Hooves

Happy new year! Right now it's a beautiful winter day in Kalix with moderate -10, winter blue skies and sun-kissed pine tops. Hope your Thursday is as beautiful where ever you are!

For my part, I started as early as 1 January with something that I think will be a theme for the year, hooves.

Here are the hooves that I, along with Kerstin Kemlén and photografer Anki Lundberg, where evaluating. At a first glance they look like completely normal riding horse hooves to me. For the evaluation, we looked at; heel (landing), frog, bars, hoof walls on quarter and toe, coronary band, sole and toe (push off) and we use a score from 1-9.

When the legs are separated from the horse and it is not a horse you know from before, it is actually not easy to know what is the right or left side of each pair. I certainly thought that would be the easy part...

The picture above is of the hind feet and you can see how the nails are set in the white line. It is not unusual that the nails ends up there, though it  does not cause tendering preassure it means that bacteria have a way into the white line and the risk of white line dissease increases markedly.

In this picture you can also see that the outer bars has fallen and that the shape of the hoof is deformed in both the outer regions, the hoof capsule is a bit rotated and the toe is cut at an off angle relative to the frog.

A toe that is cut in this way robs the horse of its push off ability at the front of the hoof. In turn, this means that the work load will be more directly on the front of the coffin bone and it was visible in the sole, nature had padded the coffin bone by adding on to the sole.

Since I am new in the area and most hooves I've seen looks like these I missed all this with the toe, sure, I could see that the toe was cut off angle - but the consequence of the cut and removal of the tip of the toe for the horse Kerstin enlighten me of.

Here we nippered the toe of the hoof, the structures you can see in the picture are (from folding rule and down) the insensitive sole, the blood supplied part (red dots) of the sole nearest the coffin bone, inner wall and the black stripe at the end is the outer hoof wall.

In the current hoof the hoof capsule had migrated forward more than 2 cm in relation to the foot. I guess the feeling for the horse is as if I (size 39) would walk around in a pair of 45's, I would have a hard time knowing where I really have my feet and where I put them in the world.

As with anything else, it was life itself that brought hooves in focus and I'm learning everything I can to give my horses hooves that fit their feet. Everything under the motto: No hoof, no horse.