Jumping to conclusions...

or 

"Why you shouldn't try to extrapolate too much from a photo".

I posted last week about a hoof which quite frankly looks very odd.

Most of you regular blog readers, who have seen a succession of hooves (from the totally straightforward to the completely unexpected) in past blog posts were pretty unfazed by this and came up with a variety of interesting and plausible hypotheses for why the hoof might have grown the way it does.

More importantly (which I loved), your first instinct was to listen to the horse and give him credit for not putting effort into growing a bizarre hoof deviation unless he had some need for it.

However the post attracted interest from elsewhere - which is great, although some of those who came to have a look had a rather more - shall we say - unreconstructed view of hoofcare.  For them, the deviation was just something which should come off - and quickly.  Various posters on a couple of different forums (in the UK and US) stated that if it wasn't trimmed to something more akin to normality, the horse would have problems.

I have no issue with these people disagreeing with me, but I do get concerned when they won't listen to the horse.  What these posters tended to do was to comment on the photo and then make big assumptions, usually with little or no evidence.

The initial assumption was that the hooves were simply overgrown and neglected - despite the fact I'd made it clear the horse was in work, despite the dramatic asymmetry of the hoof, and despite the fact that there were no chips in the hoof wall.

One person decided that the horse had muscle wastage in his forearm.  Actually, what I said in the post was that the horse had suffered from wastage of specific shoulder muscles which had now improved.  A competent bodyworker could identify the weaker leg now just by looking at the shoulder, but I am not sure that anyone else would.

Someone else stated that the horse landed laterally.  Au contraire, his landing - with the deviation - is surprisingly balanced, which is what led me to suppose that its required to enhance the stability of that limb.

In fact, its on his other foot (which lacks such a significant deviation) that he lands laterally.  I've put some footage up below, but it just goes to show why photos - though interesting - can only tell you so much - though obviously you guys know that already(!)...

Anyway, I'm delighted that others were interested enough to come and have a look at the blog and really the more discussion the merrier, so I hope the additional info I've put up now will help make things a bit clearer.

I'm not saying a hoof capsule like this is ideal - far from it.

In an ideal world this horse would never have developed a deviation, never had an injury, never have had to go through rehab.

In the real world, this horse had a DDFT injury (to this same foot, well before the shoulder injury) and was given a less than 5% chance by 2 leading vets of ever returning to work - and that was in 2007.  He came here for rehab in 2008 and since then, despite occasional ups and downs, has competed successfully in dressage, show-jumping and XC, has hunted and has been almost continuously in work.

It ain't perfect, but human ideas of hoof balance haven't historically been much help to this horse and I, for one, am not arrogant enough to insist that I know better than he does how his hooves should work.