Hello, do you know if a very long toed /low heel horse can be lame of that? Or it can only worsen another existing problem?
thank you
They’re not mutually exclusive.
What you need is a good farrier who recognizes that simply lopping back toes does not automatically raise heel. Feet grow forward and not just down.
But to oversimplify your question, Yes, long toes low heels will exacerbate many low grade lameness issues. As proper trims & shoeing will help a compromised horse.
A good farrier can make some lame horses sound and a bad one can make any sound horse lame.
4 Likes
Long toes will eventually make a horse lame. It’s just a matter of time, based on a lot of other variables - in work or not, type of work, how hard the work is, general leg conformation, etc.
A leg lameness is almost guaranteed to be made worse by any sort of hoof imbalance.
Long toes/low heels can cause navicular issues, cause suspensory tears, cause flexor tendon tears, can cause shoulder soreness, neck soreness, it can work its way back and cause hind end soreness.
6 Likes
Long toes are not the same as an overgrown hoof. Can you post photos?
In addition to what’s already been said, a foreword run hoof capsule can be one symptom of past founder. Do you think that’s the case here?
If this is a horse under your care I recommend looking at the information on hoof balance on Pete Rameys website. Barefoot practitioners tend to have the best information on hoof balance, but it is all still true if the horse has shoes.
You will likely need a better farrier as well.
3 Likes
An overgrown hoof by definition has long toes. Long toes are a subset of an overgrown hoof.
This is true. It’s also true that in certain breeds/types the long toe is cultivated to facilitate a certain way of going.
In our area if you have gaited horse your farrier will trim for a lengthed toe and lowered heel as this will promote a more lateral way of going unless you LOUDLY and CLEARLY tell them NO. Every time we switched farriers but once we had this issue. Every time but once we were able to “educate” the farrier in our preferred way of dealing with the foot and they did it our way. But it’s a recurring theme!!! 
G.
2 Likes
I know of an awful lot of pasture potatoes who have spent most of their lives with long hooves, long toes, and underrun heels, and in spite of the chicken little predictions have died of old age with sound legs and hooves. So while I believe that long toes can add to any other problems a horse might have (such as excessive work), I don’t believe that overgrown hooves cause lameness.
As I stated above, how much, or how soon, overgrown feet cause lameness issues depends on how hard the horse is used, and for what.
The pasture potato who does little but putz around, maybe the occasional gallop, never carrying weight or jumping or running barrels or working in deeper footing, is going to be on the far end of the spectrum.
It is proven that long-term long toes, which inherently bring underrun heels, and therefore contracted heels, can cause, at the very least, sore heels. That horse is lame. Long toes create excessive forces on the structures at the back of the leg, increasing the risks of strains and tears. Long front toes require more work to get those feet off the ground and moving forward - that manifests higher up the leg and then working towards the back of the horse. Long hind toes, including horizontally long as well as vertically long, increase strains on the hind end structures and can easily cause sore hocks, stifles, SI, and working forward as the horse compensates.
Walk around in shoes with an elevated toe, or high heels, all day every day, and tell me you don’t get sore, end up with knee and/or back and/or hip problems.
6 Likes
[QUOTE=JB;n10401958
Walk around in shoes with an elevated toe, or high heels, all day every day, and tell me you don’t get sore, end up with knee and/or back and/or hip problems.[/QUOTE]
The question, as I understood it anyway, was whether long toes low heels cause lameness. My answer was that I don’t think so. Now if you change the question and add work, or other factors, then yes, long toes *coupled with" other factors may cause lameness, although separating the contribution of the long toes from the other factors would not be an easy task.
I think a better analogy would be clown shoes rather than high heels, though. IOW, if I walk around in clown shoes all day would that likely make me lame? (Probably not.) What if I tried to run marathons or compete in other kinds of comps wearing clown shoes? Would that make me lame? Maybe, but then I’d have to have some way to sort out whether it was the clown shoes or the nature of the work. IOW, I’d need a large study with a clown shoes group and a control group.
And then that would lead to the question of how long the toes would have to be, and for how long, and under what conditions, before they caused lameness.
But they do, eventually. The less work the horse is in, the longer it will likely take, and/or the longer it will take for you to notice it. or maybe you’ve got a high energy pasture ornament who regularly goes rip-roaring around the pasture, and those long toes are the final straw that makes that suspensory tear.
It’s easy to see a pasture puff as totally sound, but if you put him into work you’d see that he was not moving properly. A horse doesn’t have to be head-bobbing lame to be lame. Bilateral front end (or hind end) lameness can look normal, but the horse is still lame.
LTLH ends up sort of the equivalent of your feet being shoved into shoe too narrow. You can probably function pretty normally for a while, but as time goes on, you won’t be able to.
Now if you change the question and add work, or other factors, then yes, long toes *coupled with" other factors may cause lameness, although separating the contribution of the long toes from the other factors would not be an easy task.
