Lakota - Making Progress

Lakota's feet are one of the reasons I have been delving into equine nutrition so deeply lately and have had all of our hay and pastures tested.  While many people would say that his sunken coffin bones are the result of founder, I know that this horse has never suffered an acute laminitic episode.  He has been tested for IR and he is negative, nor does he show any signs or symptoms of IR while Hawkeye does.  Lakota's feet have slowly, steadily gotten this way over time and the alarming aspect of this is that I have seen the beginnings of such symptoms in every horse who has lived on either of our properties for more than a few months, which is why I suspect a nutritional or environmental issue as one of the initial causes of his troubles.  There are a lot of factors at play here, but that may have been the pebble that started the avalanche.

I have the hay test results and one of the glaring issues is the balance between the trace minerals.  The ideal ratio of trace minerals is generally considered to be 4:1:4:4 iron:copper:zinc:manganese.  I don't have the numbers in front of me, but when I did the math, my pasture ratio was in the vicinity of 20:1:5:55.  We have added a high copper/zinc supplement, which has helped, but it is still way off.  I am working on creating a custom mix, but I still need more information.  The levels of manganese in all of our samples were higher than the highest range in the entire Equi-Analytical database and I have not yet been able to determine a safe way of balancing this.  I am still working on it and when I get things figured out more, I will post some of the results and what I am doing about them.

In the mean time, I am still working on the trimming aspect of Lakota's feet and we are making some progress there.  About 8 weeks ago, after the x-rays, I started trimming and wrapping Lakota's feet every two weeks and it is fianlly starting to pay off.  Before that we were seeing some tiny improvements, but mostly just maintaining the status-qua.

I have been looking for ways to stimulate better growth and improve circulation, especially in the back of the foot, which was so horribly weak.  This first photo was taken 4/20/13 and shows what I mean.  The frog is so badly atrophied and diseased that the heel bulbs are actually growing down and under the foot in an attempt to protect the sensitive tissue underneath.  Combined with the paper-thin soles and disconnected walls, it's really amazing that this horse could walk.

 
In these next two photos, you can see that we are finally making some real progress.  The one on the left was taken 9/9/13 and the right taken 9/21/13.  On 9/9 we decided to try a product called Magic Cushion made by Absorbine.  It is a hoof packing material with antibiotic/microbial properties, it sort of feels like putty mixed with tar.  I packed it into the entire bottom of the foot and put the casts over it.  Two weeks later there are some good things happening along with a few things I am not sure are good or not.  The things I really like are that the heels and frogs have widened considerably.  In fact the entire hoof has gotten wider and shorter.  If you look closely at the distance between the apex of the frog and the tip of the toe, you can see that the distance has shortened by about a quarter of an inch.   The overall width of the foot from side to side has gained nearly half an inch as has the back of the frog, all of which is excellent.  This was the very first time the the heel buttresses (which are right about where my thumb disappears) had not folded forward on themselves and had instead widened.

The Magic Cushion also softened the sole a great deal and for the first time ever, there was some dead sole material to remove (note: I did NOT cut any sole back.  I only scraped off the dead material so I could really see waht it looked like.  Don't cut live sole, especially on a horse who only has 2mm to begin with).  The reddish areas that you can see on the right are the bruises finally growing out that you can just make out on the left photo.  They look fresh because they have not been exposed to air before. 

This softening of the sole was good and very helpful for the moment, but I would not like to see it any more soft.  I like what the Magic Cushion did, but I wouldn't use it continuously, at least not under the casts in these conditions.  Because of that and because I want to really support and stimulate the back half of the foot, we decided to try this:

This is an impression mold material.  It is the same stuff that dentists use to create molds of teeth.   Each part has the consistency and feel of silly putty, when they are mixed together the stuff begins to set up into a soft, squishy solid that retains its shape.  I think it is some kind of silicone epoxy, but I don't know anything about how it is made.  It is fun to play with though and I can already think of several different applications that I want to try.  That will take a bit of contrapting though and I need to think about it more.  If my ideas work out, I'll share them some time.  But I digress, back to feet...

A custom fitted, cushioned orthotic, the toe area is cut out to help remove any pressure from the tip of the poor, abused coffin bone.

Below is the trimmed foot, with its blue cushion and ready for a new set of wraps, check out how much flatter the hair line is and how much shorter the whole foot looks.  Also look at where the heel tubules end now (they hit the floor just behind where the light colored trimmed portion ends), if you can remember back a few months, they used to be so long they were actually in front of the leg. Now they are just behind the leg, still too far forward, but better...

The next morning, the phone rang while I was in the shower.  I could hear RB's voice leaving me a message, but couldn't make out the words.  Because it's the way my mind works, I immmediatly started imagining that she was calling to tell me that her horse was lame and I'd done something terrible to him.  I came out a few minutes later and listened to the message with some trepidation....

"Kris, I just had to call and let you know that Lakota is out here running and bucking and kicking in a way I haven't seen in...in...in...a long, long, long time.  In AGES!  He hasn't stopped running in the last half hour..."

That's a good way to start the day.  I can't wait to see what these feet look like in two weeks. 

Hay, Hooves and Things

Yesterday, I mustered some troops and we refilled my hay shed.  We moved 114 bales.  We probably could have crammed in another 30 bales, but it wasn't wort another trip.  I'll probably need one more truck load to make it to Spring.  I am thinking about ways to change things around so I can store more hay.  I HATE having to haul hay in the winter.  It is so difficult keeping a path cleared to the barn, the truck always gets stuck, the weather doesn't cooperate....Yup, gotta store more hay or have fewer mouths to feed. 

