Monday, March 21, 2011

Scientific Paper Refutes Common Hoof Care Practices for Founder Cases

I was really excited to read about this article entitled "The effect of hoof angle variations on the dorsal laminar load of the equine hoof" by Ramsey, Hunter and Nash, (abstract available here).

It is common practice in the farrier/veterinary world to recommend raising the palmar angle (coffin bone angle) of foundered hooves (see the example photo below):


It is believed that this lessens the pull of the deep digital flexor tendon on the dorsal hoof wall (wall at the toe). Heels are often wedged up with big pads, horseshoes, even blocks of wood as shown. This belief is held by many big names in equine podiatry circles.

The aforementioned article, however, created a model to test this hypothesis. Their results were pretty simple: "For all loading cases, increasing the palmar angle increased the stored elastic energy in the dorsal laminar junction... Therefore, hoof care interventions that raise the palmar angle in order to reduce the dorsal lamellae load may not achieve this outcome."

I believe studies such as these should be collected in a volume that hoof care practioners and horse owners can carry around and hand to farriers, vets, and other horse owners when the latter say that the barefoot hoofcare movement is just another fad without scientific backing. What we all believe based on common sense just keeps being proven by the scientific community, when they take the time to look.

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