Yet more forensic work has yielded another discovery for me. Well, new knowledge for me anyway. :D I'm sure others have known this forever, but I had to discover it for myself with the help of Linda Harris.
In one of her youtube videos she was telling us that the collateral grooves get filled up with overlaid or overgrown bars which get pushed up into the hoof capsule on either side of the frog due to upward ground pressure. This is clearly evident in her photos & fresh cadaver hooves. When that is bad, it forces the quarters outwards hence flares occur. The other way of seeing this excess bar growth occurrence is to note if the widest part of the hoof is where it should be about 1/4 to 1/3rd the way down the frog or more than half way along the frog. In Sonny's case his widest part has for a number of years been more than half way along the frog.
The usual method of solving the flaring is to 'relieve' the ground contact of the wall in the region of the quarters (slightly scooping the bearing surface of the walls). When this is kept done, it does indeed help stop flaring. But if not done every week the flares begin to return & the widest part of the hoof can end up way back towards the heels when the heels run way under.
Cleaning out the collateral grooves & lowering the bars also prevents flaring. As I stated in my last post, I have begun cleaning out his collateral grooves now that I have my dremel working again. When Cas was doing it she used her power grinder to clean out the collateral grooves also, but when she was away & I was doing it I only had the knives & the horn got very hard, too hard for me to remove the excess.
So now it is time to seek out the root of the bars which have been mostly absent for many years. What little there is points in the wrong direction, out towards the outer wall rather than towards the frog. Also there has been a lot of overlaid bar growing across the sole which I knew about but didn't remove due to it probably being half the thickness of Sonny's painfully thin soles.
However now that his soles would be thickening up on their own due to re-established hoof health, I can begin to remove that overlaid bar material. From time to time it does want to flake away by itself anyway, so I am just helping it now. It has been easy to see the black line where that overlaid material ended, so last trim I used the dremel to remove material just to that line all around the frogs on all 4 feet.
The other thing to comment on here is that since I have again been making a bevel on the ground bearing edge of the walls around the toe, I can begin to see a new tighter angle growing from the coronet band. It is about 6wks since I started the beveling & this new angle is well evident now (although the first time I did the bevel/rocker based on Linda's hoof markup I did take too much off & make him sore). Lesson learnt there, so now it is just the wall itself that gets a little bevel to help relieve leverage on the toe. That seems to work better as Sonny hasn't been sore since. Once there is even better hoof health & more hoof, I will revert to Linda's markup & do it properly by not taking the bevel so far back to under the P3.
No photos this time. I was too busy with other things, being close to xmas. However I'll be getting more photos with the next trim in next few days.
I have applied these same hoof treatments to my other horses & am seeing improvements there too. Everyone is happy! It's all good.
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