Where We Are Now

After my experiments with nailing on EasyShoes the summer of 2014, I was a bit more prepared to deal with the crisis that Hawkeye found himself in last summer.  He was much healthier after being treated for Lyme disease, but his feet had degraded so much by that point that he was constantly sore on all four feet, especially the fronts.

We had x-rays taken to see if we were dealing with bone loss or rotation (I don't have copies of those x-rays or I would post them).  Fortunately, they didn't show anything like that.  However, he only had 5-7mm of sole depth (it should be at least 12-15) and he had severe white line separation that involved nearly 4/5 of both front feet and about half in the hind feet.  The separation went nearly up to his coronet band.  He also has badly contracted heels, with a very weak, poorly developed frogs.  Basically, there was just nothing holding this poor horse up.  Any one of these things causes problems, but having all of them together just put him into a no-win downward spiral that we were desperate to stop.

The glue-on shoes had not worked well for us and Hawkeye had such huge crevices in his white line that I was afraid the glue would work up into them and cause lameness all on it's own.  You can fill those holes with Keratex mixed with copper sulfate (which I did), but they were so bad in this case that I wasn't sure that would be good enough.  I was really afraid to nail into those crevices as well, but finally deemed it to be the lesser evil.  I was dubious as to whether the hoof wall would even hold up to nails, but we tried it anyway.  We didn't have much to lose at this point.

The x-rays had shown that his break-over point (the toe) needed to come back a full cm so I brought his toes back as far as I dared in one trim.  You have to be careful doing this on a horse with so little sole and poor wall connection as it is very easy to invade the sole and further lame the horse. Do NOT do this to a horse unless you have a good plan to provide protection afterward.  Everything I did here was done with veterinary involvement and approval.

I've added some of my infamous scribbles to this photo showing where I was trying to get the toe (the lines aren't as straight as they should be, my drawing skills aren't that great).  The wall separation caused by white line disease that I outlined here was on both sides of both feet. 

Unfortunately, I was so worried about getting the shoes right that I forgot to take pictures of the soles the way I usually do so this is the best I can do.

If you think these feet look really small for the size of the horse - they are.  There just isn't enough foot here to support a 16 hand, 1300 lb horse. 

This isn't something you can trim your way out of.  It's like that old carpenter's cliche: you can cut and cut, but the board still won't get any longer.  Aside from bringing the toe back, I did not cut anything off these feet.

There are lots of barefoot trimming advocates who might criticize my methods and be cringing at putting shoes on this horse.  To an extent, they may even be right.  If I could take this horse somewhere where he could be turned out on a large, DRY acreage with plenty of varied terrain that he had to cover to get his low sugar/low starch hay, his feet would heal themselves.  Unfortunately, that is not an option.

We talked a lot about taking Hawkeye to Cornell or to a specialized trimmer down in PA (who would have glued on a set of Easyshoes).  Given my experiences with the new farrier at Cornell, I think he would have told us to put him down.  The PA farrier is a long way away and there are no local farriers who could (or would?) help Hawkeye, so he is stuck with me. 

I cleaned out those crevices as best I could, treated them with Tea Tree oil and then packed them with a mixture of Keratex and copper sulfate granules to kill the bacteria that had set up house in there.  I set the shoe way back under his foot to bring the break-over back where it should be, give him full support in the back of the foot and get him using that part of the hoof.  This was in the beginning of August.

I wasn't sure if the shoes would move around too much so I left parts of the gluing tabs on to help stabilize things.

I know RB was hoping for instantaneous results when we put these on, but that is not quite what we got.  About 3 days after putting the shoes on, I got a call from her.  She said he was still the same and we should just pull the shoes off because he was still sore.  She would go back to trying to keep boots on him 24/7.  That had not worked before and I really felt that we were running out of options.  I thought we should give it just a bit more time so I talked her out of it.

We had nailed shoes onto a lame horse after all.  We had also made a lot of very sudden changes to a lame horse who had not been able to move well for months.  It would have been nice if he had walked off sound right away, but that was too much to hope for. 

Three days later though, I got another call - he was moving a lot better.  A week after that, RB starting riding him lightly.  By Fall, Hawkeye was doing 10-15 mile rides and RB was complaining that she was having a hard time keeping him to a pace that wouldn't kill the other horses.

The shoe you see in the photo below was one of the shoes we tried to glue on the previous year.  You can still see some remnants of the glue on the tabs.  I chiseled the glue off and reused the shoes.

If you were to draw a line down the front of this foot, from the coronet band to the toe, you would see that the breakover point is where it would be if this were a healthy foot.  The toe may look like it is hanging way over the shoe, but that toe is really like scar tissue.  I could have rasped it off to make things look prettier, but that would have just thinned the scar tissue and left him more vulnerable to bruising when he hits one of the 4 trillion rock in his pasture.

This was taken about 4 weeks after the first shoeing - not a pretty job, but he was 100% sound at this point. 

That high nail right in the center of the foot is higher than I would usually like to see.  However, that wall separation that I mentioned earlier extended nearly half an inch above that point.  The nail was nowhere near live tissue when I put it on so I left it.

In the above picture, Hawkeye is wearing a size two EasyShoe with half the toe rasped off.  Hawkeye is 16 hands tall and weighs about 1300 pounds. He is now wearing size 3 Easyshoes with none of the toe rasped off.

