Ace - A Tennessee Walker - Updates! Back to Ace's Setup Trim Page

Before - September 15, 2005

This fellow is a middle aged gelding with ho particular gait anomalies or problems. The first thing I noticed was that he had stretched growth rings, contracted and under run heels on his front feet and wedge pads behind that disguised the forward location of his heel buttress on the rear feet.

The shoes were removed from this horse with two weeks of wear on them. This meant that the walls were too short to do much with, aside from reshaping them by adding a slight bevel and pulling back the toes.

He's in a stall with a paddock that is bedded in rice hulls and gets ridden or ponied weekly in Epic boots.

In some cases I was able to move the heel buttress back or level the heels significantly by shaving off thin slivers of heel, but I had to be extremely careful because there really wasn't any extra heel to spare.

It's been 4 months since we pulled Ace's shoes, and I was delighted to see how far his feet had come! Ace lives in conditions that aren't considered ideal by barefooters standards... he has a nice stall with shavings, a large paddock with rice hulls, and because he's an escape artist, he doesn't get turned out in the pasture because... well, the grass IS greener on the other side if the fence!

He hasn't been feeling great, so he hasn't been out on the trail much in the past few months... so check out what happens to a horse that stands in a cushy stall and paddock all the time... he got **GREAT** feet! He's extremely sound and very balanced - especially considering where he started four short months ago.

Front Left Foot