03/10/2025
🙌 Ignorance of how to use a tool is what harms horses, not the tool itself 🙌
Following on from yesterdays post, her is the same photo indicating correct placement and use a shoe if optimising welfare is the goal of the hoof care plan.
The bottom right diagram is representative of a correct use of a modern shoeing package and placement, creating a 50:50 base split, use of a small wedge to elevate the heel and support phalangeal alignment, and 3D base support using impression material.
What you cannot imagine from this view is the lack of excess leverage which is often created by inappropriate shoeing, nor the equilibrium around the coffin joint afforded by the reductive plus additive intervention.
The material is composite, so not steel, and the manner of fixation is glue, not nails.
Together with an appropriate cycle length, this set up will facilitate correct placement of the hoof and limb, facilitating healthy forces on the entire body, facilitating healthy posture and homeostasis, helping correct past inappropriate forces, initiating correct development needed for correct growth, and ideal morphology.
The shoe set up wil be adapted according to the new morphology and needs at each cycle, resulting in rapid healing and return of optimum form and function.
In other words, the welfare state of the horse will improve.
And that is what matters to the horse.
You see, it is not shoes which harm horses, but the inappropriate use of a shoe. And human ego.
Material, size, caudal support, placement, promoting static and dynamic equilibrium around the coffin joint, promoting neutral posture and gait, preparation, length of cycle, all matter.
The other common examples here will not return healthy ideals (hoof morphology, posture, development) and will negate welfare parameters (posture, physiology, behaviour) and this CAN be measured and evidenced objectively - but rarely does.
This is why so many horses are lame and broken - whether barefoot or shod - lack of understanding of what is healthy, and why it matters, and how to maintain or create the environment for healthy welfare parameters and states in equines.
What amuses and distresses me is that I am not a farrier, and started life as a pro barefooter, and now I see the truth, I understand the science of podiatry AND farriery, and I empathise with the horse. The horse only wants to feel safe and sound, and in domestication, we should use any resource available to create and maintain optimum welfare states in the horses we all love.
For high quality educational resources and related science, visit the comments.
Www.holisticequine.co.uk - supporting and promoting compassionate equestrianism for the benefit of all 💚🙏🐴