Within 12 weeks of his first shoeing, his feet grew so much that the white line separation had diminished by half.  After six months, it is now completely GONE and he has good tight wall connection all  the way around.  His sole depth has at least doubled and his heels are a 1/2 inch wider than they were.  He runs around in the pasture and he does not think about his feet anymore.  He goes on trial rides and easily tromps over shale and gravel. He is happy.  He is sound.

Hawkeye might eventually grow enough healthy hoof that he can transition back to barefoot.  He might wear Easyshoes every day for the rest of his life.  As long as he stays sound, either is fine with me. 

A Long Saga

I've been meaning to write about Hawkeye for ages now.  Long time readers will remember that he is Riding Buddy's horse and he has had issues with his feet for many years.  He has a long history of white line disease, hoof-wall separation, thin soles, long toes and severely contracted heels.  He is also highly sensitive to sugar an we treat him as insulin resistant.

The first year that I worked on his feet, we saw huge improvement.  Although we never did get the really robust foot we hoped for, he did grow in a comparatively healthy foot with good wall connection and decent sole depth.  He was sound in the pasture, but still needed hoof boots for riding on stony ground, which is about the best you can hope given the soil conditions in the area..  He was in good shape given where he had started and the limitations we have to work with.

The environment that hawkeye lives in is incurably wet, stony and extremely acidic.  It is basically an old bog filled in with rocks and it is a very tough, hostile place for hooves despite the effort and care RB puts into it. There is only so much that can be done to improve the fundamental geology of the place so we work with what we have.  There is pea gravel outside the barn, copious drainage ditches and a beautiful, immaculate barn.  Despite the environmental issues, Hawkeye went form being chronically sore, aloof and unhappy to sound, outgoing and content.

Last year, all that fell apart.

It started as a very subtle thing.  The first I remember noticing, is saying to RB that Hawkeye seemed withdrawn and unhappy again.  He never showed any specific lameness, but I could always see pain and tension in his carriage and affect.  Sometimes it seemed like his knees, other times, I swore it was in his hip.  And, every day, his feet got a little worse.  No matter what I did, the toes got longer, the soles thinner and the white line disintegrated to the point that he could barely walk.

We scratched our heads, tweaked his already tightly controlled and balanced diet, studied his gait and added up his years -we came up with more than we had thought - Hawkeye is about 20 years old.  We figured arthritis was getting the best of him and started having very bleak discussions about quality of life.  Hawkeye retired and RB went out and bought a new horse (which is a whole other story).

Every time I saw Hawkeye though, something nagged at me about him.  It just didn't add up.  Twenty isn't all that old and I could just see that something wasn't right. I didn't know what it was at the time, but I could feel the wrongness.  Finally, last Fall, he was tested for Lyme disease and he was off-the-charts positive.  We finally had an answer to everything and all of his vague, shifting symptoms suddenly made a lot of sense.

I had long suspected that Lyme disease could have been a problem, but there is so much controversy and misinformation about it, that, up until the past couple of years, when it has reached epidemic stage in this area, it was difficult to get any kind of diagnosis.  Even with a diagnosis, most vets used to be reluctant to treat it.  Many horses test positive without showing signs (or the signs go unnoticed or are misinterpreted) so it used to be considered not worth treating.  Lyme tends to fall into a Catch 22 type of hole, many of the subtle symptoms of Lyme go unnoticed until the horse is treated and because the symptoms go unnoticed, they don't ever get treatment. 

Hawkeye was our first definitive encounter with Lyme Disease.  He is why I knew to take action when I saw the same subtle wrongness in my herd this past Spring.  In retrospect, I strongly suspect that Lakota probably suffered from chronic Lyme.  His vague, but devastating symptoms were similar.

Hawkeye was put on 4 days of I.V. Oxytetracycline followed by 30 days of Minocycline, which is now considered to be THE drug of choice for treating Lyme in horses.  We chose Minocycline because Doxycycline was not available at the time.  However, since then, it has proven to be much more effective than the doxy, with a 100% cure rate - so far.

According to several veterinary sources, Minocycline is the better choice because it passes through the blood-brain barrier. The hardest part of treating Lyme is that the spirochetes which cause the disease burrow into tissues where neither antibiotics nor the body's own immune system cannot reach.  It is this nasty little fact that makes Lyme so difficult to treat and also why it causes such diverse symptoms.  In an attempt rid itself of the disease, the victims own body turns against itself, often causing symptoms that mimic autoimmune diseases.  Some researchers believe that "chronic Lyme" is actually an autoimmune problem triggered by Lyme.  The most successful treatment options are to either use multiple, pulsed doses of antibiotic or use a drug that can reach more areas of the body, such as Minocycline.

Treatment helped Hawkeye immensely, but it wasn't the immediate cure for his feet that we would have liked because no amount of antibiotics can regrow a healthy hoof for him.  His feet had degraded to the point that he was stuck in another sort of Catch 22, negative feedback loop.

His feet hurt so he did not move well.  Exercise and normal movement are what is needed to stimulate healthy hoof growth, but his feet hurt so he didn't move.  Added to that, he does have some genuine osteoarthritis issues, aside from the lameness and muscle soreness caused by Lyme.  His sore feet made the arthritis worse, which made him reluctant to move, which made his feet worse, which made the arthritis worse.........  We needed a way to break the cycle, and that is where my experiments with Easyshoes that I did last year come in.

To be continued....