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FROM THE HOOFCARE & LAMENESS ARCHIVES Second Bluegrass Laminitis
Symposium Shoeing and care considerations for foals
One of the most often addressed problems at the Bluegrass Laminitis Symposium was club feet, especially developing club feet on foals. Joey Carroll of the International Equine Podiatry Center in Versailles, Kentucky noted that traditional therapy methods have included cranking down the heels, using tips and extended toe shoes. He said that as the tendon pulls on the heels, it is actually beginning to rotate the coffin bone, often creating a predisposition to a myelitis condition later in the horse's life, when the horse will be walking on the apex of P3. Joey explained a treatment that he and Dr. Redden have used on about 75 foals with club feet. He said that it was successful in 60 percent. The treatment is based on construction of a temporary brace from two orthoplast sheets to relax the tendon. Joey said that after ten days of stall rest, the knee should come back; if it doesn't, they put the brace back on. As the ankle comes back, they begin to finetune it, and sometimes put a tip shoe on. He noted that when a foal wears a cast it will drag its toe, so a tip is necessary. Joey Carroll argued against taking the heels down and trying to match a club foot to the "good" foot when he spoke at the Bluegrass Laminitis Symposium. He said that that creates more concussion. Therapy's goal needs to be to revert a convex sole to a concave sole. For their cases, Dr. Redden and Joey Carroll dug the hinged expansion shoe out of the mothballs of the history books. It spreads the foot mechanically by helping to keep the heel on the ground. Joey said that he has helped 150 to 160 smaller-footed horses with this expansion shoe. It is especially helpful to narrow heels on an oval foot. The shoe takes a lot of time and effort--one case took 12 hours of work--with wings against the back of the heels that have to be continually finetuned. "This is a maintenance shoe," Joey warned. The foot must be kept soft; he recommended packing with Forshners, so that the foot is always soft and comfortable when the horse pushes on the shoe. What does this shoe do? Joey feels that it works from the outside by relaxing soft tissue in the bulbs of the heels. He uses spreaders with the expansion shoe about every eight to ten days. The shoe is not resettable; a new one must be made. Borium at the toe is mandatory, to save the rivets from wearing out. Radiographing foals' legs before sales is becoming increasingly common according to figures quoted by Dr. Paul Thorpe of Hagyard Davidson McGee Equine Veterinary Clinic in Lexington, Kentucky at the Bluegrass Laminitis Symposium. Dr. Thorpe's presentation on periosteal elevation included mention that in 1986 he radiographed the knees of 400 foals. This year, he did 500 foals. Basic physics are at work when a foal's foot grows in a certain way after trimming. The effects aren't immediately obvious when you're doing the work, and traditional methodology may be getting in the way of helping a lot of foals, advised Dr. R.F. Redden at the Bluegrass Laminitis Symposium. Some helpful guidelines to remember: 1) Bone remodels along the lines of stress. The hoof works th same way. The more vertical the hoof wall is, the more weight it can carry. 2) The opposite of a straight wall is a flare. If a foal toes out, lower the flared side and relieve the weight on rununder heels. Keep the outside wall lower to compensate for the weight. 3) Line up the center of the frog with the center of the tendon. If you don't, you'll end up with an asymmetrical ankle. 4) If you start out with an imbalanced hoof and you lower the outside to balance it, you are correcting. If you start out with a balanced hoof and you then lower the outside, you are overcorrecting. 5) The outer side of the pastern bone may be longer than the inside. The inside heel will then become sheared. The coronary band may not be horizontal, it may run to the outside. Watch how the foal flips its ankle when it's walking. 6) Putting a half shoe on the inside and lowering the outside should be considered malpractice. 7) Ankles don't mature until about the time that a foal is ready to be weaned. Wait until then to begin correction. 8) The typical extension shoe has an extension about 1 1/2 inches wide. Having an extension of the inside is not a problem, even if the horse requires two medial extensions, one on each front foot, as long as the horse is comfortable. 9) Half the thickness of a rasp is a lot of correction. This should be the maximum. 10) If a horse is toed out 45 degrees, forget it. It's a basket case. It will never be an athlete. 11) If a foal has one foot toed out, the other toed in, the toed in foot will always respond more quickly to the extension shoe. 12) When a foal has an offset cannon bone, the knee will tend to bow out over it. An extension shoe holds the knee in position. 13) Start shoeing foals when they are one week old if
