Frankie update

Frankie goes home this week - he is a French TB ex-racer who arrived following MRI with a diagnosis of DDFT, DSIL and collateral sesamoidean ligament damage.

Although he is only a young horse, he is a completely laid-back TB with perfect manners :-) Unfortunately he does have an under-developed digital cushion, probably originating from the fact that he would have been shod at 2 yrs old. His feet have improved a lot, but aren't as good as they would have been if they had been allowed to fully strengthen before they were shod.

His video footage is up here: http://www.vimeo.com/12913304

RF June 2010

RF Feb 2010 1 week out of shoes - long toe, split frog

LF (the weaker foot) June 2010

LF Feb 2010 - contracted with weak, split frog

Frankie on arrival in Feb 2010

Frankie June 2010 - note the improved hoof pastern axis as a result of a stronger caudal hoof

Boys will be boys...

Andy wanted the grass round the school eaten down by the horses before we put the sheep on it, and Felix, Angel and Jacko volunteered... Of course they couldn't do it quietly....

http://www.vimeo.com/12928935

The footage is up in HD here as its too big to put straight on the blog, unfortunately. They were right next to the house, so very easy to pick up the camera when you hear the thunder of hooves ;-) I should point out that Angel is so named ironically...

Am I being provocative?!

I came across a classic quote over the weekend on a well known internet forum. Someone was asking about their horse, whose feet were apparently so crumbly that they couldn't hold a shoe. The horse's heels had also collapsed and not surprisingly the owner was at their wit's end and had turned to their farrier for help and advice.

In all honesty, under-run heels and poor hoof quality aren't the farrier's fault, but he should at least have some idea of the causes and possible ways to improve them - taking shoes off and boosting the horse's nutrition would be a good start on any basis. However, the owner said:

"My farrier is a AWFC remedial farrier and he is really not a fan of barefoot and thinks it generally damages horses"

Now is it me, or am I right in suspecting that there is a man who really needs to broaden his horizons and undertake some serious continuing professional development...?! Of course, he may have actually meant "When I take shoes off horses most of them are footy and can't do the work their owners want them to"...which is a completely different thing ;-)

Lazybones, sleeping in the sun...

Our dogs aren't daft - its a beautiful day, the sun is shining, they've had their breakfast so what next?

You want to lie in the sun, but certainly not on the hard concrete. The grass would be OK, but maybe its still wet. What's the solution to this tricky problem? Go and find your dog bed and instead of lying down inside, turn it into a deckchair by dragging it out into the sunshine...

Great minds think alike...

Bar shoes and such...

Back to what I was thinking about on Monday http://rockleyfarm.blogspot.com/2010/06/storm-update-photos.html - in other words the problem of weakness in the caudal hoof.

Every rehab horse that comes to Rockley comes with a caudal hoof pain diagnosis. What happens after that depends on the facilities and funds available to the vet and the owner, but what we see time and time again are horse which are reluctant to load the caudal hoof (ie the back of the hoof) for a variety of widely differing reasons.

Traditionally, many of these horses would have been diagnosed with navicular, but we now know that intially at least these conditions involve soft tissue - tendons and ligaments - which can only be seen clearly on MRI.

The normal range of therapies and treatments for these horses sometimes includes drug therapies but one thing that has almost always been tried is remedial farriery. The most common shoeing options are bar shoes or wedges. The problem with these shoes, though, is that they don't really solve the problem. Some horses improve over the short term in these shoes, because bar shoes stabilise a weak caudal hoof and wedge shoes allow the horse to walk perpetually toe first.

There was some interesting New Zealand research (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17534413) published, which evaluated the loading of the hoof in bar shoes and recommended them for these types of horses because:

"In comparison to the plain shoe, the eggbar shoe had less peak pressure at the heel"

That sounds like a great idea - as does the idea of allowing horse to walk toe first to relieve pressure on the DDFT...the only problem is that you still have a horse with a weak caudal hoof and soft tissue damage, and now there is no possibility of it becoming stronger. Wedges shorten the DDFT 24hrs a day, and can prevent the horse from being able to properly extend the coffin joint. Bar shoes may take the pressure off the heel, but without stimulus the heels have a terrible tendency to contract with corresponding damage to the frog.

Rather than just trying to take the caudal hoof out of the equation with bar shoes and wedges, shouldn't we be trying to restore it to healthy function?

Rehab horses on a roll!

Lexus LF: Still a work in progress, but better heels and functioning frog, 23rd June 2010

Lexus LF: Contracted heel and wizened frog, 19th March 2010

Lexus 23rd June 2010

Lexus 19th March 2010

Two pieces of good news for a Thursday - its turning into a wonderful week ;-)

Firstly, Lexus went home yesterday, and I've uploaded his footage which is here: http://www.vimeo.com/12796301

There aren't many horses who would be given a second chance barefoot by their owners having gone lame at 19, but Lexus is one of the lucky ones, and I have to say he deserves it - he is an absolute gent.

We don't have a magic wand at Rockley, so we can't turn the clock back and get rid of 19 years of wear and tear, but we can help horses improve their feet, and boy was Lex keen to improve his! Its lovely to see his footage now, and watch a short-striding, toe first landing horse transformed into a heel first landing, big-striding horse :-) Lex still finds hard uneven ground a struggle, but he picks his way and copes admirably. Across the fields and on good ground he looks half his age.

Now for the second bit of good news :-)

Some of you may remember Paul, who was with us for rehab over last winter. There is more info about him and links to his film footage in the "Rehab horses" tab at the top of the page (scroll down to the bottom to see him) and on here:

http://rockleyfarm.blogspot.com/2010/02/comparisons-paul-before-and-after.html

http://rockleyfarm.blogspot.com/2010/01/paul-again-just-for-completeness.html

http://rockleyfarm.blogspot.com/2009/12/good-job-paul.html

He went home in February and yesterday was the day his vet came to see him for the first time since he was lame at the end of last year.

Paul is one of the horses in "Project Dexter", and as part of that, we ask that the horse's own vet assesses its lameness before coming down here and again following rehab so that we have an objective record (often from a sceptical vet) of whether the horse has improved. Sometimes horses are re-vetted down here, or immediately after they go home; on other occasions the vet visits the horse once its been home a few months.

When I went to see Paul last month he was looking magnificent, and he is working 6 days per week, but its always a slightly nerve-wracking wait to see if the vet (in this case Ollie Crowe at Willesley Equine Clinic) agrees. The fantastic news though is that Paul trotted up completely sound and passed with flying colours.

Before he came here, he was 3/10 lame LF on a straight line and 4/10 on a circle, so thats quite an improvement :-)

More pages, more horse info

I am a bit slow on the uptake with the old technology, though swapping to a Mac has helped no end, but its taken me till now to work out that you can have extra info on yer blog...I only realised because I saw some other blogs which had nifty additional pages across the top, but it took a couple of days before I mastered how you put them there.... :-0

So now, there are some handy little tabs at the top of the blog where I've put info about our own horses and the rehab horses, so that if you come across a name you can check out the horse's potted history, plus pics and links to film clips. I've only put up details about a selected few past rehabs at the moment, but will add to the list as we go along - I hope you find it interesting!