Performance horses, by the very nature of the work they are asked to do, are more prone to injuries than horses that are being used primarily for recreational riding.
There are a number of studies that offer evidence that certain injuries are more likely to occur with certain disciplines, but an informal survey of several experienced farriers indicates that across disciplines, more common injuries such as sore feet and abscesses are the culprits that farriers most often have to deal with.
That makes sense, as farriers working with performance horses often are being asked to manage these problems so that a horse can continue to compete.
“No matter the discipline, every horse gets abscesses,” points out Jeff Ridley, a farrier from Leighton, Iowa. “That’s something a farrier is going to see and has to know how to treat.”
Farrier Takeaways
The performance horse issues that farriers most often will have to deal with are common, but that doesn’t make them less important.
Performance horses often suffer various forms of hoof pain, which also can have multiple causes.
Farriers who shoe performance horses often will be expected to manage issues such as heel or sole pain, as trainers and riders will be reluctant to pull a horse from competition.
If a horse has a conformation issue that is likely to affect its performance, adjust your trim and shoeing accordingly before the issue crops up.
The demands of a discipline will affect your choice of shoes to deal with an injury. A sore-heeled jumper may be able to compete in heart-bar shoes. But a sore-heeled eventer facing a cross-country day will not.
Ridley thinks farriers have less of a chance to affect some of the more serious injuries that performance horses might suffer.
“Suspensory injuries occur in horses that are jumping, and horses that are in dressage and eventing may injure collateral ligaments,” he says. “It would be nice to think a farrier can have a big impact on those, but I’m not sure there’s a lot we can do to prevent them.
“We can trim and balance the horse as best we can and try to provide him with a good foundation to work on, but these injuries are hard to prevent or see coming. And when they do happen, what’s often needed is rest. And farriers have a somewhat limited role in rehabilitation.”
But just because foot pain is common doesn’t make their treatment or management unimportant. Being able to do so successfully can keep a horse able to compete — and at the same time keep the farrier working.
When a high-level horse has sore heels, Steve Teichman often will apply a heart-bar shoe, a pad and Equi-Pak.
An advanced eventer with sore heels cannot run in a heavy shoe, such as a heart bar, on the cross-country day. In those cases, Steve Teichman will put the horse in an open shoe.
One Problem, Multiple Causes
What makes the issue more complicated is the fact that foot pain abscesses can be caused by a number of different factors, including weather, climate, footing, conformation and a horse’s level of ability.
Steve Teichman, of Chester Country Farrier Associates in Unionville, Pa., shoes competing horses across the northeast, then follows them to Florida in the winter, as well as to events around the country and overseas. And wherever he goes, Teichman deals with sore heels.
“That’s the biggest single thing that plagues us,” he says. “It’s not related to poor shoeing. All across the northeast last year, we didn’t get any rain and the ground was rock hard. The same was true much of this year in Florida near Wellington and Ocala. Hard ground and sore feet are my No. 1 problems.”
Rest often isn’t an option for the 3-day eventers that make up most of Teichman’s current book, so his approach is to manage the injury. That means unloading those sore heels.
“There are three other places I can load a foot — the wall, the frog and the sole,” he says. “What I do will be situation-dependent. If it’s a small horse at a lower level, it might be just a simple shoe and a pad. If it’s one of our four-star heavy hitters, say a bigger horse at a higher level with some age on him, it’s going to wind up being a heart-bar shoe and a pad, maybe with some Equi-Pak.”
Hard ground and sore feet are my No. 1 problems …
The demands of a particular discipline also come into play. While jumpers often compete in heart bars, Teichman says an eventer will need a shoe change for the cross-country portion of a competition.
“With a jumper, the horse is going to be in a ring for 90 seconds,” he says. “You may be able to shoe them with a heart-bar shoe and a rim pad. But an advanced eventer will have to run for 11 minutes at 700 meters a minute. These horses can’t run in something so heavy. If I have an advanced horse with sore heels, I’ll take the heart bar off on cross-country day and put it in an open shoe.”
Asking a horse to compete or train at a high level in heavier shoes can have negative consequences. You don’t want your attempt to protect a horse’s sore heels to result in a potentially more serious soft-tissue injury.
