Treating Founder without Horseshoes, Guestbook 2007

Treating Founder (Chronic Laminitis) without Horseshoes
Guest book posts, 2007

Date: 16 Jan 2007
Name: Theresa Hawkins, Anton, TX, 806-632-4524
Age, Breed, Problems?: My 7 yr. old Spotted Saddle Horse (Blazer) road foundered.

Comments:

I had hired a new farrier who was very generous with the amount of sole he took out. The first time I saw the soreness was right after that farrier’s trim, but I supposed maybe Blazer was just sore from me exercising him that same day. He seemed to be OK after a few days. A few days after that, my friend and I decided to ride some of the farm roads near my home (which are considerably hard dirt roads) and Blazer had never seemed to mind (we had ridden those same roads many times before). But this time (after his trim ) he was very uncomfortable, so we cut our ride short. After about two weeks of not riding, him he seemed to be OK. Six weeks later the same farrier came out, and Blazer again was very sore and didn’t want to go riding AT ALL. I thought he was just being fussy so we went for a long ride. I learned a very hard lesson--the next morning he could hardly walk.

The two bad trimmings and the excessive concussion set the stage for this nightmare!

I got on the Internet to look up laminitis and all the symptoms. I found your website and began reading all I could about Dr. Strasser’s method.

The vet confirmed it was founder and started a three week treatment of grass hay (only) and many foot soakings (he had three abscessed feet). Later the vet explained he wanted to put heartbar shoes on Blazer and see if that would keep the coffin bone from rotating.

I remembered your warnings about the conventional “HEARTBAR” method and wasn’t convinced that I wanted Blazer to experience that type treatment. During all this, my father had a heart attack the same day we took Blazer to the vet. So I was gone for three weeks while Blazer was being treated and stabled at the vet’s facilities.

The vet called (while I was still attending my dad) and said it was time for Blazer to be fitted with heart bar shoes and I gave in & said, “go ahead.”

Fortunately, I came home two days after they had fitted Blazer with those shoes. He looked like he was carrying cinderblocks on all fours!!!!!! I couldn’t stand it!

I had found a farrier that was familiar with keeping the coffin bone ground-parallel (that was a miracle within itself) and we took off those heartbar shoes and followed your instructions on pushing the toes back and lowering the heels.

We trimmed every week in the beginning four @ least 3-4 weeks and then went to once every two weeks, finally graduating to every four weeks and now every six weeks. I also soaked his feet in sea-salt for the first 3-four weeks to make sure the abscesses were healed.

Two months after starting this treatment my horse was galloping and bucking in the field!!!! Yeah!---there is a natural way to help heal our horses!!!!!! I also followed the instructions about allowing him to be around other horses and not be in isolation. I put him with a young foal and she gave him plenty of exercise!

Thank you so much for your sharing Dr. Strasser’s method. You were a God-send!!!!!

Comments:

I just wanted to know do you really have to shoe horses? Or can they live their whole lives without wearing shoes? Your site says it's for recovery. I don't really see why they have to wear them, other than what others say that it keeps them from cracking or chipping. But your site makes me believe shoeing is worse. Please help me with this! Thank you so much!

It is not only possible, it's a good thing. However, it is crucial that the horse lives on the kind of footing you will be working him on. If the horse lives on a soft muddy field, or in a softly bedded stall, it is unrealistic to expect him to do well working on pavement, gravel roads, and hard, rocky terrain. The soft surface he is on most of the time will not get his feet toughened up. If he is not moving much most of the time due to confinement, you can't realistically expect him to do well on a 25 mile ride, either. He has to be used to the surfaces you will work him on, and he has to be doing the activity level you expect on a regular basis. This means if he is laying around all week, you can't reasonably expect to ride him hard Saturday and Sunday, all of a sudden, without repercussions. No human gymnast would consider lying in bed 23 hours a day, and then having a maximum workout for an hour. Yet this is what we are doing to our horses when they are stalled most of the time, and then expected to perform athletic feats. It is asking for trouble. This is part of why there are so many injuries at the race track. These young race horses are too young to be in maximum work, and they won't toughen anything up being on stall rest 23 hours a day. They need to be running around on hilly, rocky terrain to develop their legs, feet and wind. I realize this is not feasible at most race meetings, but that is what these guys need.

