Performance Hoof, Performance Horse E-Book

Nic Barker

• Herausgeber: J A Allen
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 255

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Many horses will, at some point during their lives, suffer hoof problems which, in extreme cases, can cause permanent lameness. So why should outstandingly healthy, hardworking feet be a relative rarity? Performance Hoof, Performance Horse explores the idea that, given the right conditions, healthy hooves are not difficult to maintain and neither do they need much in the way of human intervention, and that the unshod or 'barefoot' horse can be tough, strong and sure-footed. The book offers practical advice on how best to work with a horse with compromised feet in terms of nutrition, surfaces and exercise in order to restore its hooves to optimum condition.

Leseprobe

Performance

HOOF

Performance

HORSE

Nic Barker

J.A. ALLEN

First published in 2017 by

JA Allen

JA Allen is an imprint of

The Crowood Press Ltd

Ramsbury, Marlborough

Wiltshire SN8 2HR

This e-book first published in 2017

www.crowood.com

© Nic Barker 2017

All rights reserved. This e-book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of thistext may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 90880 971 1

For Ghost, Felix, Charlie and Bailey who taught me my first lessons, and Angel, Dexter and Jack who continued my education.

The extract from Beyond Words – what animals think and feel by Carl Safina is reproduced with his permission. The quote from Kim Walnes’s blog The Way of the Horse is used with her permission. All photographs are the author’s unless indicated otherwise.

Disclaimer

While this book is as accurate as the author can make it, there may be omissions or errors. The publisher and author cannot accept responsibility for loss or damage caused directly or indirectly by the information contained in this book.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword

CHAPTER 1Rock-Crunching Hooves

CHAPTER 2Balanced Hooves, Dynamic Hooves

CHAPTER 3Healthy Hooves: A Way of Life

CHAPTER 4Tracks and Tradition: Where Your Horse Lives

CHAPTER 5How to Assess Dynamic Hoof Balance

CHAPTER 6Rehabilitation, Exercise and Movement

CHAPTER 7Trimming, Balance and Symmetry

CHAPTER 8Building Better Hooves: From Bogs to Deserts to Tarmac

CHAPTER 9The Importance of Research

CHAPTER 10Rehabilitation of the Whole Horse

CHAPTER 11Troubleshooting: Real or Imaginary Troubles

CHAPTER 12Further Troubleshooting

CHAPTER 13Anthropomorphism?

Index

Acknowledgements

This book could not have been written without the advice and help I received from my fellow hoof enthusiast Steve Leigh (with whom I have filmed hooves, brainstormed about hooves and obsessed about hooves), and my extraordinary veterinary friends, Becca Hart and Freya Brookes, who have pored over data, answered questions and kept me more or less on the straight and narrow. The mistakes are my own.

My heartfelt thanks go to every single owner who has ever decided to give that crazy barefoot idea a chance and send their horses to Rockley for rehabilitation, and all those who have read the blog or joined us on social media over the years. Most of all, my gratitude goes to all the horses who have made me think, opened my eyes, and inspired me with their ability to grow better hooves than I ever imagined.

Rockley Farm, March 2017

Foreword

As a veterinary surgeon, owner and rider, I have learnt a huge amount about whole-horse health from Nic. Her logical, practical approach makes physiological and ethical sense.

My own horses have been kept to the principles explained in this book for several years. They compete successfully in British Eventing and British Dressage, and follow hounds. They are sounder, have cleaner legs and are better prepared to handle variations in terrain and ground conditions.

Dr Rebecca Hart BvetMed, MRCVS

CHAPTER 1

Rock-Crunching Hooves

Recently I broke the rules.

Andy and I were going away, for the first time in ten years, and for the first time in ten years we only had our own horses to worry about. It was a warm, mild, mellow autumn and we wanted to make life as easy as possible for the friends who were looking after the horses while we were away. We left the horses with access to the tracks (seeChapter 4), a feeder full of haylage, and forty acres of grass to do with as they wished – no restrictions on where they went or what they ate, and no formal exercise for three weeks.

It might have sounded risky, but when we got home the horses were in fantastic condition and, most importantly, had the same rock-crunching feet they had when we left. I didn’t really expect anything else – after all, I wouldn’t gamble with the health of our horses – but it was an interesting affirmation of something I have been exploring for several years now: that great hooves, healthy hooves, aren’t that difficult to maintain, nor do they need much in the way of human intervention.

A healthy hoof is a normal state of affairs for a healthy horse.

