Can wimpy TB's ever go barefoot ??

My TB had his shoes off 3 years ago and was very footsore on anything other than grass for a few weeks afterwards. He's gradually improved but it is a long process! It was a bit of a last resort for me as he was losing shoes practically every week when I first bought him and we ended up with not enough hoof to put nails in. His hoof quality has dramatically improved over time although he's still footsore on stones. I've been doing a ton of reading lately about 'barefoot' as although originally the plan was to put shoes back on once his hooves improved he's done so well I've left them off. We have only been hacking the last couple of years though and I'll be doing more with him next year so I'm currently trying a couple of things to (hopefully!) improve them even more. There are loads of interesting articles on the web you could look at for some ideas. It's probably a good idea to see what your farrier thinks too. If you do decide to have a go I think you have to be prepared for a reasonable transition period.
 
my TB lost shoes all the time and couldnt keep them on but she was in training, so we put glue on shoes on, and they lasted for a good 7 weeks. she has even raced in them. i would definately recommend them.
 
It is possible for even "wimpy" horses to go barefoot. The key is understanding the reason why the horse is sore when the shoes come off.

I had a horse that acted crippled if he lost a shoe, but he is now confidently hacking out without shoes. I needed to change his diet and management to achieve this, but it was worth it to hear his little bare feet ringing out as we trot down the road.
 
My girl is fine if she loses a shoe but I do only use her in the arena where the surface is soft in that case. My farrier is generally able to come out within a day or at the most 2 and she's not sore during that time or after the shoe goes back on. She can't however go barefoot all the time though I know several who do. I imagine it depends on the horse and the health of their hooves.
 
My TB is barefoot. he's improoving everyday but is not 100% on hard surfaces yet. His diet has been balanced and he's doing brilliantly. would never go back to shoes!
 
I have a retired TB, she'd been happily barefoot for many years but I have moved her to hillier and stonier fields and I've now had to have her shod.

It really depends on the horse and the terrain.
 
Charlie is the biggest wimp imaginable when it came to losing shoes, he would be lame and very footsore within 24hours of losing shoe. He has now been barefoot for 14 months and has no problems or issues coping, even walking on stony hardcore and broken bricks. He competes in showjumping on grass with no problems being barefoot. It is the best thing that I have decided to do was to remove his shoes, as I was the biggest doubter of all time that he would never ever cope!
 
Mine is thee wimpiest tb when it comes to feet :o When we first got him as a 4yr he was barefoot, was fine in the arena but very footy on roads/stony surfaces. He now has a chipped nav bone and vet says he has very thin sensitive soles which is very obvious as he is even feely going across the stony yard with normal shoes!!! So he has to have concussion pads = no more feely feet. Although he could go barefoot on the back ones if the road surfaces were better. But all horses are different :D
 
NicoleS_007 said:
Mine is thee wimpiest tb when it comes to feet :o When we first got him as a 4yr he was barefoot, was fine in the arena but very footy on roads/stony surfaces. He now has a chipped nav bone and vet says he has very thin sensitive soles which is very obvious as he is even feely going across the stony yard with normal shoes!!! So he has to have concussion pads = no more feely feet. Although he could go barefoot on the back ones if the road surfaces were better. But all horses are different :D
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Nicoles-007 what do you feed him? He sounds like a typical case of insulin resistance (think type 2 diabetes in humans, not the same but similar). It can cause increasingly thin soles. If you feed him molassed mixes, lots of cereals, lots of fresh green grass, sugar filled hay it can cause those terribly thin soles if he has problems digesting them. Whether you continue to shoe him or not it does sound as if you need to explore why his feet are so thin. If he is already chipping his foot bones, you could lose him unless you get it sorted, like a friend of mine did recently.
 
