I agree with everything JB has posted. Another tip I will post is that many owners who swear their horses could NEVER be sound barefoot are making their horses go MUCH too long between trims.It is my professional opinion that we (as an industry) could maintain a MUCH larger majority of our horses barefoot if we trimmed at a more reasonable interval. The traditional 6-12 week interval is MUCH, MUCH too long for most barefoot horses, in my opinion. I have never owned a horse who “needed” shoes, but I have also never owned a horse who could go more than 4.5 weeks between trims. My current horse (of more than 17 years) has textbook perfect hooves, as long as he is religiously trimmed at four week intervals. At four weeks and three days, he shows signs of white line stretching; at five weeks, we start having to make adjustments to address those issues.
My farrier flatly disagrees with this logic. If it takes 2 years to “convert” a horse to barefoot - they obviously needed (and probably still need) hoof protection. And/or the trim is just wrong. How much does the horse suffer for the first 23 months before they have “converted?” (And are they really converted, or just resigned to be uncomfortable - which many horses do.)
My 22 year old retired TB mare is shod in the front. She needs them, and she would most definitely suffer if I made her go barefoot. She could do it (if I didn’t care if she was uncomfortable); and she could be comfortable for much of the year. But not in late summer when the clay is like concrete, and not in frozen mud in fall & spring, or jagged frozen slush. So…that’s about 9 months of New York, or at least - you can’t be 100% sure you can avoid it…she’s due for shoes tomorrow and we still have snow on the ground - so she’ll be in winter shoes at least one more cycle. (So, barefoot, maybe she could go from May to August? What’s the point?)
Therefore, I keep her in front shoes. For the OP’s horse, it’s likely that the hind shoes can be removed, but it really depends on why the horse is in them, their quality of hoof, conformation, etc.
