September 30, 2009

THE BATTLE OF THE HORSE SHOES

Frosty pulled, I mean torqued-type pulled, yet another front shoe two days ago.  Our farrier cannot get to us until the weekend.  I really wanted to ride because we had a lesson scheduled today and are entered at an event this coming weekend.  I went and got an EasyBoot and the first one didn’t fit.  I tried a different style and it fit well enough to walk but that’s it.  So today we hand walked today missed our lesson.  I have been doing research on both hoof boots and keeping shoes on.  I have always meant to keep my ponies barefoot but once we started to jump and event, we seemed to need the shoes.  There’s not much out there in terms of information let alone research for hoof boots and jumping.  Although manufacturers of hoof boots claim most of their boots are fine to jump with, there are many stories about how easily the boots come off in various terrains and during galloping and jumping.  I did find one great blog, “Eventing-A- Gogo” where a young woman chronicles her experiences barefoot eventing and using hoof boots and other natural horsemanship techniques, which I do recommend readers check out.  But, it seems I will have to do much of my own foot work in terms of finding boots that might work for my ponies.  In the meantime, I have an emergency set of EasyBoots.

So my research on the why’s and how to prevent pulling shoes brings up a lot of conflicting information.  I am used to this with researching horse issues but hoof health is tantamount.  The best barefoot trimmers and farriers recommend not rolling or squaring toes to prevent pulling shoes (and in fact much front shoe pulling happens front foot stepping on front foot).   They also do not recommend making the shoe too small by not allowing some "overage" of the shoe that shows to support the hoof wall as it grows between trims.  Instead, the most reasonable recommendations I’ve found were hot shoeing to get the best custom fit, using pull on bell boots, and reducing or eliminating deep footing (the footing does not suck the shoe off but the slowed pulling up out of it with the front feet leave them vulnerable to the hind catching) and reducing boredom at the non-electric fence line (pawing at the fence can loosen or take off a shoe).

Now my pony falls into most of these categories.  She’s a pawer.  She gets bored easily.  We have deep footing, rock hard footing, gravel or mud.  And I don’t turn her out with boots because what she can’t undo and toss, she chews off.  So, it looks like I am back to having several pairs of pull on bells and maybe spray painting them a neon color to find them in the pasture….