It’s really not a question of 'may". It’s just a question of when, and how obvious is it. It’s the other factors which increase the risk of sooner rather than later, and the severity.
I think a better analogy would be clown shoes rather than high heels, though.
Different pathologies. Not all underrun heels crush - some just get taller and taller. So while the hoof angle may still line up with the pastern angle in a straight line, everything is contracting, and the heel support is moving farther and farther under the navicular bone. Painful.
The LTLH scenario would be more like the clown shoes.
IOW, if I walk around in clown shoes all day would that likely make me lame? (Probably not.)
I guarantee if you walked around in them all day, the next day you would be sore because all your muscles would be working differently, and harder, to get your legs moving the right way without falling on your face. Your whole body mechanics will have changed, and if you did that every single day, you would end up with knee and hip and back problems.
What if I tried to run marathons or compete in other kinds of comps wearing clown shoes? Would that make me lame? Maybe, but then I’d have to have some way to sort out whether it was the clown shoes or the nature of the work. IOW, I’d need a large study with a clown shoes group and a control group.
Every time you change body mechanics, change how the body has to work to stay as sound as possible, you are increasing the risk of an earlier and worse lameness issue. Guaranteed. It might take you longer than me, might take me longer than someone who’s 20, but it will happen.
We don’t need more studies. It’s been proven over and over. People with a sore knee who compensate long enough end up with hip problems and then back problems. My brother ended up with back lameness because of a hip problem - there was nothing inherently wrong with his back, but every specialist he saw before having hip replacement surgery said without a doubt, his back issue was a direct cause of compensating for his hip
Every competent farrier out there will tell you that a horse with chronically poorly trimmed feet will become lame at some point. You cannot alter the mechanics of a body for long before you cause strains, and small tears and eventually big tears.
And then that would lead to the question of how long the toes would have to be, and for how long, and under what conditions, before they caused lameness.
Well of course! Having long toes because the horse went 10 weeks instead of the normal 5 is unlikely to cause a lameness issue. But if he grows toes very quickly, and his heels crush instead of standing up, then double-long toes may well be the direct cause of a suspensory strain when that uneducated owner takes him around a jump course at week 9.
Yes, there are a lot of moving parts. But I don’t understand how you “don’t think so” there is any scenario where poorly balanced feet, over a long enough period of time, won’t cause a lameness issue.
There is SO much more to a horse being lame than a head or hip bob.
3 Likes
Thin soles can go hand in hand with long toe low heel and that will certainly cause lameness.
1 Like
Many barefoot pasture horses self trim, even if that means dramatically losing a chunk of overgrown wall. If they don’t ever get trimmed and don’t move around enough to break off hoof, then you get way worse problems than under run heels.
The worst collection of long toe/ under run heels I’ve seen has been on shod, low dollar, back country recreational trail horses. Clearly chronic contracted heels long toes run forward heels probably caused by folks trying to max out intervals between shoeing to save cash, and having lower quality farriers.
I’ve never seen a barefoot horse get that amount of hoof distortion.
It can. It doesn’t have to. But when intentionally done it has an effect on way of going. If that’s the “natural” tendency of horse it will also affect way of going. Enough to cause lameness? Maybe so and maybe not.
G.
So, this is the story…my horse have never been lame…untill the day i felt him very stiff under the saddle. I looked at him and i felt he was really lame in both front feet. People told me he was not but i know really well my horse and knew something was really wrong with him(he was bilateraly lame so no head bobbing). So I called a vet, he told me"horse is not lame, thank you, good bye". Went to big vet clinique, after x rays, ultrasounds, the horse did not show any issue, the only thing they saw is he had abnormal long toe, low heel(you could see it more in the x ray, lateral view that actually looking at the hoofs). So had to wait for a week before farrier came and in the meanwhile he became dead lame in the left front. Decided to go to special orthopaedic vet, he found an issue in the knee, after treating the knee and 5 days after new shoes the horse was totally sound. So the vet told me that the horse after being a long time shod with really long toes was really sore and the bad hoof angle worsened his knee issue.
Know I learned that every time i will buy a knew horse i will take some lateral view x ray just to see how the coffin bone is in the hoof
So I had a look back at your previous started topics, OP. Just curious how many horses you own, if you are posting about horses you actually own or just horses you ride maybe in a program? Just that you had a lot of posts with basic questions about hooves and lameness but about many different horses including a number of young ones.
It’s unusual for someone to be acquiring that many horses but still be learning the basics so was just wondering about your situation.
We have 7 horses at home, basically had Big issues with 2 of them, allways the same ones, a mare that actually died last year and now this one that is going through many problems. Thank you for your interest anyway, but allpeople i know that have horses go through issues, maybe they do not post them . I like to share them, that s all, thank you
