Nerd alert - hoof pictures galore.

So I just checked the mail. There was some goofy catalog for clothing and jewelry featuring horses - stuff I'd never buy. (How do these people find me? I haven't ordered ANYTHING at this address.) But anyway, on the cover was a cute paint horse walking through a shallow pond. She had a foot raised to take the next step and the first thing I thought was "talk about underrun heels!" Then I flipped through the catalog to make sure they weren't selling anything useful, like tack, and threw it away.

Anyway, I haven't been trimming my horses. The last time I trimmed was at the end of April. It's a bit of an ongoing experiment - I've checked their hooves every time I've seen them, and if anybody seemed too long or uncomfortable, I would've dragged my rasp and stand down and fixed the problem. But Carmon's horses live on a mountain and self-trim. And there are wild horses in non-rocky areas who self-trim. I wondered how mine would do with a lot of room to roam but only dirt to wear their hooves down.

It's actually a success, as far as I can tell! Champ's feet looked pretty good before, and they look AMAZING now. Here's a blurry pic of his RF in March 07 (barefoot for 3 months, IIRC.)



Here's his LF from last week. The wall looks horrible and ragged, but it's wearing off. Not chipping off nicely into a mustang roll like if he lived on rock, but somehow wearing off nonetheless. And his FROGS! I really had no idea that his frogs could and would expand so much, ever! He wore keg shoes from when he was probably 2 til 13, and he had nice-ish shod feet with puny frogs.



Here's his rear from March 07. His rears have always looked better (most horses' do), even though he wore shoes on the rears too. I thought he had nicer frogs, but high inside heels.



LOOK AT THE DIFFERENCE! (Yeah, I know I'm yelling, but I'm a nerd and I get really excited about pretty frogs.) I even think the high inside heel is not as prominent.
At first, when I was looking through the pictures I'd taken, I really thought that was a picture of Poppy's feet. But I *know* I didn't pick up anybody's feet except Champ, and Poppy has a longer thicker tail and hairier fetlocks, so... that must be Champ's foot.



And I didn't pick up Dixie Quinn's feet, but I don't have any old pictures of solar views anyway. We'll compare apples to apples with her. Here's her feet, shortly after I got her. The short back story is that she was a padded show horse for a season, then shod (fronts only) with heavy keg shoes. Her hoof capsules were horribly distorted - padded TWHs are the very definition of long toes / underrun heels. This is about a month after I got her and had her shoes pulled. You can see how much I pulled her toes back.



Here they are today. Down in the grass you can see a tiny bit of ski-tip still growing out, but otherwise, her feet have healed really nicely.