“We might use heart bars between competitions or if we’re trying to rehab a horse during the winter when he’s just in light work,” Teichman says. “Then we pull him out of the heart bars when the season starts.”
When treating an infected central sulcus, Steve Prescott applies MalOtic ointment to a roll of gauze and flosses the area to clean it out. Photos: Steve Prescott
Frog Focus
Steve Prescott says one of the most common causes is an infected central sulcus.
“When that frog gets broken and the sulcus gets infected it can be very painful and quite often will affect a horse’s performance,” says the Raleigh, N.C., shoer. “A hunter that is afflicted feels the sting upon landing after he jumps and it will make him resistant over fences. A dressage horse might not lengthen its stride as nicely as it used to. That’s the one thing that I see that consistently pops up across all disciplines and it affects horses the same way. It creates heel pain, they become short strided and the discipline is affected. I probably have to deal with four or five cases every season.”
Fortunately, it’s a problem that Prescott finds can be treated relatively easily, particularly if you can get a trainer or an owner on board.
“I like to use some gauze almost like using dental floss,” he explains.
He takes a roll of gauze and stretches it out and treats it with an ointment. He then uses the pad to get down between the clefts of the frog and clean it out, using the pad much as you would use dental floss between your teeth.
“It’s a daily treatment kind of thing,” he says. “With thrush, we’re trying to kill bacteria and fungi with harsh chemicals, but with this, what we’re really doing is cleaning out the raw sensitive tissue. Harsh thrush remedies will burn the tissue and can be painful to the horse, so I advise against using them in the central sulcus when the frog is broken. When that sulcus breaks down, shavings and dirt get packed in there and it saws back and forth every time the horse takes a step.”
Prescott also says it’s important to get the owner or trainer involved, and demonstrate what’s needed.
“When the owner gets involved, everybody wins,” he explains. “After the initial treatment, if the owner will continue daily with a piece of cotton, this has great success. You need to tell them, ‘I can help you, but you need to help me.’”
Prescott believes that the choice of ointment is not as important as the repeated cleanings and treatments. Some farriers use mastitis medications that are used on dairy cows. He’s had success using MalOtic ointment, a treatment a veterinarian suggested that was developed for ear infections in dogs.
“This is where you don’t tell the veterinarian what you want, you tell him what you want to do,” he says. “Then he’ll hand you something that will work.”
With daily treatment, the problem usually clears up in 10 to 14 days. The horse can even continue to work if it seems comfortable.
Thin Soles, Rain, Don’t Mix
Mark Rikard, who also shoes many 3-day eventers in his Birmingham, Ala., business, says the Thoroughbreds that are frequently used in the sport are particularly susceptible to foot pain. Like Teichman, weather complicates the problem, but in his case, it’s been too much rain, rather than not enough.
“Bruising creates lameness and can sometimes progress into an abscess,” he says. “We’ve had a lot of rain lately in Alabama and many of the Thoroughbred feet — which are thin-soled to start with — are becoming soft and prone to bruising, either from jumping at a show with footing that’s too firm, or from trail riding in the rocky foothills of central Alabama. I’m finding myself leaving more ‘dead sole’ during a trim in an attempt to prevent bruising during wet weather or prescribing durable or leather pads after the fact.”
Other than adjusting your trim and shoeing to the horse’s conformation, there’s nothing else you can do about it, Tim Shannon says.
A Bar Too High?
With some performance horses, the likelihood of injury increases with the level of competition. Sometimes, it’s simply a matter of a horse being asked to exceed its abilities.
“It’s often a matter of a horse being asked to work past what their conformation allows,” says Tim Shannon, who has 3-day eventers and endurance horses on the books of his Moreno Valley, Calif., practice. “As the jumps get higher and paces get faster, some of the horses just can’t keep up.”
Like Rikard, Shannon finds that the Thoroughbreds often used in eventing suffer from thin soles, resulting in sore feet. He also says sore feet are the most common issue he deals with. He deals with this through a combination of toughening up the soles while also keeping them high enough off the ground to keep them protected. But conformation issues can make the problem even worse.
Shannon says the biggest issue is when a foot doesn’t load evenly because of its conformation.
