The difficult choice to shoe, why I went from barefoot to heart bar

   Prior to my forays into foot problems with Big Mama, I had long been a believer that shoeing a horse was the ultimate display of failure when it came to horse care. I had found an excellent barefoot trimmer that specialized in drafts, I spent hours researching hoof supplements and topical hoof care solutions. I had purchased just about every product on the market to harden feet, reduce thrush, protect the hoof wall, and build sole. I bought hoof boots, and when those got destroyed, I bought more hoof boots. I spent over $200 a month on the best hoof supplements I could get my hands on. I tried natural solutions, like washing the feet with dish soap, and using tea tree oil. I actually had to go see a chiropractor at one point because I threw my back out while bent over holding her feet in Lysol soaks to try and kill the thrush that was eating away at her soles. 

   So last winter when the vet informed me that we had no choice but to put shoes on my princess because her lameness had gotten so bad, it's not entirely surprising that I viewed it as a complete personal failure on my part to keep my horse healthy. 

   Her lameness reached a climax when I sent her to a trainer that was an hour away from my home. The hard ground and extra workload took a toll on her delicate feet, and her usually stoic nature could no longer hide the fact that she was in real pain. We took X-rays, and found some discouraging news. Her soles were only about half as thick as they should be, and she was showing beginning signs of high ringbone.

X-ray from February 2014, shows thin sole depth, ringbone, and poor joint alignment.

  One week into her expensive training, I had to haul her back home. Well, shit. She sure seemed fine galloping full bore away from the trailer in the dark, six times, under threat of a blizzard, but that's a story for another day...

  

   Initially, when we got her back home, we put her back into her old shoes from about two years before. My farrier bevelled the edges and set them back a bit to increase her breakover and reduce the pressure on the joint with ringbone. We put her in leather pads with a packing underneath to increase support to her sole. Unfortunately, she had put on so much weight, she would just squish all the packing out within a couple weeks, but it did help temporarily. We also put her on Previcox.

  The results were not great. She was fairly sound on hard ground due to the shape of the shoes, but she was still dead lame in the arena. The vet and farrier agreed that this was likely due to the pressure the deep sand was putting on her thin soles. We tried for 3 or 4 cycles to get her sound this way, but it just wasn't working. We had to take the next step.

   Now, let me preface this by saying our next step was to move to heart bar shoes, and my farrier kept warning me that this was a 50/50 shot. She would either get much better, or go completely lame in a couple days. My other hobby, besides hooves, is worrying. So I spent months agonizing over the decision that could potentially cause a huge deal of pain and distress to my girl. The farrier even offered to leave tools behind in case I need to pull the shoe off before he could make it back to my farm.

  We finally set the date where the vet and farrier would come to the barn at the same time, take another set of X-rays, and measure for the heart bar shoe. I was racked with anxiety, guilt, and frustration that I couldn't get her better some other, more humane way. 

   Her new X-rays had some positive information in them. Her joints were much more aligned with the proper shoeing now, so some of the pressure on the joint had been relieved.  But, the X-rays also had some troubling news to reveal. She was having a flare-up of pedal osteitis, and her coffin bone was causing her a lot of pain. The very mechanics that were meant to keep a hoof healthy, that is, the flex of the hoof tissue that ensures proper blood flow, was actually the culprit for her discomfort. It was imperative for us to stop the flex of the hoof wall so that the internal tissues of the hoof would stop tugging on the already inflamed coffin bone. (I don't have copies of the current X-rays, but will upload them when I do.)

  The farrier would have to fabricate the heart bar from scratch, since heart bars don't come in size uber-mondo prefabbed, so the week after the vet appointment he would come back and put on her new set of shoes.

 The ones that would either cripple her... or be the miracle cure....

  The farrier explained that the middle portion of the heart bar should be enough to reduce the pressure of her soles, but to ensure that that would be the case, we also used a special, extra soft gel packing that had just come on the market recently, along with plastic pads, which, unlike the leather pads, would provide almost no give.

   Here was the final result:

New heart bar shoe.

Showing off her new kicks.

This is her bad foot. As you can see, this one is still softer than the other, and so is more prone to breakages and chipping. 

  After the farrier was done putting them on, he told me to take her out and lunge her in the field. Moment of truth...

   I took her out and asked her into a trot. After a few tentative steps, she began to stretch out and extend into the trot more willingly. There were no head bobs! No short ouchy steps! Holy crap!!!

  The next day I took her into the dreaded arena, her own personal torture chamber. But even there, she was able to stretch out willingly and trot out as soon as I asked her, no hesitation!

  The vet, farrier, and I are in agreement that this is not a long-term solution for her for a variety of reasons. We hope that by the spring we can either reduce her down to a less severe shoe, or maybe even pull them off altogether. We have also discussed the possibility of making her shoeing seasonal, so during the times when the ground is hardest, we will put her shoes on, then when the ground softens back up we can take them off again.

  I think the hardest lesson that this has taught me is that there are no black and white answers to horse care. I recently read a great article by Julie Goodnight that talks more about how we should never be so set in our ways that we can't even see the value in a different approach, here. That lesson is even more evident to me now. Some horses do great barefoot, others need shoes as a short term solution, still others need them for life. I can't deny the change it has made in Big Mama's soundness, or the concrete benefits they had on her joint alignment. So for now, I will put away the judgey thoughts of how I somehow failed my barefoot horse, and enjoy the fact that she is comfortable, happy, and that we are able to get out and ride more!

  Next post, we have started back into lessons and are turning into a dynamic dressage duo!