The donkeys at least thought it was nice of us to provide some entertainment and they very kindly offered to help out with cleanup.

After taking Tanner for his walk and finishing all the normal chores, I went down to Riding Buddy's place to trim feet.  Remember Hawkeye and his sky-blue feet?

We saw immediate, good results with the Equisock casts, unfortunately, they only lasted 2 weeks instead of four.  They didn't fall off, he wore through them.  However, even in just two weeks there was a lot of improvement.  We have another version made by a different company and I would like to know how they would compare, but as the snow is quite deep, we have decided to hold off reapplying them for a bit and see if the improvements will continue with the help of the snow. 

 Meanwhile, I started work on this pair of feet...

These belong to a 14 year old paint horse named Lakota who is related to Gabe.  Lakota's mother was Gabe's grandmother - I think.  I have no idea what such a relationship is called, my knowledge of genealogical terms doesn't stretch that far.  Regardless, these feet are going to be another real challenge.  They suffer from severely under-run heels, thin soles and hoof wall separation.  While all of these things seem like separate problems they aren't really.   The under-run heels push the foot forward causing the sole to thin and the walls to stretch.  The more the walls stretch, the more the heels grow under.  The problems all end up feeding into one another and the whole thing turns into a vicious feedback loop. 

I have no idea if I will be able to help him or not, but I'm gonna try.  A barefoot trimmer worked on him last year and I think she was on the right track and may have ultimately helped.  However, she did too much too fast and made him so lame he could barely walk.  He wound up wearing shoes all summer just to keep him comfortable.   The shoes made him comfortable, but did nothing to help the underlying problem.  There are farriers in the world who can help solve this problem with shoeing, but that is a hard beast to find in this area. 

I trimmed Lakota's feet for the first time yesterday and, rather then try to address all the problems at once, I worked just on the heels and did just enough to the toes to stabilize them.  The goal is to get the heels going in the right direction, if that happens, the toe will follow naturally in future trims.  If the toe follows, the stretching will disappear from the wall and the sole will gain some concavity and thicken.  I used this method on Hawkeye and we have seen dramatic improvement in the past few months without any lameness.  I hope it works here.

Returning home, cold, tired and hungry, I decided to indulge myself.  After a scrumptious dinner of tuna fish (OK, maybe scrumptious isn't quite the right word, but it was quick and easy, which is often the same thing in my book:) I took a long, hot bath; made a pot of tea and read an old book having absolutely nothing to do with horses, donkeys, hooves or hay.  Do I know how to live it up on a Friday night or what?

Hooves

Over the past couple of years, I have been doing a lot of studying of horse and donkey hooves.  I seem to be turning into a farrier, I never intended it, and it's a bit against my better judgement, but as always, necessity propels.  I even broke down a while ago and bought the entire set of Pete Ramey's videos.  If you are seriously interested in learning the real ins and outs of hooves and how to trim them, I would highly recommend these videos.  Just be warned, these are not a quick overview, they are 16+ hours of densely packed, intense information.  They are very well done and easy to understand, but there is A LOT of information there.  I have actually only made it through the first three videos and I had to take a break and work on some real feet in order to process all of it so far. 

In a roundabout way these feet are what started this odyssey...

They belong to a wonderful gelding named Hawkeye, who belongs to Riding Buddy.  She has had him a number of years now and has spent the last three years struggling with chronic hoof problems.  I believe that his troubles actually started before she got him and some bad farrier work after that compounded the problems.  He ended up with a severe case of white-line disease, went through a complete hoof resection about two years ago and has been struggling ever since. 

In addition, Riding Buddy has three other horses who all started having the same trouble and I started having hoof issues with Tessa and Gabe after they spent time on her farm.  There are a couple of decent farriers in the area that do an OK job as long as they are starting with healthy hooves and there are no problems.  However, if there are problems, they don't know how to fix them. 

Thus, the beginning of my hoof odyssey.  I bought some good tools and I started doing things on my own, mostly out of a sense of self-defense.  I made some mistakes along the way.  Mostly, because of self-doubt and being too timid.  Worrying about cutting too much, I often didn't do enough.  In the past six months though, things have really started to come together.  This weekend, I trimmed both Tessa and Gabe's feet and they look great.  All signs of trouble are gone despite the fact that they have been almost completely neglected this past month as I have been overwhelmed with Ramsey's care.

Where we are really finally, finally starting to see a real difference is in Hawkeye's feet and in Riding Buddy's other horses.  The others all have good feet now.  Hawkeye's feet have been trapped in a kind of negative feedback loop for several years, but in the last four months, they have undergone a radical shift for the better.  All he needs now is a relief from the low-level, chronic pain that is keeping him from moving freely, which is what stimulates healthy hoof growth.

Enter the blue casts he is wearing in the photo above.  They are called equi-socks (or equi-casts) and every horse owner in the world should know about these things.  They could save your horse's life one day.  They are made of the same material that a doctor would use to cast a broken arm.  They roll onto the hoof just like vet-wrap, but harden into a solid cast that will (hopefully) stay on for the next four weeks.  A regular shoe can even be nailed to the bottom of them for added support.  

Now that Hawkeye's feet are set up for proper growth, we are hoping that the casts will give him enough support so that he can move out soundly and stimulate good hoof growth.  I just put the casts on yesterday and he already seem more comfortable and is moving better.  I am hoping to have good things to report in another four weeks.