“When the bony column comes down and the pastern ties in medially to the foot, the foot loads a little heavy on the medial side,” he says. “These horses are also more prone to cracks.”
This also can occur with horses with a slightly turned-in foot; a little pigeon-toed as he calls it.
When he sees this kind of conformation in a horse, Shannon doesn’t wait for further problems to crop up.
“I want to try and get out ahead of it,” he says. “I’ll put a little wider web on the medial side to try and move more of the load to the outside. I’ll also move breakover, usually to the lateral toe quarter, to help the foot flow and load evenly.”
Shannon says that often, simply acknowledging that a horse is being asked to exceed its limits is the best approach.
“I’ve seen lots of horses with conformation problems that start to have problems when they are asked to do too much,” he says. “But when you back them off a little, the issues will clear up and the horses can be used for years.”
Other than adjusting your trimming and shoeing to the horse’s conformation, Shannon says there’s nothing else you can do about it.
“It is what it is,” he says with a chuckle.
Like Teichman, Shannon thinks the cross-country segment of 3-day eventing presents the most challenges.
“I see more foot-sore horses after the cross-country segment,” he says. “The jumping arena is groomed to be softer. They’ll try and groom the cross-country tracks, but with the varied terrains, the jumps, the water, over longer distances and higher speeds, the demands on the horse really build up.”
Duration obviously plays a big role in the sore feet that Shannon deals with in the endurance horses he shoes. When horses are being ridden as much as 100 miles over varied terrain and surfaces, the number of footfalls quickly escalates into the hundreds of thousands.
“If anything is going to fine-tune a farrier’s trim and how he balances a horse, it’s going to be doing an endurance horse because of the sheer number of footfalls,” says Shannon. “Your trim is going to be tested quite a bit. If you’re off, you’ll know it.”
Shannon says that the trim is going to be the most important weapon in keeping an endurance horse from becoming too footsore to continue.
“Basically about the only change in shoeing that I can make is to add pads for protection and shock absorption if I know the track is going to be particularly hard or rocky,” he says. “Other than that, the shoeing pretty much stays the same. Most of my endurance riders go to the same races every year, so they know what the course is going to be like.”
Most Injuries Don’t Come Out Of The Blue
Nick Denson of Sagamore Beach, Mass., usually sees performance horses when he’s asked to take them on to provide hoof care for an existing lameness. Most of these are soft tissue tears in the superficial or deep flexor tendons. He says he probably sees most of these in eventers or jumpers, but doesn’t believe that the discipline itself is usually the issue.
“Poor conformation can easily set the horse up for failure,” he notes. “What it takes for the failure to happen might not be much more than landing a jump badly or over-exertion in a workout. It’s most likely that these injuries are not going to be a sudden catastrophic failure of a previously unaffected tendon. Rather, repetitive damage over time will have a cumulative degrading effect until something pushes it over the proverbial edge.”
So what can a farrier do to prevent this from happening? According to Denson, probably not much — beyond providing the best hoof care you can to begin with.
“We, as farriers, can provide a solid, balanced base that the horse can move from, but I don’t believe there is any trimming or shoeing that can be described as a preventative,” he says. “There are no magic shoes that will protect a horse against all injuries, just as there is nothing that will protect the horse from itself.”
Denson points out that shoeing protocols used to treat superficial digital flexor tendon injuries vs. deep digital flexor tendon injuries are polar opposites. But they wouldn’t be of any real use in preventing these injuries.
While poor hoof care can be a factor in injuries, lack of conditioning, conformational faults and poor riding are as likely to be the culprit.
That doesn’t mean farriers should let themselves off the hook too easily.
“There are things we can do to help in individual cases, but every horse, every leg has to be evaluated separately and a determination made as to what will benefit that particular case,” says Denson. “It gets more complicated because we must find out what works best for the horse while accommodating what the owner/trainer requires for a chosen discipline and also satisfy an attending veterinarian.”
With all of these factors, there may be only one certainty you can count on.
“If you take a poorly shod horse with conformational deviations and add a strenuous career with an inept rider, some part of that horse’s anatomy will give way eventually,” concludes Denson.
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