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Nipper


Wry Foot &
Crack Due To Coronet Injury


March 14, 2006 _ Shoes Pulled
March 24, 2006 - Dropped Flare & Decontraction
May 12, 2006


August 25, 2006 - Rear Feet Still Thrushy & Wry

October 15, 2006 - Relaxing Heels!

Five months into rehab, and Nippers feet have changed a LOT, but we have had trouble picking up her rear feet because of her muscle pull from May to July, so we didn't make much headway with her rear feet.

This trim she became more patient and let us get back to work again.

Nipper had a lot of thrush all along and her owner has soaked her, but her tightly contracted rear heels and frogs couldn't be adequately trimmed so they managed to hold on to the thrush.

THIS time she let me work on her feet long enough to clean her frogs up, so we'll make some headway when Jill soaks.

The thrush has made its presence known in several ways:

  • Her feet smell slightly thrushy
  • Her rear frogs are tattered and have a sick wasted appearance
  • Her heels are still tightly contracted and remain too tall
  • She has continued to walk on her outside walls to avoid painful hoof mechanism, leaving her inside walls longer. This is better than it was, but marginally.

We both noticed that Nipper has almost grown a whole new wall in the past 5 months. The shots to the left show how the prominent growth ring below her coronet in the May shot (above) and August (below) has grown over an inch in 2.5 months!

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Nippers attitude has also changed dramatically.

She was so affectionate and demonstrative that I had a hard time getting any work done! She's always been good for me, but was a skeptic.

Now? She's openly happy to have her feet worked on, even though its still hard for her to hold the rear feet up for long.


Rear Feet

The picture to the left shows her right rear foots asymmetry; the walls are bent and the inside wall looks much longer than the right.

Notice the tight heels. They are much looser than when we started, but are still way too tall and tight to be healthy. I lower them significantly durring the trim, but don't invate the live sole.

When the two rear feet are seen side by side after trimming, you can see that she's still weighting the outer wall.

This will hopefully change when the thrush is eliminated. Jill will soak all 4 feet in Lysol dilution for 30 minutes a day for 3 days or until the thrush is gone.

The picture below shows how little healthy frog remains after removal of the damaged frog.


 

The AFTER shots below illustrate how the combination of the scarred coronet and thrush have distorted the shape of this hoof capsule. Will we be able to get it looking normal? That's what we're going to try to do. She's very sound now, walking nicely on all four feet, even with the wry shape on the rears still evident after the trim.

 


Front Feet

 

There was still a bit of thrush on the right front foot, too. In the two pictures below, I removed the shedding bar from the untrimmed hoof to highlight the difference in the size between the left and right bar.

The left bar being the larger and the left heel grew higher, too. And guess what? The thrush was in the left side of the hoof. I trimmed the small piece of of loose frog adjacent to the bar and removed the shedding frog as shown.

Both frogs had shed at the last trim and were still essentially non existent, but I was able to get the heels down to an acceptable height this time and their concavity looked good, especially considering where her feet started from a short 5 months ago.

 

Left Front Right Front
   

This is Nipper standing on a 1 inch gravel pad normally used for storing an RV... she has gone into the gravel the last three times after I trim her...

 

Maybe she wants her own gravel loafing area?

 

Or maybe she's training for the hard roads ahead!

............

Linda Cowles Hoof Care
Serving the greater SF Bay Area & Northern California
Copyright 2008 Linda Cowles
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