Mud vs. Bar, round one

The insidious mud won round one.

Bar lost the shoe on his upright front foot and went barefoot for one day, just until my long-suffering farrier managed to somehow attach a shoe to that soggy, peel-y hoof.

Mike is my hero.

As mentioned earlier, that shoe was hanging on by a bare thread the other day and by Wednesday night, was flapping loose on the inside. What to do, what to do. Leave it on until the mud sucks it off completely or pull it? Being a bit of a nervous nelly, I chose the latter--worried that the shoe would hide in the mud nails up, posing a much more nasty risk than Bar being barefoot. Then I slathered the foot with iodine, called Mike Thursday, and gave Bar the day off. You can see in the picture below how chewed up the inside wall of his foot is.


Lena benefited, too--getting some ground work, brushing, and massage on Thursday. She thought it was about time.

All this just in time for the next storm to roll in.

Winter feet

Every winter, our farrier has to visit a little more often than during the dry times of the year. Not because of hoof disease (knock wood), but mostly because Bar has Thoroughbred feet and his shoes do not always stay as connected to his feet as we would like.

Lena has awesome feet--big and well-formed, with solid and thick hoof walls. Mostly, the only time her shoes come off is when she steps on them herself and pulls one off.


Bar, as mentioned in previous posts, has fairly typical feet for his breed. Racehorses are built and bred to be light and go fast, so they don't always end up with tough, sturdy feet. His feet have, however, gotten much better with the work our wonderful farrier, Mike, and Farrier's Formula.


Every winter, it's a dance to see how long we can go between shoeing as the moisture and mud soften Bar's already thin-walled hooves, letting the shoes work themselves loose. Last year, we added clips to the mix during the worst of the wet, but that's a trick, too. Clips can weaken the hoof wall by allowing bacteria to get behind the clip, so it's a balance between keeping the shoes on his feet and adding to the problems. We also use a lot of iodine to keep that bacteria in check and to harden his hooves as much as possible.

The horses were just shod on the 18th, so when I took Bar out today to work him in the round pen, I did a cursory check to be sure he did indeed have all four shoes on--which he did. After his work, I took him up to treat his hooves with the all-important iodine and noticed that two nails in the left front had wandered out of the hoof and gotten flattened out against the bottom of the shoe.

Bah!

Luckily, Mike is available to come out on Monday and fix it. He knew exactly what hoof and even what part of the hoof because he'd set the shoe to try to give Bar's hoof enough room to flex with the moisture.

Seems like there is always more to learn, always more to try to make a horse's life better.

Mother-Daughter bonding over abscesses

Katie is house/horse/mule/dog/chicken sitting until the 27th and called me the other night because one of the horses had abscesses pop through in the heel bulbs of both front hooves. Poor guy--one would be bad enough!

Cowboy was wearing pads on both front feet--probably to protect his soles--and they seemed to collect a lot of, well, you can guess. Not only collect it, but hold it up against the sole of the foot where it can ferment and do all kinds of good (bad) stuff.

We decided to pull his shoes (with the owner's permission), and Katie needed tools and first aid supplies, so I agreed to head down there early Sunday morning and assist.

It's really amazing what this parent-child bond gets one to do.



Cowboy was not a terrible patient and we did get the shoes off and his feet cleaned up, treated with Ichthamol (a truly nasty but effective substance), and wrapped in diapers and duct tape for the night. I have to say Katie does a nice job of creating a diaper-and-duct-tape boot for a horse. It seems to be in the prep work, which appears to include holding her knife in her teeth.



Last I heard--which was this morning since the cell phone service is a little spotty where she is--the diaper boots were still on Cowboy's feet and Katie was prepping to go out and check on him again. She planned on laying everything out before even going to get him out of the paddock, since he is now vaguely suspicious of buckets and medical supplies.

Silly horse doesn't know yet how good Katie is. Or how stubborn.

Bar and his Typical Thoroughbred Feet

Bar has a beautiful head and (as Devon put it) "terrible" feet. The hoof walls are thin and shell-y and without shoes on, the poor horse would have nothing to stand on. I have heard the barefoot arguments, but I really don't think there is any way to toughen up his feet. At least not without staying off him and putting him in pain for awhile, neither of which I'm willing to do, even if I was convinced it would work.

Luckily, I have a fabulous farrier who is as stubborn as he is talented, so even though that back foot was torn up and very, very short, we have a shoe on it. That's good, because without it, I couldn't work Bar and that would be a very, very bad thing for all of us.

When Mike came last week to shoe Lena, he came prepared to deal with Bar's back feet. Mike had managed to get a shoe tacked on after we lost it on the trail a couple weeks ago, but the mud we got as a result of all the much-needed rain ended up pulling it off because there just wasn't enough hoof to hold the nails.

As it turned out, Bar had grown out enough that Mike ended up doing all four feet anyway and put clips on the back to help hold the shoe on--hopefully for at least 7 weeks until our next appointment! So far, so good. Both back shoes feel very attached.

Ta dah!



The clips look great! The lumps are mud I couldn't quite scrape off (need a wire brush) and the red is iodine to keep bacteria at bay.