Ace's Feet: Latest Update on "the feet" May 23, 2013

I apologize for the delay in posting. Sometimes life just gets away from you....

Here is today's self portrait after the trimming -tired and happy.

Here are pictures of the front feet. Sorry I was so tired I couldn't pick up the hinds for photos after doing 2 horses trims. How DO farriers do it!? I swear I took more, but they are not here. I had a nice front feet "after" shot, but this will have to do for the time being.

One done and one not, then I went back and did it again ;)

Starting to look a bit more like hooves you would see on a horse, though there are about 3 months growth left to get to the new angle the hoof wants to take. Here you can see the horizontal line across the hoof where the new angle begins. There is yet another closer to the hair line.

So here you can see the thick rubbery line of lamilar wedge growing out just inside the line of the hoof wall. (sorry about the cheese grater marks, I got a new rasp that I tried a few days before and it was awful!!)

Nice open central suculus of the frog, heel bulbs are firm and springy. The extra bar material is shedding away rapidly, and he is SOUND! The frog is slowly backing up to a better position.

Left front after trim

Right front after trim

They are starting to round out a bit, not be so oblong. I brought the wall closer back to the edge of the live sole, moving through the lamilar wedge stuff. This always makes me nervous as I am not a farrier and short is scary, but I need to get these toes backed up!

The really noticeable thing here is the callusing on the right sole near the toe is essentially gone now! He is starting to gain some sense of concavity, though not much yet at the point of frog. The bars are peeling away like crazy and if I had a knife I would have reduced the flaps here and it would look that much better. He is getting a much more natural bar shape now.

My goal over the next months is to continue to keep on that toe, so we can grow out the cheesy wedge and get to the spot where the new angle is. Right now his boots are fitting and we are riding again :) We did a nice technical 3 hour ride with extensive trotting and he was fine in the feet.