I will say from the start that throughout this book, when I talk about healthy hooves, it means hooves that are totally sound, capable of covering mile after mile on all sorts of terrain, day after day, at all paces without shoes. I am well aware that hooves like this don’t happen by accident, certainly not in a domestic environment. On the contrary, we are used to seeing unhealthy feet as the norm on many, perhaps most, of the horses we see day to day. Given that so many of us begin our hoofcare journeys with horses that have unhealthy feet, it is perhaps not surprising that it can often feel as if achieving a healthy hoof is an impossible struggle, and that there are obstacles and challenges continually in the way.

The obstacles and challenges that we face when hooves are unhealthy are real, and I am not belittling them in the slightest, but it is important not to lose sight of the fact that a healthy hoof is what the horse is always trying to grow – it is the default position, and not some impossible dream. A healthy hoof is a normal state of affairs for a healthy horse.

ACHIEVING HEALTHY HOOVES

So why are healthy hooves so difficult for many of us to achieve with our horses? It’s not that we are bad owners, nor is it that we pick the wrong horses – and it’s not even (usually) down to bad luck. It’s more often the case that our horses are living in an environment that makes healthy hooves difficult to achieve.

Over the last decade there has definitely been an increasing awareness on the part of horse owners about what affects hooves, good and bad, and I’d like to think I have played a part in that. In Feet First, which I started writing with Sarah Braithwaite in 2007, we introduced the idea that there is a ‘holy trinity’ of nutrition, exercise and environment, and that these form the key elements of hoof health – and this is something I still stand by today.

However, it was undoubtedly true then, and I think it remains common today, that those who are the most interested in hoof health are usually those who have the most to gain – in other words, those whose horses have (or had) problem feet. After all, human nature being what it is, if you have a horse with robust feet that never cause you a moment’s worry, then you will almost certainly never expend too much thought on those feet. This had the inevitable effect that, initially at least, the owners who were most interested in barefoot were owners whose horses were lame, which typically were shod, and where both owner and horse were running out of options.

There is no doubt that for many of these horses, getting the ‘holy trinity’ right and going barefoot was enormously beneficial. There are very many horses today, and we will never know exactly how many, who have been given, quite literally, a new lease of life when they would otherwise have faced ongoing lameness and euthanasia. There is also no doubt that bringing horses like these back to soundness is a tough job.

You are usually dealing with a foot that has had years of being compromised and weak – in many cases (perhaps in most cases) a foot that has never been truly healthy. It doesn’t take much imagination to realize that with unhealthy hooves like these, which are precariously edging towards soundness and strength you have very little margin for error. Taking hooves like these barefoot gives the feet the best chance, in my opinion, of strengthening and improving – but it is not a magic wand, and many of these horses will have had such severely compromised feet that, even when they have improved barefoot, a complete return to soundness is not possible.

With compromised feet you need to be extremely careful with nutrition, surfaces, and the work the horse is doing. That is why the sort of regime I described at the start, which suited my horses admirably, is not something I could ever risk with the horses who come here, with weak feet, for rehabilitation. Once a horse has healthy feet, though, he finds it easy to maintain them – he will be comfortable on his own feet, so tough terrain is not an issue for him, and he goes where he chooses. My horses were preferring to spend a proportion of their time on the tracks, and in the shelter of the woods and barns, as opposed to being in a soft, wet field 24/7, and so they were also voluntarily spending part of each day off the grass.

When they were grazing, even during the day, it did them no harm, partly because our grass is ‘safe’ – it is not artificially fertilized, but is managed organically, with a huge diversity of plants rather than a mono-culture of a single species – but there is also the fact that their feet have been tough, strong and hard-working for many years, and their hooves have an inherent fitness now which protects them as well.

When you see horses with perfect hooves moving at speed over tough terrain there is an ease, a confidence that is almost a swagger, and an elegance in their gaits which is something I have never seen in a shod horse. This unique quality of movement in horses with healthy hooves is the reason I will never use shoes on any of our own horses.

It should be a joy to see horses work barefoot.

Often having a horse barefoot is seen as hard work, a challenge, and not for the fainthearted – if you want to make life easy, then just bang a set of shoes on the horse. But it doesn’t need to be like that. It should be a joy to see horses work barefoot – they should awe you with their sure-footedness, amaze you with their capability on tough terrain, and movement should look effortless for them.

Barefoot is all about balance: hooves are healthiest when horses are eating varied forage which is not intensively farmed, and when they are moving for most of their time, covering many miles in a day. Of course, this is also when horses are at their healthiest – but there is more. If we manage our fields in a way that is better for hooves, it is also better for biodiversity and wildlife. Barefoot is about balance, and if hooves are healthy there is a beautiful, virtuous circle which has benefits beyond the health and well-being of the horse.

