I just took these today. There are photos of all four of Chief’s feet from the outside and bottoms, plus I took at least one of each hoof showing the rasp being held to the hoofwall to look for flares. I also showed the angle gauge. I’ve been seeing some improvement but there are still things I’d like to see better, like getting the frog on one front hoof to spread back out a little. The good thing is that Chief seems to be really tough footed in all footing. You can tell in some of the photos that there is a lot of flaky sole on the bottom of his feet. I try not to remove very much, just smooth things out. I also posted these photos on Facebook. Feel free to comment on the photos, either on FB, or here. Thanks! Karen P.S. I’ll work on finishing up the rest of the Coso ride stuff next.
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Looks great! I’ve just started trimming my horses’ hooves and am working on getting rid of the flares on my favorite mare. Our horses live on Florida sand so their hooves will never be as tough as yours, but they are are doing well barefoot. Looks like you were trimming in the snow.
Lovely – thanks for sharing those!
Hi Karen-
In one of the photos, there is a brown plastic thing you have laying on the bottom of his hoof. What is that?
KD – your horses can have great feet in FL too! Each place has it’s own unique challenges along with pluses and negatives. This time of year can be tough on their feet when they are in snow, ice and mud for weeks on end. When things do dry out they need some time to dry out and adjust to going over some of the hard rocky terrain that we go over.
I did a little more work on one front hoof this morning. I didn’t like how it looked in the photo last night. I often do that, going back and rechecking a day or two later and doing some more tweaking.
Jonna – the brown thing you see is a hoof gauge. It measure the angle of the hoof. I don’t work on enough horses feet to be able to just look visually and see how close their angles are. So I use tools – the hoof gauge and also a measure that is made to fit in the hairline and show me the toe length. For example, with Chief his front feet are usually at 55 or 56 degrees and the hinds are within one or two degrees (steeper) of that. Toe length is usually 3 1/4″.
Thanks Karen. I couldn’t tell from the picture! I also have to use a gauge. JB’s feet can be really deceiving! We’ll be trimming horses this weekend. I might do a post on it with photos as well and do a compare between Maggie and JB. I love your photos and posts. Keep them coming!