The mare I ride has heel cracks that run from her frog back to the bulb on all four hooves. They’ve been the cause of some lameness recently (or at least I think as there’s nothing else coming up and she’s a sensitive girl who has gone lame from mud rash before). My local store has Hoof Doctor Hoof Putty, and NT Thrush Powder. I’ve heard both can work, any recommendations between those two? I go up 3-4 times a week and can apply then. Thanks!
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I’ve used the NT Powder on my mini who had the same issue and it worked great. I treated him several days and could see a big improvement each day. Now I treat once a week just to keep things looking good. I’ve also used it on my other two for mild, weather related thrush with the same results. I used a stiff brush to work it in to all the hard to reach areas. It did not sting them like some other products which made treatment easy.
Picture? do you mean there’s a crack in the middle, from sort of back-center, back to the heels? That suggests thrush, which is almost always caused by poor trimming, and while topicals may keep things from getting worse, they’re not going to fix the actual cause.
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Tomorrow cream in the syringe. Fill the cracks daily until healed meanwhile do as JB says and address the cause.
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If you can only go three or four times a week, And the thrush is that bad, I would be treating this aggressively. I am not familiar with the products you mentioned. With severe thrush I like to tackle it with tomorrow/today And something like Groom’s Hand. Use the GH First, give the hooves a few minutes to dry, then go back with the mastitis cream. I would say that you should see a difference within 2-3 weeks of treating it 3-4x/week this way. If I get a horse with debilitating thrush, I tidy up the frogs with my hoof knife and then do this protocol daily and there is usually a noticeable difference in a week. Be religious!!! On healthy feet, I like to spray a tea tree oil dilution on the bottom of the foot once a week…especially in the rainy season. I do find this helps keeps them in good shape!
You could also use wax(like from a wax toilet ring) or desitin and copper sulfate crystals…I have had friends who have had success doing that but I do not seem to have as good of luck keeping the treatment where I want it…so I tend to stick with what works for me.
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Just tried it for the first time last night, will do it the next two days and hopefully have another rider help me do it on a day that I can’t make it up this week! My problem is with the application though, I’m not sure how well I was really getting it in there. Were you really packing it into the crack? Thanks! Fingers crossed this helps!
Any chance you could link me to this tomorrow product (I am in Canada), I’m having trouble finding it online. Thank you!
I put the tip of the nozzle in the crack and filled it if could, If I couldn’t, I used a stiff brush and worked it in really well. As the cracks started to heal, it got easier to treat as they widened as became easier to get the dust it. I did find I wasted a bit getting it in to the areas because of the nozzle, but I learned to just brush the wayward stuff to where it was needed.
Hope it helps!
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Tomorrow is prescription only in the US now, so you’ll have to find some old stock.
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Thanks for the link.
Good to have on hand for the future.
Clean the crack with a strip of gauze and floss it. Today’s cow cream into the crack, then pack the crack with gauze leaving a tail you can grab to remove to prevent junk from getting inside to delay healing from the inside out. Then talk to your farrier about how the horse is trimmed to prevent it from happening.
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IME treating thrushy heel cracks is a two stage process.
First you need to knock out the infection which can be done fairly quickly with several applications of something broad spectrum that will act on a range of microbes, bacteria and fungus, because you don’t always know what’s in there if you don’t culture. Packing the central crack with gauze or similar is a great idea.
If the cracks seems to go down towards soft tissue, I would use a treatment that is soothing and not caustic like the antibiotic creams mentioned.
However, once you have knocked out the infection you still need to wait until the cracks and other damage grow out and that can take several weeks to see a difference. So it can be hard to tell if you are making progress. It’s not like skin, which heals cracks and cuts much faster. The frog grows from the inside out like the hoof, and the bulbs are part of the frog structure.
The other aspect of thrush is that it has environmental, nutrition, hoof care and idiosyncratic individual aspects.
If your thrushy horse is in wet or dirty turnout or stall, that is absolutely a causal factor that will make it return even if other horses in the same living conditions are fine.
If the horse has contracted heels or is overdue for a trim, this will make it easier for thrush to grab hold.
If the horse’s diet is low in copper and zinc, he will have lowered resistance to skin and hoof ailments overall.
And some horses are Special Petunias and just more prone to thrush, scratches, skin funk generally even when everything else is Ok.
You also need to keep a critical eye on hooves and get in there with something like iodine if the frogs are starting to get mushy or smelly, before any infection takes hold.
I dealt with thrush heel cracks this at some point in the past couple years for the first time on my very healthy mare when we had some summer rain: warm plus wet. I used a mix of athletes foot cream, polysporin and zinc oxide cream in a syringe. Kind of messy to mix but got right up there. I’m sure the cow paste stuff would do the trick too. As preventative I use straight high concentration iodine or a thrush squirter that’s iodine plus gentian violet
I love gentian violet as an all.around barn first aid spray but it got banned in Canada to keep it out of the tilapia fish farm ponds. Gentian violet is a great anti fungal and I would use it as a frog spray if I could get my hands on some!
Some people also swear by packing the frog of thrush prone horses with one of the clay hoof packing products like Artimud or Lifedata etc. I don’t think that’s enough to cure real deep seated established thrush, but it could help prevent.
I’d much rather see treatment consist of something like this, rather than continue to use antibiotics that are critically important to animal (and human) welfare. There’s a reason Tomorrow, and other “medically important” antibiotics that were OTC, went to Rx-only in June of 2023
https://www.hoofrehab.com/Thrush_treatment.htm
Copper sulfate is a good antiseptic, and when mixed with desitin (drying, soothing, water-repelling) can help heal a whole lot of things.
https://www.hoofrehab.com/Thrush_treatment.htm
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Do people not use thrush buster anymore?
Yes that’s the iodine/ gentian violet product I mentioned. I would use it on mild thrush but not on the very deep cracks that potentially go down to soft tissue which may be raw, because the iodine stings.
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A small update I was using the no thrush powder and unfortunately, my horse is becoming foot shy and applying the powder was just too much of a hassle. Wasted product every time she swung her foot while I tried to apply it in the cracks. Going to try a combination of red horse products next. I’ve heard hood stuff works well for packing.
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