I am including a case studies section to help the general public as well as all my trimming students that either come to me for the Horse Owners trim training sessions, or the Professional training program. I hope these cases will be of help to anyone dealing with hoof capsule deformities, they are based on fine tuning the hoof balance to achieve optimal hoof mechanism.
* Please note, this is not intended to replace proper hands on and theoretical training! If you are an amateur, get some hands on help, proper trimming takes a lot of practice and training.
| Clydesdale |
| This case is not a complete case but I wanted to include it so people can see how reasonably nice you can get a draught hoof to look after just one trim. I hope these few pictures will help owners and practitioners alike whom are dealing with large horses to see that they too can have hooves that look and work like light horse hooves. I didn’t follow up on this horse with photos as his soundness issues disappeared within his first few trims. Unfortunately about 6 months later when the owner was away on vacation the horse broke his coffin bone while playing in a muddy paddock. These guys play hard I guess! He would have mended just fine barefoot as did the other client horses I treated but the owner succumbed to the attending veterinarian’s advice and put shoes on the horse. I was called out in spring of 2006 to begin work on this nice, but HUGE Clydesdale whom had been having trouble with his feet. When I went out to see this horse, he had the very typical flat pancake draught horse feet. His walls were flared out and pretty thin for such a large horse and his soles, flat as pancakes, even though he was overdue for a trim. When I say overdue, someone might think that he was more than 6 weeks due, when in actuality the horse had been trimmed 2 weeks prior to my first visit. I told his owner that the horse needed a full trim and not just a clean up trim. It was noted that this horse tripped a lot as well.
This first photo of his right front hoof shows what his hoof looked like that day prior to my trimming him. Note the flared out walls and the very thin edges on the walls. No wonder the horse was lame on gravel, how could walls like this allow a thick sole to support a horse of this size?
I don’t have a solar view of this right front foot, but I did take a solar view of his left front so you can see what kind of flaring we were dealing with from underneath. You can see some callusing of the toe in the 10 o’clock to 3 o’clock region. I removed practically nothing from that area, as I knew full well that I was going to be removing as much of that flare as possible and placing this 18 hand 1600 plus pound horse straight on his soles. I also did NOT take much frog at all, apart from any loose flaps that needed to come off.
After this first trim his hooves looked like this – Note how after trimming, the wall thickness increased from down below where it was paper thin. There was still work to do on this hoof, ie flare removal but I felt on that day that this horse was having most of his walls taken away and being placed back onto his soles, I wanted to make little changes and trim him often. He was placed on a 4 week trimming cycle. We also know that we can’t remove all the flare in one trim, it must grow out with consistent and proper trimming, so this is how we left his feet.
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