently sound, and more of them would be dead.

The message of today's blog is a simple one: if something is not working for your horse, then don't accept that its inevitable; instead try and change it for something better.