My horse has recently developed cracks in the center of both front feet. My farrier says those are just his feet. Do I need to be more concerned? Is there anything I can do to help get rid of them?
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Is this a farrier who’s been doing this horse for awhile? Or is this the first time this farrier has done the horse?
These feet look grim. Unless you’ve just switched farriers, and this is the very first trim with the new guy, and he’s inherited this mess, it would be good to find someone new.
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That was a very eloquent way to say those feet look like crap. Yikes!
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How long are you going between shoeings? He looks like he has an awful lot of toe but you need rads to see how far you can trim that toe back. The farrier is also nailing pretty low which can make the foot fall apart but there again you need to see how much sole depth the horse has to see how high you can nail. Personally, and I am not a farrier, I think the long toe that is flaring and crumbling is contributing to the toe cracks. Maybe talk to your farrier about shortening the shoeing cycle first.
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This looks like it could be or could become white line disease (WLD). WLD damages the hoof horn, turning it powdery, and it will slowly progress if not addressed. WLD is addressed by hoof resection, wherein the damaged horn is carefully removed. In my experience, some farriers are impatient with this whole process (resection takes a while to perform) and may choose to ignore it.
Also, the hoof looks dished. This may be from chronically long toes. If your farrier is brushing off your concerns, I suggest getting your vet involved: schedule a joint appointment with your vet and farrier and consider taking X-rays. I was frustrated at feeling the need to take X-rays just to get improvement in my horses’ farrier care, but rationalized it because in the scheme of things, hoof X-rays are relatively inexpensive compared to other vet care.
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Agree. Is this a new farrier? How long between trims?
Horses can have naturally crap feet that take some managing, but these look to have issues that are entirely caused by the trim. I’m no farrier, but I don’t think that type of crack is “just his feet”. Either way, they can definitely be helped by a better trim.
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I had my former farrier for…gosh…25+ years? He started doing my very first horse and then every horse I’ve had since then. He followed me through several boarding barns and then to my own barn and then when I sold that barn he came to the new boarding barn. Lovely fella.
However.
My current horse’s feet, compared to everyone else’s feet in the barn done by a different farrier, looked like hell. They had cracks and splits and chips. I had heard “that’s just his feet” for decades about various horses and truly just didn’t know any better.
I finally moved on from that farrier to the barefoot trimmer and rehabilitative specialist that I have now. She’s fabulous and it is very rare to see a split, crack, or chip in my horse’s feet. He’s barefoot (always has been) and does have thin soles, but his feet look good and hold together and are at much better angles with much less toe and flair. She discovered white line when she started doing him, and that went hand-in-hand with the raggedy appearance of his feet. Once that was taken care of, his feet came along beautifully. He’ll get the occasional surface crack or something from wet-dry weather cycles, but nothing more than that. I also feed him a hoof supplement with lots of copper and zinc added to his ration balancer that already contains a lot of copper and zinc. It helps.
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I will say I had a horse here for about 9 months that was barefoot and his feet looked awful at the end of the 6 week cycle. He grew a ton of foot, but it was not the greatest quality foot. And he stomped at flies violently and dug, even though he had on fly wraps. So his foot was pretty cracked at the end of the cycle. He had the same farrier and trim cycle as the rest of my horses who did not have hoof cracks. And I don’t think the farrier could have trimmed more when he was here. Now the horse was a lot worse when he came - but I don’t think he had great hoof care before and what foot grew down seemed to be better quality foot. But he still cracked. I am not sure how I could have prevented the cracks aside from stalling him 24/7. And that was not going to work.