The TBx I ride is barefoot and of the 4 (also barefoot) in the field (1 native and 2 Haflinger-crosses) has the best hooves of the lot! She's been shoeless for about a year and has thrived doing mainly hacking with some SJ and XC.
 
cptrayes said:
Nicoles-007 what do you feed him? He sounds like a typical case of insulin resistance (think type 2 diabetes in humans, not the same but similar). It can cause increasingly thin soles. If you feed him molassed mixes, lots of cereals, lots of fresh green grass, sugar filled hay it can cause those terribly thin soles if he has problems digesting them. Whether you continue to shoe him or not it does sound as if you need to explore why his feet are so thin. If he is already chipping his foot bones, you could lose him unless you get it sorted, like a friend of mine did recently.
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Serious!!! iv never heard of that before :eek: ... He doesnt get anything sugary i dont think!! Just Alfa Oil and conditioning cubes and alot of haylage, hes also only turned out for 1-7hrs a day 3days a week and theres not much grass!! His feet used to crack alot but since using cournecresent (sp) every day there not half as bad and are looking really well now!!!

ETS dont think he has trouble digesting as his poop is looking good and has never coliced :S *touch wood*
 
i have a TB x who is wimpy about everything lol, she is in foal so i needed to take all her shoes off, the farrier did it slowly, first taking of the back shoes and not filing the foot as much as he usually would for 'cushioning' then 6 weeks later he did the same with the fronts and now she is barefoot, shod normally and was never footsore through the whole process ;)

Hope this helps :)
 
NicoleS_007 said:
Serious!!! iv never heard of that before :eek: ... He doesnt get anything sugary i dont think!! Just Alfa Oil and conditioning cubes and alot of haylage, hes also only turned out for 1-7hrs a day 3days a week and theres not much grass!! His feet used to crack alot but since using cournecresent (sp) every day there not half as bad and are looking really well now!!!

ETS dont think he has trouble digesting as his poop is looking good and has never coliced :S *touch wood*
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The conditioning cubes may have more sugar in than you realise and "a lot" of haylage would be enough to cause him foot weakness problems if he is sensitive to sugar. Your haylage will have just as much sugar in it (or sugar and a bit of alcohol where it has fermented) as the grass it was cut from. It doesn't show in colic or sloppy poo, but they grow very weak feet. I took one on ealier this year and to get him right we had to soak his hay (it dissolves out the sugar). He's got super feet now and can walk on stones - from his xrays (he was about to be put down) his terribly thin soles (3.5mm) reflected his generally weak feet and he couldn't tolerate shoes and got navicular too. That's fixed as well.

It just isn't normal to have soles so thin that you need to pad up his shoes to walk across a bit of stony yard :( . And it isn't that TB's "just have thin soles", because they usually have thin soles if they are ex racers because of the masses of high carbohydrate food they have been eating. When their diet is adjusted, they can manage just fine with no shoes on after a period of getting used to it and growing a stronger foot.

I don't want to scare you, and I'm sorry if I did, but if I were you I'd try feeding him soaked hay and see if his soles grow any thicker in a few months. That might be too difficult whereveryou are, and if so I hope the pads continue to do the trick for him if he is happy and you are too.
 
I've had my 'wimpy' TB for 7 years. For the last 5 years I have taken his shoes off over winter as he's not got the best feet so gives them a break, and I like to give him time off over winter (also struggle to get him ridden as keep at home, work full time and don't have an arena). For the first 2 winters he was dreadful - so foot sore walking over a concrete yard and crippled on very slightly stony track to field (was fine once in field). Then after a couple of weeks would get better and was fine. After that he moved to my own place which isn't stony at all so could cope to get to field. Strangely last winter was not remotely footy - don't know what has changed but very glad as used to dread the first couple of weeks where he looked so uncomfortable. There has been no change to his diet so can't put it down to that. I think next year he will have to go barefoot all the time as he will be 19 and has spavin - I am struggling to keep him in work due to other horses and think he is now ready to retire completely (i'm very sad about this as he has been my 'horse in a million').
 
look carefully..............
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!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

this is a 5yo ex racer.he has been BF since i had him (jan 09) and has coped fine,never a foot sore day.he is winning affil elem and schooling adv med, hacks out on roads,grass.grit tracks, and also does a bit of sj, all without shoes.

his race trainer was rather shocked when i told him he was BF, but he's been fine.

mums horse (irish) used to be a huge wimp when shod, if he lost a shoe he was hopping, but he then had to have a year off work, so shoes came off as he was to spend 6months stabled, and when we build him back up slowly, he was fine as his feet had time to adapt.
 
cptrayes said:
The conditioning cubes may have more sugar in than you realise and "a lot" of haylage would be enough to cause him foot weakness problems if he is sensitive to sugar. Your haylage will have just as much sugar in it (or sugar and a bit of alcohol where it has fermented) as the grass it was cut from. It doesn't show in colic or sloppy poo, but they grow very weak feet. I took one on ealier this year and to get him right we had to soak his hay (it dissolves out the sugar). He's got super feet now and can walk on stones - from his xrays (he was about to be put down) his terribly thin soles (3.5mm) reflected his generally weak feet and he couldn't tolerate shoes and got navicular too. That's fixed as well.