It’s true that taking a horse barefoot can be a great remedy for weak hooves, allowing them to develop the strength that shoeing has denied them, but if you have the choice it is much better – and easier – to allow your horse to grow great hooves from the start, and never to allow them to deteriorate to the point where they ‘need’ shoes. I see so many horses whose owners have to try barefoot because the only other option is to put the horse down because of ongoing lameness. I have nothing but respect and admiration for their commitment to their horses, and it is a huge thrill when their horses grow vastly healthier feet (as they mostly do) and come back into full work barefoot.

It’s sad, though, that these horses – who invariably were born with better feet – have had to live with gradually deteriorating hooves, to the point when they actually go lame. Although barefoot is a great lifeline for hooves that are at the point of failure, how much better is it to help your horse grow the best possible hooves long before there is a problem.

DEVELOPING GREAT FEET

So why is a horse with outstandingly healthy, hardworking feet still a relative rarity? I believe it is often due to the ingrained belief that hooves are immutable – a part of the horse’s conformation that is incapable of change. We are taught that hooves should be a pair, and that horses shouldn’t have under-run heels or long toes. What we are not taught is that hooves can start off looking perfect, but can worsen over time – or conversely can be weak, and strengthen over time. Horses, and hooves, come in all shapes, sizes and conditions of health or sickness, and what you have today is not necessarily what you will have in six months’ time, let alone in a year’s time.

Many of us have had the satisfaction of bringing on a young horse – helping transform an unbalanced, inexperienced youngster into a fit and well-mannered adult horse. Equally many of us can probably recall horses (let’s hope not our own) that have gone from being perfectly balanced and beautifully schooled to being unfit, tense or unwilling because of physical problems or poor treatment.

It’s no different with the horse’s feet – but a horse with ‘terrible’ feet is not necessarily something you have to accept. Even the thinnest-soled ex-racehorse, shod at eighteen months and with a totally under-developed palmar hoof, can grow a better foot. Barefoot is not a magic wand, and a horse like this will, realistically, never be able to overcome completely those early disadvantages – but why wait until this sort of horse has under-run hooves, mismatched feet and a poor landing? Far better to prioritize the job of improving those feet (because they can be improved) as soon as possible, and with luck avoid, or at least minimize, soundness problems before they raise their ugly head.

I hope that in the future developing great feet will become much more of a focus not just for owners on a day-to-day basis, but also for those who are bringing on young horses. Youngsters who are fed correctly and are, ideally, allowed to move on a variety of terrain rather than just soft flat fields, will have a head start when it comes to developing tough, strong, well balanced feet, and should be set up for a lifetime of soundness. However, even with horses like this, who have had a great foundation of good hoofcare, there is no room for complacency because healthy hooves aren’t a fixed state, but an ongoing commitment – and even the best hooves are only as good as the horse’s current diet, environment and workload.

Good hooves enable good movement.

Once these are in place and consistent, though, then you and your horse should be within that ‘virtuous circle’, where good hooves enable good movement, which enables correct work and great fitness, balance over all terrain, true sure-footedness, and a confidence and ease of movement which I believe you simply can’t replicate in the shod horse.

As an owner, not only should you be proud of the hard work you and your horse have put into achieving this level of fitness and hoof health, but you also have the assurance of knowing that your horse is as healthy as he can be, that his movement is at its absolute best, and that his good biomechanics and well-balanced hooves should give him the best chance of a long, injury-free life. For me, this is what having a barefoot horse is all about.

Whereas Feet First was all about the basics of hoof health, the aim of this book is to go further and explore how we can achieve the best for our horses – training, managing and riding them in a way that enables them to grow fantastic feet, enhances their overall health, and which respects their needs as well as our own.

WHOLE HORSE HEALTH

This isn’t a book just about feet, because feet are simply the magnifying glass. What I mean by this is that problems in the feet are usually a clue that there are wider problems that we need to address – perhaps in how we feed, perhaps in how the horse moves, perhaps in how we ride or train. The flip side is that if you have a horse with great feet, then you and your horse are probably doing a lot of things right.

Great feet are a confirmation of whole horse health, and poor feet are a warning of ill health – but if we are ambitious about the health and happiness of our horses we need to look much further than just the feet. So you can’t talk about hooves without talking about biomechanics and nutrition and anatomy; you can’t talk about management without looking at how the horse evolved and his physiology; and you can’t talk about riding and working the horse without looking at how all these factors interact.