you have to. 15) Do not use acrylic with an outside extension. It will push the heels in. 16) If a brace is to be used on a foal for correction, it must be individually designed and fit for that foal. A brace may be useful to hold a knee in place. A bolt-on brace with a torque bar can be used for a few hours a day. At this stage, braces are very primitive. 17) A ballbearing shoe has been experimented with. When one ballbearing touches the ground first, the others have to follow, spinning the knee. Ballbearings were put on each heel and on the outside toe. 18) About 80 percent of the horses Dr. Redden sees are toed in early in life, but most straighten out by the time they are four months old. 19) It takes a month to get crooked, and a year to straighten them out. Straight pasterns early in life are a warning sign of possible ballerina syndrome to come, or contracted tendons, says Mac Head, FWCF, of Buckinghamshire, England. At the Bluegrass Laminitis Symposium in May, Head commented that the genetic inclination to ballerina syndrome is too strong to correct. Mac outlined five options for trimming foals: 1) Give an even, balanced trim. 2) Lower the heel. This is common. 3) Do an uneven medial-lateral trim. Use extreme caution when doing this. 4) Lower the toe quarter. Use extreme caution. 5) Do a diagonally differential trim of the hoof. Use extreme caution. Dr. R.F. Redden holds the patent on a new glue-on foal shoe manufactured for him by the Dallmer company in West Germany. The collared shoe is lined with felt and is available in four styles, with varying types of extensions. The shoe slips onto the foal's foot and has small ribs extending from the collar down to the edge of the extension, so that if the extension gets stepped on by baby or mare, the weight slides down the ribs and the shoe is less likely to be pulled off. Dr. Redden is marketing the shoes in the United States at a cost of about $25 per shoe. For more information, write to International Equine Podiatry Center, P.O. Box 505, Versailles, KY 40383. Mac Head recommends using caution when evaluating foals for deviation. Make sure that you stand in front of the leg and look at it straight on. Don't necessarily think that you can evaluate the foal by standing in front of its spine or head. The leg is often angled out from the center of the spine. Farriers from around the country are experimenting with the versatile Baby-Glu plastic foal shoe from Glu-Strider, a division of Mustad. Originally designed for use as a slip-on foal shoe for protection or correction, the profile part of the shoe has been used as a support mechanism with aluminum shoe inserts, a patten bar insert, and even an aluminum plate extension in foal cases. In addition, the shoes are being put on miniature horses and ponies with frog pressure for laminitis cases or chronic founder support. Glueing profiles and pads onto breeding farm stock for protection from injury is still another use for the shoes. At the International Thoroughbred Exhibition and Conference in Lexington, Kentucky in June, Mustad announced that Baby-Glu would soon be available in a tougher, reinforced model with a stiffer plastic base to the profile. This should add to the longevity of the shoe and create more opportunities for it to be used on heavier ponies and older foals. Writing in the May 15 issue of Speedhorse, Dr. Michael Collier recommends cutting the deep or superficial flexor tendons in contracted foals only as a last resort. This is in contrast to presentations by farrier Burney Chapman and Virginia researcher Dr. Nathaniel White at the Bluegrass Laminitis Symposium, who discussed the procedure only in terms of their work with laminitic adult horses. Dr. Collier warns that any future performance potential of horses with cut tendons is very limited, and that post-operative management may be quite complex. Detailed information on this and many other hoofcare topics can be found in Hoofcare & Lameness publisher Fran Jurga's award-winning guide to hoofcare, "Understanding the Equine Foot". For more information, or to order, click here Back to the articles table of contents
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