If you cannot have the horse live 24/7 on the type of terrain he will be worked on, you can use removable hoof boots. There are many different brands available, and more being developed all the time. If you get some that fit well, this can work out fine on a horse being worked on harder or rockier terrain than his feet are accustomed to. There are both pros and cons with boots. The good points:
1. They offer more concussion absorption and traction than most horseshoes.
2. They offer as much protection to the sole as horseshoes with full pads, without the negatives of pads being nailed on for 6-8 weeks (i.e., thrush, and softened soles because the bottoms of the feet are not getting exposed to air.)
3. They only need to be on when the horse is worked in challenging terrain. There rest of the time, they can and should be kept off.
4. Leaving horseshoes on tends to get feet contracted. Keeping the hooves barefoot makes heel expansion easier.
5. Easier heel expansion allows for more hoof mechanism...resulting in better circulation.
6. One reason shod horses are more reluctant to walk through cold streams is that the nails conduct cold to the inside of the foot more; a barefoot horse does not feel as much of a shock of cold walking through cold creeks and ponds.
7. When a nailed-on horseshoe gets sucked off in the mud, you often have a bunch of wall pulled off at the same time; this can be a setback.
8. Horseshoe nail holes breach the white line, giving more entry points for bacteria that can compromise the white line, such as fungal infections.
9. Many horseshoers do not bend the clinches back individually in order to more easily remove the shoes for a reset. Instead, they rasp the clinches and the wall until the clinches are thinned enough to pull through easier. This weakens and thins the walls. When you pull the shoes, there really isn't much wall thickness hitting ground, which people see as an indication the horse doesn't have good enough walls to go barefoot. If they wait long enough for full-thickness walls to grow down, they might be pleasantly surprised.
10. There is a practical limit to how often you can reset nailed-on horseshoes. If you reset them often, you'd soon have excessive numbers of nail holes weakening the walls. Yet you can tweak a barefoot horse's hoof form with little touchups as often as you want. This can be helpful for preventing long toes shooting forward, for instance.

Booting negatives if they don't fit:
1. They can fall off.
2. They can bruise areas where they are too tight.
3. They can rub or turn if they are too loose.

Just like horseshoes, boots add weight to a foot. Some back up breakover more than others. A slower breakover is usually a negative...

It is still possible to have contracted feet when barefoot. This is often because the breakover is too far forward, and not backed up enough to give the horse time to get the foot level in mid-air before it hits ground.

Many people are so used to high-heeled hoof form that they think it is normal. With barefoot hooves with high heels, the quarters start breaking out, which leads people to believe the hooves have too poor quality horn to go barefoot successfully. If you study Jaime Jackson's wild horse hoof specimens, you can see hoof form that IS successful on horses who are barefoot all their lives. These hooves have low heels, subtle quarter scoops, bars ending halfway forward alongside the frogs, concavity that follows the form of the underlying structure, breakover backed up, and a rounded edge to the walls. There is a relatively even layer of horn covering the internal structure of the hoof; the shape of the capsule is similar to the shape of the underlying structure. This is quite a departure from what we are used to seeing, but well worth looking into.

Comments:

A friend had mentioned natural horse trims and is currently trimming his own horses. I never quite understood the concept until I was searching for articles on founder. I found your articles fascinating. I am willing to try a different approach to my foundered quarter horse. I believe my farrier uses similar techniques, but I will check with him. He just trimmed “Tom” about a week ago and the heels looked low to me, but now I understand. I hope this works. I think I’ve got a long road ahead of me. Thanks for the information.

Comments:

My horse Pawnee ripped off his entire hoof when he fell into a rusted drain pipe underground. He fell forward and it came off.

He went into shock (as did I) and we tied off the bleeding until the vet could make it to where I was. We wrapped it up and drugged him and took him home. Long story short, he is still with us today. He has a deformed hoof and less than half of his coffin bone. He has been happy and relatively without a lot of pain until lately. How do I know when it is time to let him go? I was reading the coffin bone page of your site and it seemed like people let go too soon. I realize that is a hard question to answer, but it is so hard to decide, too. I could email you his x-rays over the years, too, if you are interested in seeing them.

I will send you the x-rays from 2/05, and then in 11/06 there is a big change. You can also see his super high heel. I have other angles also. Do you have high speed internet? If not it would take a long time to download.

I had him at New Bolton. My husband and I always asked about his heel being so high, but no one ever did anything about it.

I will also send you a couple of pictures on another e-mail. Thank you for responding so quickly.

Pawnee stood in the same spot this morning for 2 1/2 hrs. He looked like he was trying to talk himself into moving. I was sad for him.

The idea behind the high heels is that if you reduce the pull of the deep digital flexor tendon via high heels, there will be less tension on the coffin bone to pull it down. A lot of people buy into this theory, although I don't. It strikes me that it makes more sense to equally weight and stress the laminitic connection all the way around, rather than over-weighting and stressing it in the toe area with a tilted-down coffin bone. There is an inherently more stable situation when the bottom of the coffin bone is resting parallel to the ground. At some clinics, they illustrate this by having someone step on a web leadline. If they are weighting their heels, it is very hard for someone to pull their heels up with the leadline. If they are already up off their heels some, it is much easier to pull their heels up further. I admit this is not an exactly parallel situation, though....

On the x-rays, what is that weird, crumpled-looking hoof form on the hoof with less bone loss? The x-ray on the right shows quite a bit of coffin bone loss, which means full recovery in this foot is less possible. Are these of the same hoof, taken at different times? What did the outside of the hoof look like? These are kind of depressing x-rays...

If a horse has lost interest in going on, then I think it's time to help him go as easily as possible. It's a very hard thing to face, though, and I'm terribly sorry to hear of this. If you're close to him, I think you will know when he's ready to leave. I guess I'm saying to hear him, and to go along with his wishes. Sometimes, when you know it's a temporary situation, like an abscess that hasn't broken through yet, I'd be all for hanging in there for a while. However, if the prospects for improvement just aren't there, it's not the same thing.

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