If that sounds like a minefield, don’t worry. We can’t be experts in all these fields – I certainly am not, and that isn’t the aim of this book. Instead, my objective is to give you the tools for assessing your own horse, suggestions for making practical changes that make it easier for you to keep your horse at the top of his game, whatever that is, and some ideas for problemsolving if things go a bit wrong.

CHAPTER 2

Balanced Hooves, Dynamic Hooves

The traditional way of assessing horses’ feet is to look at the static horse, but I hope to persuade you that there is a better way. By looking at the horse in motion and assessing the foot as it loads and lands we can, in my experience, learn a lot more than we ever can from a stationary hoof: after all, the horse’s leg is not like a table leg (contrary to the opinion I once heard expressed by an equine vet) but has evolved to cover ground efficiently and at high speed.

By using this dynamic balance instead of static balance as a guide to the hoof we can find out whether a foot has the right dorso-palmar and medio-lateral balance, whether the horse is able to fully extend his limbs, whether he is using both limbs evenly, and whether there are any niggling discomforts which may lead to lameness or injury in the future.

DYNAMIC ASSESSMENT IS CRUCIAL

The difference between static and dynamic assessment is crucial because a foot only makes sense in motion. The horse evolved to travel large distances and be capable of high speed, and the function of the hoof is to enable this to happen as efficiently as possible.

There was a lot of comment back when our horses first started working barefoot about how (or whether) they would cope. People being only human, it was very rare (in fact unheard of) for someone to say ‘isn’t it amazing how well they do?’ or, ‘isn’t it incredible how well hooves thrive on high mileage over tough terrain?’ Much more frequent were pessimistic statements such as ‘they’ll get worn away on the roads’, and ‘it’s all very well in the wild, but wild horses aren’t ridden’, and gloomy predictions that horses would never cope without shoes in the constantly wet British climate, but would quickly go lame.

The best way, in my experience, to deal with these annoying and prescriptive prophets of doom (opinions such as these are invariably voiced by ‘experts’ who have limited or no experience of barefoot horses) is, frankly, to ignore them and get the answers straight from the horse’s mouth – or in this case, his feet.

Hooves are designed to move.

Since those early days I’ve seen nothing to make me change my belief in what our horses have proved to me time and time again: that a truly healthy hoof is capable of covering miles and miles, day after day and year after year, no matter what the terrain. The huge advantage of being unshod is, of course, that the hoof has better shock absorption without the interference of metal. The other massive benefit is (potentially) perfect hoof balance – but how can you tell whether your horse’s hooves are balanced? In fact it is simpler than you might think to assess hoof balance, as long as we bear in mind that hooves are not designed to stand still, they are designed to move.

It is much easier to look at hooves when horses are standing still, and so that is traditionally how we assess them – but in fact dynamic assessment is far more useful than static assessment, and movement is absolutely essential in order to judge whether a hoof is balanced. As I am sure you already know, the horse’s hoof is anatomically a single toe which evolved to allow the horse the greatest possible speed, and so you need to assess a hoof not just on its own, but as part of the whole limb.

CONSIDER THE WHOLE HORSE

As well as this, we need to remember that, naturally, a single limb cannot work in isolation, and so we need to stand back and consider the whole horse, including his other three hooves, rather than look at one hoof at a time. This doesn’t mean you need a PhD in equine anatomy before picking up a hoof, but you do need an appreciation of how the horse moves. You need to understand, for example, that a front limb lameness will always have a knock-on effect on the hind legs (which will often also have a related shortened stride), and it will also affect the muscles of the neck, back and shoulder. This will be apparent not only in the muscles that power and support the affected limb, but also in the muscles on the opposing side, where the limb may be forced to compensate.

If your horse has one foot more upright than the other, it is a function of how he has been moving: as a rule the upright foot will be the one he has been loading less. Hoof conformation is not set in stone, and even though hooves appear tough and unyielding, they are really plastic and malleable – their structure adapts and changes depending on how the horse is moving, landing and loading his feet.

When we look at hooves from our usual position, standing roughly level with the horse’s head and looking down on the hoof from above, we see only the hard external hoof capsule, and it looks pretty solid. In fact the hoof wall is covering not only the pedal and navicular bones, but a complex and interconnected framework of tendons and ligaments as well as other critical structures such as the solar and frog coriums. The hoof also has an extensive blood and nerve supply, and is constantly receiving and relaying sensory information from and to the rest of the body.

