Bensmom, thank you for writing up Ben’s story. I love hearing about the tricky ones that finally get working sound.
Regards John
Bensmom…no, it doesn’t make sense, but it also doesn’t make any difference if it is hot or cold set…just generally, if hot set, the wall is burned to match the shoe so there aren’t parts that touch and parts that don’t…does that make sense?
In Buzz’s case…the toe and quarters are basically weight bearing, while the heel and corners of the toe are not. This basically is the opposite of what is normally weight bearing…that is why the hairline buldges in the front and quarters. Look at some of the better feet I posted and see how the hairline is always generally straight looking, without buldges.
What you are describing for Bear sounds much like what hubby would do. He uses a lot of St. Croix and NB shoes.
Hang in there…this will take a while, but next year, all will be much better. Do keep us updated with pics so we can track progress.
Bensmom…like you got nothing better to do…but could you take some pics of the resets? Also, could you take pics of his heels…looking for imbalance there also.
Here is conventional wisdom about addressing M/L balance:
http://www.horseshoes.com/advice/balancingnormalfoot/balancingnormalfoot.htm
Here’s another site with some M/L info at the bottom.
http://www.aro.co.za/source/News/asian/Ware.htm
I have a similar problem horse. He has limb deformities that actually twist the leg first one way, then the other…therefore, he “looks” straight in limb. However, he toes out. Conventional approach would leave him highly imbalanced. Seen this as my husband has questioned several farriers about how they would trim him. Hubby holds the foot loosely, in a natural position bent up under the body. This tells him where the foot acturally falls…turned in! He then trims to address this toed in problem and the horse is sound and balanced. So yes, some horses can be “weird” and convention doesn’t work at all.
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I finally have a quiet morning at work… Took a bunch of pictures of the boys’ feet before the farrier came last time, but they didn’t come out very well.
This one shows my 14-y-o TB, and believe it or not, this is an “after” shot! I kept meaning to take some “before” pix last year and never did. When I bought him a little over 2 years ago, he came from a very rural area where there weren’t many (any) choices for farriers. I honestly believe his former owner honestly believed her farrier was doing the right thing. My vet, on prepurchase, said the first thing he needed was to get his feet in shape. He had huge flares, big plattery feet with thin soles flat on the ground, and L-O-N-G toes and no heels. My farrier worked on him for about 6 months but it wasn’t enough, because we ended up with major WLD in the right front. Next we spent 8 months working with the referral farrier at the vet school, who worked MAGIC and gave my horse a new set of feet. It’s been almost exactly a year since we were “discharged,” and his protege has been working on him since then.
When the WLD was diagnosed, he had almost 2" of toe ahead of his coffin bone. He still has more than the ideal, but he’s a whole lot better. The heels still need work but show a lot of improvement. The crack in the RF is now simply a sand crack, which he will probably always have. The crack in the LF, which you can’t see in this photo, gets dremeled occasionally as a preventive because I’m paranoid. He’s shod in Natural Balance shoes and I’m not sure if my farrier is still modifying them; at one point he ordered size 3’s because he is so wide in the toe and quarters, he can make a bigger shoe smaller but couldn’t make a size 2 wide enough.
This was taken shortly before he was due to be shod, I think at 6 weeks after his last reset. His LF doesn’t toe out the way it looks in the picture; he’s just standing funny.
Hi EqTrainer and welcome!!
My farrier has now diagnosed me as “dangerous” 
and I have you guys to thank for making me more dangerous!! 
slb – I’m going to go to my balance debate that is ongoing with my farrier, and then I’ll gather my navicular ideas in another post (see, if I keep “talking” we will catch that sunnie thread for sure!!)
Ok, when we originally computer balanced Ben, it was done in order to find the source of his hind end pain. We found that he was very “tilted” in his P1/P2/P3 alignment – he leaned to the outside. My farrier at the time had been struggling with why he wore down the outsides of his hind feet more than the insides and when he quit attempting to fix it with extended heels and/or trailers, my poor horse was so sore in the hips that he couldn’t canter.
So, flash forward to the reset that day at the vet clinic. We reset him, cut off a lot of toe on the hinds, put him in a larger shoe and build up the outside of his feet. The change in how he moved was nothing short of miraculous and the vets were stunned, because they hadn’t been able to “see” the tilt from the outside.