So at the risk of pissing off a lot of people, what breed is the horse? I have OTTBs and have one with feet that dish just like this. We’ve got him at 5 weeks trimming but as a TB there isn’t a lot of sole depth to work with. I’ve had him 6 months (he’s 4), so at 12 months, we’ll see what’s what. So far so good. His feet are better (Hoof quality) than my other OTTB who has a similar toe crack, although not quite as high. His angles load both front feet differently so he has pads with different wedges for each front foot. I’ve had him since 2020 and he’s 10 and with this regimen, he has been sound, whereas without pads he would be intermittently slightly off. Both horses are on hoof supplement—recently switched from Farrier’s Formula double strength because of the cost, to TSC Dumor at half the price and my farrier swears by it. So far so good. I also oil their hooves 2-3 times/week. They are outside pretty much 24/7—they can come into their stalls anytime they want, but they don’t. I’ve had OTTBs all my life and foot quality is aways an issue although it didn’t used to be in the 1970s 
. If it’s a TB, it very well might be that yeah…it’s just genetics and you accommodate.
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Please understand I’m not attacking you! At all! Some horses just have naturally finicky hooves. I just wanted to point out a few things that might resonate with OP too.
Your issues could certainly be management issues. TBs don’t, as a breed, have bad feet.
- farrier’s formula and Dumor are both essentially expensive pee. Neither have enough of any of the active ingredients to be worth using in my (not a nutritionist) opinion. You’d be better off supplementing biotin, Cu, Zn and maybe protein individually in useful amounts. Depends on the diet, but my vet says biotin and CU/Zn are pretty safe to add to a horse with poor hooves and/or coat.
- oil can DEFINITELY be a contributing cause. If “oil” is one of the hardener products like Keratex or Durasole, that’s less likely. But if it’s one of the others, moisture and oil isn’t necessarily a good thing for crumbly hooves! They need protection from the wet-dry cycle. A lot of the hoof topicals on the market are a waste at best, and actively damaging at worst. You may see a huge improvement by just dropping this step
- persistent cracks can be a sign of thrush, WLD, or other invasive damage to the hooves. Treating that infection would help a lot - the less caustic options won’t damage healthy tissue either.
- I definitely have seen some horses struggle to build depth, but it’s almost entirely impossible to build depth with fighting a poor trim or diet. That said, some horses just need shoes/boots/pads to be comfortable in their environment and workload. I won’t deny that!
Anyway, toe cracks like OP’s are NOT normal. A little bit of chipping on a bare hoof during fly season? Yeah absolutely. But huge cracks like this are a sign of poor balance - farrier caused or too long a cycle. I would NOT say that hooves like OP’s are “just cause it’s a TB”. Or any breed actually. Those are some crap feet due to other reasons.
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There are quite a few concerns about the hoof in the OP. I’d be looking for another farrier if my existing one said, “those are just his feet.” Generally, no horse needs to or should have the issues this hoof has on a long term basis, IMO.
I’d be considering an evaluation of the horse’s diet. What does this horse eat?
I’d also be thinking about WLD as someone else mentioned. Out if curiosity, does this horse have any thrush?
This horse would benefit from a better trim for sure.
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If you ever get one like this again, I highly recommend professionally fitted hoof boots. I’ve seen some amazing turnarounds of pretty awful feet that had been getting worse/were unthinkable due to stomping and digging.
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That’s a really unhappy unbalanced foot. The toe crack is a manifestation of that imbalance and the wall getting pulled every which way to Sunday. Finding a good farrier is tough and the reality is that many barns can’t get a different farrier out for a single horse.
If this is the farrier you have to use it get radiographs from multiple angles. It’s going to show how off things are and if your vet is remotely decent, they can help me a bridge with the farrier. If you get the balance and flaring addresses the toe crack should go away in a few cycles.
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Yeah, this horse needs more frequent trims, at the very least. You can see the change in angle here:
Did something change in the management? Frequency, diet, different farrier? You can’t chop the foot off at the green line, but it looks from this angle that the toe is very overgrown and needs to go back to the same angles as the green. (Obviously you can’t tell everything from this angle so maybe I’m wrong).
There might be other issues (white line disease) but I’d first want to address the trim.
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What do the heels and bars look like? Feel brave enough to post a solar view?