The hoof is really one of the most adaptive parts of the whole limb, and it is brilliant at compensating for injury elsewhere. It can provide support for weaknesses not only in the hoof, but in other areas higher up the limb – for instance, you will often see deviations in the hoof as a result of hock arthritis or soft tissue damage, and I have even seen one instance of a hoof wall deviation which appeared to be a compensation for a pectoral injury.

Hooves continually try to provide maximum support for the limb above.

From what I see of hardworking bare hooves, I am convinced that the hoof responds not just to the surfaces it is traversing and the mileage it is doing, but also to how the limb above is loading. It would make sense for hooves to be continually trying to provide maximum support to the limb above them, but they will only be able to do so if the conditions are right.

Naturally, for a healthy hoof to grow it requires the ‘holy trinity’ we have already discussed: nutrition, exercise and environment. For a hoof to be able to adapt and respond it also needs to be unshod, since a shoe not only restricts expansion, contraction and wear, but also limits the hoof’s proprioception (the body’s ability to sense where it is). Proprioception is required for the hoof to respond and adapt, and to balance the feedback from the surfaces it is travelling over with the requirements of the limb above.

Hooves can be perfected, strengthened, repaired and rehabilitated, or impaired, damaged, weakened and wasted. Much of this is under our control – certainly much more than you would imagine if you thought that hoof health was mostly determined by genetics.

Hooves can strengthen and repair: these are the same hoof four months apart.

These photos are of the same hoof four months apart: at the top lame and just out of shoes, and below sound and back in work (and not trimmed), though his hoof improved further over subsequent years.

I have written before about a recurring theme that hooves don’t need to look pretty to function brilliantly. This is intimately connected with static and dynamic assessment of hooves, and it is why the dynamic assessment is so important – because hooves can look fine but may not be loading fine, or can look ugly but be loading perfectly.

You can imagine what happens if a foot which is actually in perfect dynamic balance is trimmed to a different, static balance: the result is often a less capable horse, and can sometimes be a lame horse.

CHAPTER 3

Healthy Hooves: A Way of Life

Whereas it can be hard work rehabilitating hooves – bringing a horse with foot problems who has had long-term lameness back to soundness – it is in my experience far, far easier to keep a horse sound in hard work barefoot than it is to keep a horse sound in the same level of work in shoes. For instance, our own horses cover a lot of miles barefoot over Exmoor during the hunting season, and since 2004 all our horses have been barefoot. The combination of long seasons and tough terrain has taught us a huge amount about the capabilities of the hoof, particularly since all our horses were previously shod and several had come to us diagnosed with serious lameness.

KEEPING A HORSE SOUND IN HARD WORK

The majority of the other horses we see when we are out and about are shod, and it is common for owners to have problems with abscesses, mud fever and thrush due to the pervading wet. It is equally common for shod hunters to suffer bruises from flints and stones, and they will almost invariably go lame if they lose shoes while hunting. Over a career lasting many seasons a proportion of the shod horses will also suffer chronic foot problems such as pedal osteitis, tendon and ligament damage or navicular problems.

Perhaps we have just been lucky, but although we have had a few injuries over the combined sixty or more seasons that our horses have hunted, they have tended to be one-off accidents: once a horse was badly kicked by a shod horse, and on another occasion a horse who was inexperienced fell from a steep path. Like most horse owners, we have had the occasional abscess as well, but in fourteen years, in a herd of (usually) four or five horses hunting once or twice a week over a nine-month season, these can be counted on the fingers of one hand. What our horses haven’t suffered are any chronic, recurrent foot injuries or lameness – and this is despite the fact that three of them were originally written off with career-ending unsoundness.

My suspicion is that because hooves have to be very healthy to work hard without shoes they are also better able to resist injury. Good medio-lateral (side to side) and dorso-palmar (front to back) balance ensures that tendons and ligaments can function well and are under as little strain as possible when horses are working hard, thick soles give great protection on challenging terrain, and a well developed frog, heels and digital cushion allow for the best possible shock absorption at high speed and on hard ground.

HEALTHY HOOVES THRIVE ON WORK

Healthy hooves thrive on work.

It may seem counter-intuitive but, within reason, it actually becomes easier to keep a horse sound barefoot (in many cases unlike a shod horse) the more miles, and the harder the work the horse is doing. This is because healthy hooves thrive on work – and to be honest it isn’t always easy in a domestic environment to give hooves the high mileage they crave for health. So ironically – given that barefoot is sometimes thought by the inexperienced to be a good choice for owners who love their horses but do very little with them – it is easier to find healthy hooves on a horse who is hunting, eventing, competing in endurance or hacking six days a week than it is to find them on a horse that spends most of his time in the field.