It just isn't normal to have soles so thin that you need to pad up his shoes to walk across a bit of stony yard :( . And it isn't that TB's "just have thin soles", because they usually have thin soles if they are ex racers because of the masses of high carbohydrate food they have been eating. When their diet is adjusted, they can manage just fine with no shoes on after a period of getting used to it and growing a stronger foot.

I don't want to scare you, and I'm sorry if I did, but if I were you I'd try feeding him soaked hay and see if his soles grow any thicker in a few months. That might be too difficult whereveryou are, and if so I hope the pads continue to do the trick for him if he is happy and you are too.
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Thats actally very usful to know. We usually have him on hay throughout summer but didnt bother this year so i will defo be changing as a precationary measure. That would probably explain why he chipped a bone as everyone was baffled as to how he had done it even the vet!!! But has been sound for near a year with the injection and pads (there weird, dont cover the frogs lol) you wouldnt even know there was anything there know!!! Its only his fronts which are thin though back ones are grand!! Is that strange :confused: Will defo be getting some hay to see if it makes a difference :) thanks
 
We are also intrigued by going barefoot, our cb x tb mare has thin soles, our bf farrier has said she would have problems going bf, whereas our gelding, no known parentage is an ideal candidate, he is now unshod and a little footsore but nothing major.
It is our ambition to have both bf and are feeding happy hoof to that end, any suggestions to achieve that result welcome
 
Friend has a TB who manage brilliantly barefoot until his grazing changed. He went from spare winter grazing onto cattle grass. Sadly there's nothing she can do about it on the yard she's on (although she is looking into moving him ) and so he's shod.

I would have made it my No1 prority to keep him barefoot (since the ability to work barefoot is a good indicatoin of all round healthy and a correct, healthy diet) but she's happy with shoes on. Except when he looses one. Or his feet crack. Or she has to fork out a fortune to have him shod. Or spends hours waiting on the farrier to arrive. Or has to take a day off work for the farrier.

Remind me why we shoe horses again? ;)
 
I sort of lurk on this forum, reading posts and not very often posting. We have a tb, who we took barefoot last year. He had previously been in a field barefoot, but with a pasture trim, so we got a barefoot trimmer out and I couldnt believe the difference in how they trim feet to a farrier. That said I won't go back to a farrier now unless something drastic happens and he needs shoes. that said, he had an abcess blow out of his coronet band months ago that we didnt even know was there, no lameness before or after it blew, but he had a horizontal crack growing down his hoof. He managed to take the bottom chunk out recently of the weakened bit of hoof, so whilst that is growing out he has Perfect Hoof Wear hoof wraps on, they look like rubber shoes on the bottom held on with tape. He is now coping brilliantly again. Prior to the chunk coming out he was sound on everything, but when he lost the outside bit of his hoof he was a bit tender on hard surfaces and gravel. Now he is fine again.
His hooves have grown amazingly as well, when we got him they looked like they belonged on a 12.2 pony, now they suit his legs. X
 
iv got a tb/clyde mare, almost 4 and a half now who has never had shoes on and my farrier is confident she may never need shoes. Despite the fact she has huge flat feet she has never been footsore or lame a day in her life. I think it is all dependant on the individual horse. a friend of mine has a tbx and if it loses a front shoe it acts as if it is dying, she then cant do anything with him for a couple of days until he feels better. I think mares are generally tougher than geldings anyway.
I do know a few people with tbs who go barefoot and never have a problem.
 
I know people do, I am not sure if mine would cope but she has some other farriery challenges at the moment (under-run heels) but maybe she would, I certainly wouldn't dismiss it out of hand in the right circumstances.

We have just got a new farrier and he put some natural balance shoes on ours because these help to mimic barefoot but still have the extra support of shoes, I feel this is a good compromise in our case.
 
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