But, what was odd about it, is that he no longer stood “turned out” in back. He didn’t look like a ballet dancer any more, and instead, stood more or less with his feet properly supporting his weight and he could actually “push” to carry his hind end. We realized, after the fact, that he had turned out his feet to balance himself since he basically bore all his hind weight on the outside edges of his feet. (Try it yourself – if you roll your feet to the outside edges, and then turn them out, you can balance much better – so he basically had adopted this stance as a coping mechanism and it also hid the problem) The give-away should have been that though he stood turned out in back, his hocks were not close together – i.e. he didn’t toe out from the hocks down.
Now, we are working on Buzz. He stands the same way in the rear. I asked my farrier to adjust his medial/lateral balance as we’ve done Ben’s and see if he would be able to stand better and hopefully, see the same sort of improvement in his comfort in work level. This is NOT the same farrier that originally made the improvement in Ben. This one has been working on Ben with the benefit of the x-rays from his beginning of doing him.
Instead of lowering the inside, he lowered Buzzy’s outside. My trainer freaked when she saw him walk after that, saying that now he was wringing his hocks and told me to fix it. Well, I can’t see that and neither can the farrier, so we haven’t changed anything yet. He was very tranqued when she saw him, so perhaps he was just drunk.
So, right now, the farrier wants to lower the outsides more, and his theory is that since he lands outside of the foot first, it means that the outside is high and needs to be lowered. I disagree with this. I think he is landing outside first because I think he has the same tilt that Ben has and he is bearing more weight on the outside. It seems that it would be impossible for him to stand and strike off in the walk toed out if he were high outside, because the higher outside of his hoof would naturally push the foot to the inside, not outside as he walks.
If you have ever studied, even casually, human walk/wear patterns, you can see that the lower part of something, in the case that comes most easily to mind, a running shoe that someone wears down by listing to the outside, once it is worn, it will be lower than the inside, but it will still strike the ground outside first, because that is the way the bones in the legs lean, and therefore, place the weight.
Am I making any sense at all? Right now we’ve agreed to disagree, and I haven’t told my farrier yet, but I talked to the vet yesterday, and he thinks I’m probably right and that the horse needs to be lowered on the inside. We are planning to shoot just an A/P view of each hind foot, because that should answer the question definitively and that will be a whole lot cheaper than either going through several resets testing the views out and dealing with the problems that may go along with that testing.
Does my theory make sense or am I just knowledgeable enough now to be dangerous
EqTrainer – the website for the computer program that analyzes the feet and makes suggestions is www.eponatech.com and at one time, they had a good explanation of the views needed to judge the balance of the hoof – they have a very specific set of x-rays that they have you take to feed into the program. If they have removed that as giving out too much knowledge, let me know and I’ll pull my reports and check and see what views we did to check balance.
Thanks for your insight!
Libby
Good to hear that is was the pic and not his feet.
Collect your thoughts and lets talk navicular
Wow…don’t tell anyone, but 19…oh, only 18 more posts to go to catch the sunnieflax thread
Wow…who would have thought!
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LF Side View
“Don’t mince words, don’t be evasive
Speak your mind, be persuasive”
Madonna
OK guys…if I cheat here, we can catch the sunnie/flax thread…
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fixed! (decided to stick 'em on a page instead, sorry 'bout that!) And how exciting, a reply already!
- To Ride A Horse Is To Borrow Freedom -
slb,
Thank you. They do look bad. Now that he’s on the road to being healthy and gaining weight, I can focus on the rest of him and his feet. I’m trying to get a good farrier to come out! Thanks again.
Love means attention, which means looking after the things we love. We call this stable management.
- George H. Morris
http://community.webshots.com/user/flycak
WOW Betsy…from what you described, you must be pleased with the progress. Sometimes it can take a long time to attain correct form…a lot depends on how fast the foot grows. Looking good 
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Libby - I think you’re exactly right about him having too much toe. My farrier is working on this with the rocker toes, and not trying too much too fast. When he’s shod (even without the rockers) his feet don’t look so toe-long. But that’s the first thing to look off when he’s in need of shoes.
I’ve wondered the same thing about the sacrum/hip issue and the hind feet, except that he injured his sacrum in an accident -slipped and split his hind legs (OUCH!) about 4 years ago. He was given some time off and some anti-inflammitories and then back to work. He needs to get adjusted 2-3 time a year and I can tell when he’s “out” because his left hind seems weaker. He also has a huge hunter’s bump. The vets/chiros/dressage folks can all tell he has an old injury by the way he moves.
