The Enchanted Forest

I haven't talked much about Levi yet.  He came to this farm about two years ago in very poor condition.  That has changed and he is in excellent shape now.

Levi has a sweet and mischievous nature and would be happy to go looking for trouble if he thought he could get away with it.  He'll test the boundaries just because he thinks he should, but he gives up happily enough because his heart isn't really in it.  He and his person have worked out a fine friendship and have a genuine connection.

This is what his feet looked like on 8/28/16 when I first looked at them....

These shoes had been reset just a couple of weeks before and you can see that they sure weren't doing much for him.   Levi was very sore and tender footed in these shoes and they were doing more harm than good.

Unfortunately, I did not get any more pictures at the time, but Levi's feet are, sadly, very typical of what I see around here.  The foot is badly under-run, he has central sulcus thrush, the walls are long with very poor connection and his soles are paper thin.

If I had remembered to take pictures of those soles, you would have seen that the bottom of his foot was nearly convex rather than concave and the frog was prolapsed beyond the bottom of the sole.  I know that if we had had x-rays taken, they would have shown a sole with only 3-4 mm of depth rather than the 15-20 he should have.

This is very common in this area because the ground is perpetually wet and soft.  The soil is highly acidic and very deficient in both copper and zinc, which are needed to grow good feet.  Feet like this are a by-product of our environment and the extent of the associated problems depends on the genetics of the individual horse.  I have seen much worse than Levi, but there is a great deal of room for improvement.

As a side note, I think I have posted this article before, but it is worth revisiting if you live on soggy ground:  http://www.thehorse.com/articles/15097/managing-wet-feet

My goals with Levi are to treat the thrush, bring the heels back and shorten the toes.  This should allow him to grow in healthier, well connected walls, which will also increase the depth of his soles.

This is what his foot looked like on Friday after I had pulled his first set of Easyshoes....

Believe it or not, this is improvement. When we started, Levi's collateral groove at the back of his foot was less than a 1/4 inch deep and was a negative number at the front of the frog.  Here, he has about 1/2 an inch in the back and 1/8 at the front.  Dismal, but still an improvement.

I was worried about Levi when I did his feet the first time because his feet were so flat, I was afraid that even the Easyshoes would put too much pressure on his thin soles.  Thankfully, the Easyshoes made him immediately more comfortable instead and he is striding out well in them.

As you can see in the above photo, he also has very thin hoof walls.  I find it a bit tricky to clinch the nails without ripping them right through the walls.

I have been using copper-clad nails, which just came on the market a few months ago.  I really like the copper because nail holes are generally a great breeding ground for bacteria and the copper prevents that.  The copper nails are a little harder to use though as they are a bit less malleable.  So far, I think the trade off is worth it and my clinches will get prettier with more practice (and thicker hoof walls).  The shoes stay on - knock-on-wood.

I could have made the feet look prettier by rasping off more of the excess toe, but that would be cosmetic and do nothing other than thin the walls even more.  I have set the shoe back far enough that the break-over is where it would be if this were a healthy foot.  Doing that will help him actually grow a healthy foot.  I prefer to leave the feet a bit ugly, but functional rather than pretty and sore.  Levi doesn't mind and his opinion is the only one I really worry about.

I got an email from Levi's person telling me they went out driving down the gravel roads of the state land with his new shoes.  It is the first time they have been able to do that this season because this is the first time his feet were not sore on the tough gravel of the Enchanted Forest.

That is what I like to hear.

***

I have had a couple of requests for an update on Ben's foot and I am working on that.  I will try to have it ready in the next few days.

Lip-Smacking Good

I went over to see Amos and Levi yesterday to work on their feet....

Amos is looking really good and is doing very well.  It's a little hard to tell because the weather has turned vile and no one was precisely "photo ready", but you can still see a lovely horse under the mud:)

Amos is really coming out of his shell and his true personality, both quirky and charming, is coming out.  He got a couple of apple flavored treats along the way and the whole time I was working on his feet, he was rhythmically slurping his tongue trying to get every smidgen of flavor out of each treat - like a kid with a lollipop.  I've never seen a horse get so much out of so little and he had me cracking up while I was working on him.  Silly boy.

Someone (Rebecca??) asked me if there was something odd about his hind legs.  The answer is: sort of.  He is a bit sickle hocked, which basically means that there is a little more forward curve in his hocks than is ideal....

...and his left hind bows out just a bit.

Technically speaking, these are conformation flaws.

Do they matter?

Since this horse is in his mid twenties, is completely sound, extremely fit and has literally thousands of hard-working miles on these legs, I sure don't think so.

Dave sent me a photo of Amos from before he bought him....

You can see that he was pure muscle with not a single ounce of extra weight on him.  He was driving 30 miles a day and has done that for most of his life.  We can all only hope to be as tough as he is at any age.

More about the feet coming up since I got off on a tangent with this post.....

 

Bright Boys

Since my last post was so lacking in pictures of Amos and Levi, their person sent some to me to make up for it.

Amos on the left, Levi on the right.  They make a handsome pair don't they?

Levi on the left...he came here about two years ago also very thin and headed for a last road trip.  Lucky for him, he ended up here instead.  He has filled out quite nicely as you can see.

They have become a very nice team and they work really well together.

Amos

Amos is looking good, he has put on a lot of weight since the first time I saw him and his eyes are much brighter and softer.  He isn't getting anything special, just plenty of good hay and good care.  It is still enough to make a world of difference and put the light back in his eyes.