Wild horses move anywhere from 20 to 30 miles a day, grazing here and there as they go. What they eat looks rather spare to us, yet they are generally pretty healthy, with beautiful strong hooves. Maybe we should look to them for answers. The closer we can keep our horses to the natural way, the better overall health they will have. Including their hooves.

Movement is a key ingredient in producing a healthy hoof. This can be challenging for those with small properties, but most situations can be improved upon with a little thought. Give your horses a reason to move. Is the hay next to the water, next to the salt block, next to the gate? Your horse need not go anywhere to fulfill his needs. Horses grouped together will move more than a horse standing alone. Besides, they are very social and must have companionship for their physical and mental health.

Place your hay in small piles spread far apart. The boss horse will suspect the other guys have something better. They will keep pushing the other horses off their pile and you will get more movement between mouthfuls.

Keep your horses outside. Barns and stalls are for people, not horses. They are prey animals and are happier when they can see what is coming. Why limit their movement by locking them up?

Exercise your horse. The healthiest hooves I trim are the ones that work the hardest.

Don’t forget diet. Low carb forage (stick to the grass hay), available most of the time is ideal. Stay away from grain. If you need a handful to feed your supplements in, try LMF’s Low Non-Structural Carbohydrate or well-rinsed beet pulp without molasses added.

If you want to really think outside the box, pick up a copy of Jaime Jackson’s “Paddock Paradise”, available at http://www.star-ridge.com. It will give you some great ideas on how to utilize your space creatively. You can not only increase your horse’s movement and the health of his hooves, but also decrease his boredom, reducing stress and the bad habits that come with it.

Leslie Carrig is a Natural Hoof Trimmer and Boot Fitter, in the Carson Valley. She has training with the AANHCP, Easy Care Hoof Boots, and continues to study Pete Ramey’s techniques. She is a founding member of the Pacific Hoof Care Practitioners http://www.pacifichoofcare.org.

The benefits of pulling the shoes go way beyond avoiding a slip in the snow. With the shoes off, your horse can attain the full expansion of the hoof, helping to de-contract the heels and return circulation to it’s fullest. With the return of full circulation a much healthier hoof wall can be attained. This will speed up progress on growing out cracks and flares.

The horse will also be wearing its hooves in between trimmings, instead of getting longer and longer. This will enable your farrier to make more progress at getting those toes back or those heels down. The horses I see that are shod back to back, year after year, have the most severe problems.

Keep a regular trimming schedule throughout the winter, no longer than 6 weeks between trims. Don’t think that just because you aren’t riding as much, the hooves don’t need attention. Yes, the growth can slow down some in winter, but a regular trim schedule will make it possible to actually move forward in the process of growing a healthy hoof.

You don’t have to choose between pulling shoes and riding anymore. The hoof boot industry has taken off with the barefoot movement. This benefits us all. If you think of hoof boots as the old “Easy” boot that required a crow bar to remove, yet fell off no matter how tight you clamped them on, things have changed. The new boots really work! I would suggest checking out the EasyCare website at http://www.easycareinc.com. They have been one of the leaders in the boot industry and their site is loaded with great information, including a boot dealer locator list.

It’s best to get some help fitting the boots and tips on applying and removing them. It may seem awkward at first, but it soon becomes just another part of tacking your horse. There are so many choices in boot styles available that there will surely be one that fits your horse and your needs.

If you can keep riding that horse this winter it will benefit his mind, body, and hooves. Winter is a great time to try out the hoof boots. You will be surprised at how healthy the hooves can become in a few months, with regular, thoughtful trimming. You just might get hooked on the boots and decide to stick with them most, if not all of the year!

What is laminitis? It is the inflammation of the laminae. You may recall, from past discussions, that the laminae are the “ little fingers” that bond the hoof wall to the inner structures of the hoof. When the laminae grow down and reach ground level, that is where you see the white line. It is the area between the sole and the hoof wall. It’s appearance would remind you of little feathers, usually yellow in color. It is a Veterinarians place to diagnose laminitis. I would just like to put it in simple terms and help you to understand some of the factors that put a horse at risk.

When the bond between the hoof wall and the coffin bone has been weakened, the result is separation. This can be seen on a hoof in the form of flaring of the hoof wall and/or a stretched white line. Ripples or protruding growth lines also indicate metabolic upset. Mechanical forces such as the hoof wall bearing all the weight alone ( over grown wall or shoes) can make it difficult to grow out a separation, but generally the bond must be weakened by dietary upset.

Horses were designed to move constantly, grazing here and there on natural low sugar, high fiber diets. Their stomachs can not hold large amounts at one time and long periods with no intake are damaging to the stomach lining. Feeding high calorie meals two times a day is convenient for owners, but hard on the horses metabolism. Pastures can also contain high amounts of sugar, that some horses can not process. Our “easy keepers” seem to be more susceptible to problems.

Although the exact mechanics are still being researched, there is an undeniable link between high sugar diets and the weakening of the laminae bond. A horse has usually been struggling with this for years before an all out laminitic attack or founder occurs.

In the west we have a situation in the fall that can create very high sugars in our pastures. In general, when the sun rises each day the sugar in a plant begin to increase. By late afternoon it is at it’s peak. When the sun goes down it begins to drop off and is at it’s lowest level in the early morning hours. Once temperatures go below freezing at night, the sugar level is stopped from dropping off. The sun comes up the next day and the level rises from the already elevated level to an even higher level. Get another freeze at night and the same thing happens. A week of sunny days and freezing nights and you will see the incidence of laminitis and founder go way up. Keep this in mind when you are grazing your horses.