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I am continously bothered by the amount of bad trims and shoeing that I see both on here and in real life. Sometimes horses are wonky, sometimes owners don’t get their horses feet done as often as they should, but still, the theme is far too reoccurring. I guess if the horse isn’t outright or very obviously lame, it’s not such a big deal? I know that in some instances, a horse will grow the hoof it needs, so not every hoof will be textbook picture perfect at any given moment.
This isn’t just about the OP. I can’t help but wonder who is teaching these farriers this sh*t and/or why they think it’s OK? I see so many horse plagued with all sorts of imbalances, underrun heals (that’s a huge one), and other things. I’m just a layman, so my opinion is worth the piece of paper it’s written on, but it’s just baffling to me.
I’ve been able to get a few different farriers or trimmers out for one horse over the years, so while it can be difficult, it’s always worth asking, IMO.
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the solution there seems simple - shorten the trim cycle. If there’s that much foot at 6 weeks, there’s enough to trim at 4-5
Toe cracks are almost always due to imbalances, whether long toes, or high heels, or both The rest of the time, it can be because of some WLD (which can cause cracks anywhere), maybe he whacked his foot and caused a chip big enough it spread into a crack. But MOSTLY, it’s a trim issue.
The top of this crack is very clearly at the top of flared hoof material, which almost guarantees this is a trim issue. The question is - is the current farrier growing that flare down with better trimming, or is he the one causing the flare
A ground level side view will help us see the foot a lot better. There will be clear signs of long-term poor trimming, and then the question is - how long has this farrier been trimming him, and at what frequency
it’s an age-old question for sure. 35 years ago, my first horse was boarded at a barn of around 30 or so, give or take, for most of the years I was there, and the horses, trimmed or shod, were done by a CJF. The more I learned, the more I realized how many horses had long toes including mine, and it was actually a MT I had work on my horse who pointed it out in the beginning. When I got brave enough to talk to the farrier about bringing toes back, I was told “I can’t, he’ll get sore” 
After another couple of trims, I brought in the non-certified farrier who’d been trimming my young horse at another barn, and in one trim he took off a lot of toe and huh, no sore horse. It still wasn’t GOOD, but it was a lot better, and in the year or 2 he worked on him, things were still better, just not good. It wasn’t until we moved, and that trimmer wouldn’t travel up to me, that I found a trimmer who would come to me. My horse was still in wedges, and in one trim, she had a better angle barefoot, than shod in wedges (not implying at all trimmers are better than farriers, it’s all about the trim first)
Point being, poor farriers AND trimmers have been around since the dawn of time. Not all of them go to school, some learn by apprenticing with someone else who learned who knows where. Some simply stop caring. Some take a week-long course and think they’re good to go
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Yeah, it’s a highly unregulated industry in this country too. I personally don’t care so much about “qualifications” anymore. Which sounds bad, I know. It’s just whoever does a good job at this point.
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Owners need to read the labels for ingredients. Dumor hoof supplement delivers biotin at 30 mg/6 ounces and copper at 100mg/6 ounces, which is what they get daily. Kentucky Equine Research recommends 20-25 mg per day. Their feed, Nutrena ProForce Fuel, also provides biotin at 1mg/pound and copper at 55 ppm which equals about .00194 oz. Trace mineral amounts. They are getting plenty. Their feed is 13% protein, they are both adult geldings in (ultra) light work and turned out on 80+ acres of grass pasture and they get coastal hay when they want it and 1-½ flakes of alfalfa daily. A more affordable supplement like Dumor can certainly help.
We live in a primarily DRY, rough/rocky area—Texas hill country. We don’t have frequent wet/dry cycles, so hoof oil has helped my guys.
Yes, DuMor Hoof Care is decent. 30mg of biotin is plenty for most horses. 100mg/300mg cu/zn is decent. At roughly $1/day for the 22lb size (not sure if it comes in other sizes), it’s not the most $$, but it’s not the cheapest way to add those nutrients. The amino acids in it are mostly insignificant - 1.8gm lysine, 3gm methionine
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