But nutrition can have a huge impact on those feet and your work on them, especially when it comes to laminitis, and often owners just don’t know when their horse-feeding practices are contributing to the problem. You can win a lot of loyalty, and reduce your chances of working on foundered feet, by helping educate your clients about nutrition as it relates to foot health.

Laminitis continues to be an all too common, devastating mystery — extremely painful for affected horses, frustrating for those treating them and sometimes ruinous to equine businesses. We don’t yet know how to prevent it 100%, and we can’t always treat it effectively enough to bring affected horses back to work.

Is it really important for a farrier to know how to read and interpret a radiograph (X-ray) of a horse’s foot? Absolutely so, especially if he or she is dealing with laminitis or other pathological problems, says Ric Redden, — farrier, member of the International Equine Veterinarians Hall of Fame and founder of the International Equine Podiatry Center in Versailles, Ky.