Preventing laminitis is far easier than recovering from it. Observe your horses carefully for signs that they may be sensitive to high sugar. Hard to keep weight off? Fat pads around the base of the tail and behind the shoulders? Cresty? Ripples and flaring in the hooves? A steady diet of grass hay and well thought out grazing is the best plan for most horses. Exercise is a key to a healthy metabolism. For more information on the factors affecting sugar levels in pasture and hay, go to Katy Watt’s website: http://www.safergrass.org/. She can tell you how to test your hay and pastures.

The development of the digital cushion and the health of the frog will be key to how comfortable your horse is landing heel first. Most of us know what the frog is. A healthy frog should be full and firm, with no signs of thrush. A well developed digital cushion is a thick fibrous mass, which lies inside the back of the hoof between the lateral cartilage. It contains the sensory nerves which help the horse to “feel” the ground.

When a foal is born the digital cushion is a soft pad of fat. If the young horse has enough movement and good frog and sole pressure, the fat pad will become more and more fibrous. This thick fibrous pad in conjunction with a firm healthy frog will provide a pain free heel first landing for the adult horse.

Unfortunately for many of our domestic horses this development falls behind and we end up with a full size horse on a digital cushion that can’t comfortably support it. The sensory nerves are not well protected and it hurts to land heel first. The horse then shortens it’s stride and comes down toe first. This creates a whole new set of problems, navicular syndrome among them. With the horse landing toe first the digital cushion will never develop. High heels and thrushy frogs often accompany this situation.

What causes this under development? In the young horse, lack of movement on a firm surface. Overgrown hooves lifting the frog and sole off the ground. Shoeing before the digital cushion has a chance to develop. Even thrush can cause enough pain for the young horse to avoid heel pressure, thus starting the cycle of toe first landing and under development of the digital cushion.

You can learn to feel for the digital cushion. Lift the horse’s hoof and put your thumbs on top of the heel bulbs pressing down towards the hoof in the space between them. It should feel thick and firm. Compare front and back. It is usually better developed in the rears.

Pay attention to those young hooves. Keep those hoof walls trimmed right from the start and if you plan to shoe, put it off as long as possible. Provide plenty of movement. The digital cushion can improve later on in a horses life, but it is a slow process and takes a great deal of commitment. The horse will need to move on surfaces that don’t cause heel pain or it will just switch to the toe first landing. Riding in hoof boots with pads for support is very effective in getting a heel first landing, on a horse that is sore in the palmer hoof. I would suggest Pete Ramey’s book Making Natural Hoof Care Work for You, available at http://www.hoofrehab.com.

The hoof is an engineering feat (no pun intended). In the healthy, pain-free hoof, the horse lands heel-first. The collateral grooves (on each side of the frog) act as hinges, allowing the hoof capsule to expand. This rapid expansion at ground level creates a vacuum, which sucks a large amount of blood instantly into the hoof capsule. It is trapped in the hoof by a tightening force at the top of the capsule, as the hoof rocks forward, over the frog and descending sole, towards the break-over point. Think of the hoof capsule as a cone shape. As the sole descends and the walls expand outward at the bottom, they press inward at the top. This abundance of fluid in the hoof acts as a shock absorber to dissipate the weight of the horse, as it drives downward.

The hoof then breaks-over at the toe, coming off the ground. In this non-weight bearing stage, the hoof capsule retracts, as the sole ascends back to it’s original position. The spring like shape, created by the hoof wall and bars, assist in contracting the base of the capsule and therefore expanding the top of the capsule. This allows the blood to be pushed out of the hoof, creating a healthy vascular situation. With the next step, the process is repeated. This is probably one of the biggest benefits to keeping a horse barefoot. The hoof mechanism is allowed to function fully, in the manner that it was designed.

As you can see, a heel-first landing is vital for the hoof mechanism to function properly. Next month I will talk about some of the reasons your horse may not want to land heel-first. Again I would recommend reading “The Sound Hoof” by Lisa Simons Lancaster, available at http://amazon.com or http://www.star-ridge.com.

Let’s start with some basic anatomy. We’ll begin at the back of the hoof:

The heel buttresses are made up of the rear most hoof wall, as it turns the corner and becomes the bar. This is the initial landing zone for the hoof. It’s interesting to note that in the wild horse the heels are so low that they look like one structure with the heel bulbs, which also make contact with the ground on impact.

The frog functions as support, traction, and acts as a sensory center for feeling the terrain beneath the horse. A healthy frog will be firm and large, reaching two-thirds of the way across the hoof, towards the toe.

Collateral grooves describe the junction between sole, bar, and frog. This is the area you clean out with your hoof pick. The coronary band is the soft area around the top of the hoof capsule.

The sole, covering the bottom of the hoof capsule is ideally concave in shape and a minimum of 1/2 inch thick. In a barefoot horse you will see an arc-shaped callus form at the toe. This is extra support and protection for the front perimeter of the coffin bone (P3 or pedal bone).

The white line is the connection between the hoof wall and the sole, made up of small tubules called laminae. From the bottom of the hoof it looks like tiny fingers and is more of a yellow color than white.

The outer most structure is the hoof wall, which serves to protect the inner structures. Looking at the bottom again, the inner part of the wall has no pigment and will appear to be a white line. This is called the water line (go figure). It is most easily seen in a dark hoof with a thick wall. The hoof wall is often mistakenly thought of as the main support for the horse. This however is not the case. In general, horses do not live and work on hard flat surfaces, so all parts of the hoof are designed to work together in sharing the load.

For a better understanding of the hoof, I would recommend reading “The Sound Hoof” by Lisa Simons Lancaster, available at http://amazon.com or http://www.star-ridge.com. Next month I’ll talk about the hoof mechanism.