Wednesday, October 8, 2014

The Summer of Thrown Shoes

2

Posted on 9:43 AM by Unknown

It's been a rather dismal summer for Cash and I in terms of getting to ride.  We hit a few high points when I was able to actually ride him for more than 2 weeks at a time and got a few jumping rides in which were amazing.  However, the majority of the summer went something alone these lines:

Farrier comes and shoes horse
Horse keeps shoes for a few weeks, a month maybe
Horse throws shoe
Call Farrier, Farrier comes a week later, by this time Horse is lame
New shoe on, wait a week (or more) for Horse to be not-lame
Horse is sound, ride horse for a week or two
Horse throws shoe
Rinse, repeat....

I've honestly lost track of how many shoes we've gone through this summer. We finally got him to let us hot shoe him (courtesy of a lip chain) so that we could put quarter clips on.... that still didn't work.

He tore up his bell boots like nothing else...


So got shinny new ones... and still pulled a shoe the very next day

I'm frustrated, my farrier is frustrated, we're both puzzled as we can't figure out why (or HOW) he's pulling these shoes so frequently.  Interesting thing is I realized yesterday that the rate at which he's pulling these shoes has increased significantly since getting his hocks injected earlier this summer. So it very could be that he's feeling better and stepping up more under himself, OR he's just the klutz with his feet I know he is and continually stepping on himself as I see him do on a nearly daily basis. Sigh.

SO.... as of this last missing pulling a few days ago I'm just going to throw in the towel and pull his shoes for the winter and let his feet grow out.  They are getting so riddled with nail holes at this point that it's just going to be a continual downward spiral.  Sucks because I was hoping to get to ride him in his first show next month.  Oh well, such is the life of horse ownership.  I'll probably still take him just to hang out and experience the atmosphere, but I doubt he'll be sound enough to ride.

Welp Cash, enjoy your winter break! Guess that gives me more time to study, play with the kiddos, hang out with the boyfriend, and play a sweet little GPS-based mobile game I got dragged into called Ingress.

Cheers,
Emily

2 comments:

I've read that when the horse springs a heel or throws the front shoes because the back hooves keep clipping the fronts, it's because the back hooves aren't trimmed at the correct angles. I'm not a farrier though but it seems to make sense. My horse did this twice last summer on her right front. New farrier, new angles, no more problem :)

I'm assuming you're doing due diligence as far as balanced diet and his feet aren't just falling apart of their own volition. If that's true, then if you have other farrier options, I'd explore them. Your farrier sounds like a nice guy, but that doesn't get the job done.

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