A chilled Filly

Saturday 24 January 2015

Walking Filly

Filly continues to make good progress. I've found a route we can walk that includes a quiet road with only a little traffic. This is important as the woods are currently very muddy and slippery. An additional worry about the woods is that there are some flints in the mud and I don't want to risk her cutting her feet stepping on one buried in the slime. Additionally, road work is better for grinding the hooves down naturally so that they become the best shape to support her upper limbs.
This idea that the hoof can adjust to help with problems further up the leg is an important one. I feel that in the past hooves have been shaped by man to best conform to what they think the hoof should look like relative to the lower leg. That may not be the best shape for the rest of the horse. The hooves are the platform that support the rest of the horse and they need to be the shape the whole horse requires, not just the lower limb.

At Rockley farm Nic owns one horse that has been barefoot for many years. The state of the feet were to me shocking when I first saw them. They looked flared and had cracks running up the hoof wall. Nic said that she had hoped I would only see him after I understood more, but having seen him gave me a detailed explanation about his history.
He has a deformity of the upper limb that made him very lame. In desperation they left him barefoot with no trimming, but lots of hard work on varied surfaces. Of course he also lives in the track surfaces at Rockley that are designed to reshape horses hooves naturally with their abrasive surfaces. So he had the best chance to create a hoof that best suited his needs. And this misshapen hoof is what he came up with. As a result he can now hunt over Exmoor and has done 66 miles hunting this year ! Nic said she had tried trimming his hooves to a more "normal" looking shape and he instantly went lame so she learnt to leave him alone.

I think maybe humans interfere with their horses too much on occasion. Maybe rather than impose our idea of the what the horse needs on them we should let nature sort it out for us. This does not mean we can just leave our horses alone and hope they fix themselves. We have to create the conditions for the horse to be able to help itself. In many ways this is harder work than just relying on the trimmer / farrier doing the work for us.
In the case of Filly, as we don't have a track surface for her to live on, it means lots of walking out to find the surfaces her feet need. If I miss the walks for a while the hoof walls do tend to grow a bit longer than I would like. When that happens I very reluctantly take out the rasp and take a tiny amount off around the whole hoof. I don't try to shape the hoof at all, just take the same amount off all the way around. And no more that 1mm. I've only had to do this a few times when I've been away for an extended period and been unable to walk her to let it happen naturally.

The upside is that I actually really enjoy the walks. Filly seems to like them as well and finds the countryside very interesting. Yesterday she insisted on spending a few minutes staring at the local golf course while I explained the strange rituals that take place on that glorious stretch of grass. I think Filly thought that was just a waste of good grass ;)

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