Hello Riders.

I've talked about hoof drift a bit lately and want to make sure everyone is understanding so here's a picture.

as you can see in this photo the foot/hoof is not directly under the horse and rather pressing to the inside. This photo is a right front foot so the flare on the right side of the photo is facing the left foot. Flare was the culprit here in producing the drift.

When there's flare and typically inside/medial flare, as in this case, there will always be a tendency for the flare to pull the rest of the foot in the direction of the flare. Obviously not adressing flare as soon as it's becoming apparent is not a good thing. One thing leads to another, the flare leads to unbalance, the unbalance leads to stress, stress leads to injury and lameness. Tie this in with other issues that don't get dealt with and you're really heading for trouble in the prevention of lameness and proper shoeing practice.

It's little subtle changes in the foot that are not taken care of that over time lead to severe problems like this one. Correcting this foot is not easy and can take sometimes several years to get the foot correct. One of the problems with correction is in many cases rasping the inside flare takes moving the shoe and putting it in a position where in order to rasp flare the nails are put closer to "Quicking" the horse. It then becomes a question of how much the shoe can be moved "Without Quicking" to effect the change necessary. If you can only move the shoe so far before you're ready to quick the horse then sometimes the changes are going to be minimal until the whole hoof grows new ( which can be a year depending on how fast the horse grows hoof ). So after that "Cycle" ( i year or so ) you'll be able to take another "Bite" at moving the shoe farther again.

You can see making changes to hoof is a painfully slow process sometimes. This is the reason you want to get everything right and keep it that way, it's ongoing correct maintenance ( of course ). I think it's easy to get lulled into a false sense of security with horses by saying well he or she has been ok for these past 10 years like that,  and then next year "Bang" something goes wrong - seriously wrong and your great horse is lame.  It's kind of like Carpel tunnel syndrome - you don't get it the first week or month of some kind of movement - it takes sometimes years before it shows up , then it can be bloody hell.

So take flare seriously, some people favor big wide flared out feet, i particularly do not. I like feet somewhat compact where the integrity of the hoof improves and has structural strength. Not only that but big wide feet become heavy - i call them "Clod hopper feet".   If you hold a 3ft long stick out horizontally at your side with your arm stretched out then ad very little weight it becomes quite heavy quickly. If you held the same weight up close to your body it's basically nothing. Well horses legs are quite long and have to move quickly - adding weight to the Feet is a laborsome tiring process to the horse. Of course that's why aluminum shoes are so great as they're half as heavy as iron shoes.

So keep flares to the absolute mimimum and stay ahead of the prevention of lameness process and you'll be on your way.

I'm heading out to Santa Barbara again for a 5 day volunteer duty and will be back next friday the 28th, until then as usual happy and safe riding and remember to always www.Care4Horses.com   

John Silveira

Currently consultations at no charge ( that's FREE ) for any shoeing or conformation issues. Just email me at John@Care4Horses.com or please leave a comment here on the blog , it will be my pleasure to help. I'm doing this on a temporary basis as time allows so "Hurry" get on the band wagon like everyone else   (-:

take care

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