My poor toe!

It's a vicious cycle. Poppy is young and green, so he's a jerk about letting me trim his feet. They're huge and it's a lot of work so I tend to put it off a week or two longer than I should, so they get longer than necessary and they take longer to do and he's a bigger jerk about holding them up that long. If I'd just stay on top of the trimming, it would be easier on me, easier on his patience, and better for his feet. I am going to try to rasp his feet every single Sunday for the next few months - obviously, he won't need much taken off that often, but it'll be good practice for him to put his feet on the stand and let me rasp them.

Anyway, I trimmed all four horses yesterday. Yep, it sucked! I did Poppy first, cause he was the worst. He yanked on of those enormous back feet away from me and slammed it down on my poor little toe, and stood on it. I had to holler and push on his butt to make him move off my toe. Instead of beating him to death with the rasp, I sighed, went up to his head, and scritched him.

It's not broken, but it's red and swollen and quite sore. I'm sometimes tempted to buy steel toe boots, but if he stomped on my boots and bent the steel down, that would be way worse.

Champ and Silky's feet were almost perfect. I've been staying on top of Champ's trims lately, and his feet are just picture-perfect. I wish his frogs were a little bigger and plumper, but he's got rock-hard concave soles and all I needed to do was freshen up his mustang roll. Silky's feet were much the same.

And poor little Quinn. I've looked at worse feet before (a horse who's been wearing pads for years looks exactly like a slipper-toe founder case with wedges of rubber strapped on his feet), but I've never seen worse. Certainly never owned worse :( Well, I ordered my new digital camera, so I should have pictures to document her improvement (fingers crossed!) over the next year.