I guess I would worry about ajusting the feet, when they may be caused the the higher-up problem but they do look very off-balance and will this eventually cause problems of it’s own.
Any ideas about the cracks in front? His feet all around are very succeptible to coronary band dings - the horizontal cracks in the hind feet start up top. ON the plus side, I can see how his feet are growing by the downward progress of these flaws…
Awwww…Bensmom…I’m going to go back and look at Ben’s feet…maybe can get hubby to look in the morning. It definately sounds like the farrier is slipping. 
Sometimes, this is way to easy to do. The foot gets into its own growth pattern and you don’t realize it until its too late. 
I’ll post when I think I actually have some answers…where HS when you need him?
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Fizz…bring on those pics!!
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Just a quick note to say thank you to everyone for the advice on what films to have shot. I am going to at least have one of my horses done, doubtful I can talk the sales horse owners into yet ANOTHER expense…
On a happy note our barn manager hauled a new sale horse to our farrier today and he came home with, amongst other things - new shoes that were two sizes bigger than the ones he arrived in!
Thanks again 
Fozbein - interesting “coincidence”…
Java had sores before the corks, but also had unresolved stifle.hock problems… I think the corks came in and prolonged the sores when the stifle was fixed. Now with the corks off and the problems treated in addition to maintaining the stall they are pretty much scabbed over.
martha
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**Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day; teach that person to use the Internet and they won’t bother you for weeks. **
I think that the confusion might lie in what is typically depicted in illustrations verses what is seen in photos. In illustrations, typically the tubules are drawn straight up and down…perpendicular to the ground plane. However, you are correct, they should more closely resemble the angle of the pastern…but we don’t wnat to get to carried away with that either because the pastern angle is a variable…not a fixed structure…and can be changed as a result of changes in hoof form and alignment. I think that if they were growing perpendicular to the ground, then that would most likely be more like a club or coon foot…while the more oval the foot becomes (as evidenced in LT/LH or underrun heels) the more parallel to the ground they become.
Betsy – that is a very interesting observation about Buzz’s soreness. He is actually more sore right front lately because that is where his djd is in his fetlock. But, the left is where the bowed tendon is and though it was done some time ago, I guess we’d still see the effects of him carrying the weight on the other leg in the hoof as it grows out. Interesting.
This pic is right after I got him a year ago.
We have our own clique!
Awesome SLB. The farrier seemed pretty confident his nicely squared toes would stay squarish and his heel would wear proportionately without shoes. I figured if they started to seem long and pointed in a few weeks I would just call him in early.
Something that bugged me about my conversation with him… I asked him his opinion on fixing the underrun heels. Java’s heels are not terrible, and I think if I took another set of pics they would look mighty close to “good”, but nevertheless I was/am on a quest to have them “perfect”.
I asked him about cutting off the heel in order to widen out the support and allow it to grow out more where it belongs. He said, in Java’s case, He feels like his longish sloping heel is somewhat due to foot conformation and there isn’t a lot he can do about it except carefully measure the angles his feet are taking on each shoeing and keep his toes squared, the foot balanced and the shoe on properly if I have one.
So in other words, he prety much said what’s left of Java’s underrun heel was more a matter of “the way he is” as opposed to a fixable problem. Now all Java’s angles were low as well, according to xrays. So he has brought them all up a bit, the back signifigantly.
And I watched him trim, and he certainly cut down the heels to some extent, obviously he wasn’t totally ignoring them. So I felt better about the conversation when he was done.
I need to take pictures again.
But do you guys feel like some amount of sloping heel on a horse of 10 is the conformation of his foot and not always 100% fixable? Libby mentioned a vet said a similar thing, only it sounded like the vet said it about some bad heels and was advocating dumping the horse. 
I might be imparting my conversation poorly. Like I said, he did trim all around the heel also, and he is obsessive with his little measur-er. The NB shoes look nice and he was telling me about many horses he’s used em on whose feet really opened up in size and heel correctness.
Just some more questions to add, that have probably been answered 23423423 times here already.
martha
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**Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day; teach that person to use the Internet and they won’t bother you for weeks. **
