Hilary – It sounds like you will be really pleased with the pour-in pads. I wonder if you’d need both? I wonder if pouring him at first with the equi-build (the black stuff) would give you the stabilization you need, without needing to do the bondo as well. Ben was the bondo foot king at one point, and we found that once we started pouring him, he grew more sole, and hoof wall, and his whole foot is more stable and we haven’t needed any bondo in ages. The Equi-build is a much firmer pour and we did two resets with it at first, to improve his feet and then moved to the Equi-pak, which I love. One of the unexpected benefits of it is that when he does pull a shoe, it stays in his foot and keeps the hoof wall from disintegrating. The only time he’s lost a pad or had it tear was when he was in a pasture that had some buried hay string and he managed to catch that across his heel and it slipped under the pad and cut it when he took off. I always had problems with the different bondo materials staying on the hoof, particularly in a wet spring or summer.
slb – I wondered that too – if we had too many horse feet floating around!!
Ok, Buzz is in wedge bars because he is pretty poorly conformed in front. When I bought him, he stood waaaay behind his feet, so to speak. On his left front, he has a hideous old bowed tendon (the leg turns out about 15-17 degrees in front without a little correction and yes, he is a cousin of Slew! 
) and he had lonnnng toes and really low heels.
The farrier trimmed him the first time, put fronts on the second time, and I was really unhappy. So, I met with the vet and we decided to shorten the toes and set the shoes back – farrier claimed I just wanted a second horse with a club foot, but he did it, and then stated that I was right, that was what this horse needed.
So, we go along, he puts himself to work in the pasture (gotta love those T’breds! 
) and he comes up lame, like really lame. So, we believe that he’s strained his suspensory, but nothing shows on u/s, so we do stall rest and turn him back out after about 3 weeks. Plays in the pasture for a while, and boom! He’s lame again. This time we x-ray and the films don’t look bad, but vet decides that there is probably arthritis in the joint, based on the amount of effusion in the joint, so we inject him and rest him.
He’s better but not 100%, so I start really thinking about this – i.e. I am dreaming about horse feet (I think there is a pattern here!) I realized that his boney column support is still bad, even with the short toes and farther back breakover. It occurs to me that to rotate through its motion, the fetlock joint is still having to go too far forward over the long toe, and worse yet, dropping way too far to the ground, since there is no support under it at all. Therefore, anything more than w/t work is going to probably aggravate a joint that is low on lubrication at this point anyway.
So, I ask for a shorter toe and we decide to see if the bar shoes help with his support issue. They do, but he is still having an occasional flareup in his ankle. At this point, he is also on NAG injections, feed through joint stuff, and I was getting ready to try to put him to work. So, right after the AAEP convention, I got together with our vet that went to all the foot stuff that was available down there, and we looked at his feet/conf really hard. We decided he still had a low/slightly underrun heel, so I asked my farrier if he could build these shoes into wedge shoes (I HATE wedge pads and though that would have helped the ankle, it would have further crushed those heels).
So, what he did was to take the eventers that he wears, and weld the steel bar across the back, adding steel and tapering the wedge just so. He did a beautiful job, and it has had two benefits that we can see so far.
First, his ankle is finally standing more over his foot. He’s been back in almost daily work (he doesn’t do much, since he doesn’t KNOW anything) but some days he’s worked pretty hard, and the ankle has not flared up yet (I feel as if I am jinxing myself!) As we got started back to work, I did bute him lightly (1 gram at bedtime) if he worked really hard, just to be careful. He hasn’t had any bute in a while, and seems to be doing ok. The second benefit to this shoe is that while his heel isn’t really floated, it has been given room to expand, and darned if it isn’t growing down to meet the bar. We’d like to encourage the heel to do what the bar shoe is doing and that is our goal – to one day not need them. I don’t know if we’ll get there, but we are trying.
I wanted this type of shoe on Bear, who is the navicular horse, but his farrier doesn’t believe that the wedge on the bottom of the shoe works – like the KB shoe- he thinks that the wedge will just sink into the ground and not do what it is intended to do. I can see that argument, but it is obviously helping my horse and must work for others, or the idea wouldn’t have been developed.
I realize that I am neither a vet nor a farrier, but it seems that applying some basic idea of physics to this horse has really helped him. The vet is stunned we have not had to re-inject that ankle, and if the time comes, I will, but I’d rather avoid doing it if possible.
Libby (who will take Ben’s new rear feet pics later today when it stops raining – hey, Martha, can we do a file that puts x-ray views next to feet pics? )
Proud member of the Hoof Fetish Clique
So far, I haven’t cried yet, but I’m still thinking about it. I did call in sick to work so that I can take them to the clinic. We’ll see what we find . . .
