Rick Burten wrote:<deletia>
Darren, why did you repost your post #63? I answered it with my reply at post #77.
Over worked I guess
Any way after a great conference on wild horses at which I got to massage some wild caught horses and show the muscular strain caused by domestic feet does not happen in the wild, I continued the clubby foot case. Here are the pics of the progress.
OK B4 the first trim the horse was given 15ml of oral bute to get to the vet clinic for rads. This short trip caused enough pain that it was obvious the horse could not handle the 7 hours on the float to my rehab centre

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So I needed to plan a 1000km round trip to trim the horse ASAP as the vet said there was no way this horse would get better. The first trim was hard as the horse had to very quickly swap feet to alleviate pain. Pedal bone visible through cracks in the sole and sole badly distorted by pressure from the pedal bone. Also had serum leak out of a building abscess in the right fore.
I do not care if you call this a club foot, or a foundered foot or a bad navicular foot, the shape is the same and so is the treatment. For the sake of argument I will call this a club foot based on the lack of preceeding laminitis, the fact that the dorsal wall does not deviate too far from the pedal bone and the sole is thinned under the solar margin.
http://www.nanric.com/Howtotreatclubfeet.asp
If you look on here this would classify as a grade 4 club foot as the heels are as high as the front of the coronet band. Evidently hard to fix

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There was a gap of 4 weeks between trims, after the first trim an abscess occurred in the left fore to complicate matters. Horse was uncomfortable for the first 4 weeks due to bone damage and abscesses. The horse was better the second 4 weeks but still sore on some days. She would get active and then pay for it later, there was a lump of proud flesh that was sensitive to pressure, the wet grass cleaned up the proud flesh as normally happens. After the third trim she would walk around happily but no more than a walk.
Before trim 4 which happened 2 weeks late, she was seen trotting happily, The forth trim is the final one in the pics. I tried to video the horse for Equitana a big horse expo in Melbourne and she would not leave me alone and ran around the paddock like she was connected to me so the video is a bit close up.
The horse is now happily chasing and beating up on the younger horses in the paddock and playing hard to catch.
The order of the pics is trim 1, trim 3, final trim and then rads as well as the hoof a few days before the rads. Trim 2 failed to photograph due to cold morning and low batteries. If you look closely at the first and last pic you can see there is less than 2 weeks between the pics and you can see how much I removed in the first trim. Trim 2 I feel was not as trimmed as it should have been though I might have had to leave tissue above an abscess exit point.
So before anyone does the wrong thing with club feet, have a look at these pics and understand that club feet grade 1 through to 4 are easily reversed by good hoof trimming without the need for surgery or fancy contraptions on the feet.
The owner paid 5 figures for this horse without checking the feet because it was a cheap deal. When something seems to good to be true, it probably is. If the horse was worth less money the vet would have put it down at the clinic. The horse is fine after 12 weeks of new growth and has good sole depth as well as much better palmar angle.
The unfortunate thing for the client is now that we have proved we can save these horses, she had in years gone by 2 previous cases with less damage that are now buried on the property.
The reason we can do this rehab work, is because of a lot of research into how the horse weight is transfered to the ground. Building on prof. Bowkers work that the wall is not the primary load bearing structure. We have taken this to the full extension and worked on the principle that the pedal bone is the only structure that can support the horses weight and that at full load it must be level with the ground. If it is not level demineralisation will occur in an attempt by the body to make the bone level with the forces.
Knowing how the bone is connected to the wall we can trim away the parts of the wall causing the problem. Do not trim heels on club feet as that will increase the load on the bone at the quarters. Scoop out quarters, bars and frog if needed and you can reverse just about any painful problem.