hardening hooves

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Equine_Dream

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Hi everyone

Looking for some advice with hardening up my girlies feet :)

Basically over the summer her feet were TERRIBLE. A combination of soaking wet weather and baking hot sun had left them very soft and crumbling. Literally could not keep shoes on her and had my farrier back an forth every 5 minutes. My farrier has never had to put racing blades on a cob before :p

In the end I decided to remove her back shoes as these were particularly bad, and I felt she was doing more harm than good by trying to put shoes on them, as every time she'd loose a shoe, it take any re-growth with it we had achieved.

However she went very foot sore poor thing :( so when I brought her in for the winter at the beginning of October, I had her reshod and invested in kevin bacon hoof dressing, which I had heard was very good.

Her feet have definitely improved and are much stronger than before. She hasn't lost a shoe in weeks thankfully. However she still seems foot sore, despite having shoes on for the last 6 weeks. No where near as bad as before but still tender.

Having spoken to my farrier, he suggested her soles and frogs could still be soft hence why she is still a bit footy. So does anyone have any suggestions about how to harden her feet up fairly quickly? There are a few hunt meets coming up that are local to me that I would love to take her on, but obviously not if shes still sore.
 
A healthy foot comes from the correct diet outside conditions should not do that much damage, if she is obviously footy then she is lame and still not coping although shoes are covering up the problem, it needs to be solved if she is going to be able to go hunting, what do you feed her? getting the diet right will be far better than putting stuff on the outside which long term will not sort out the underlying issues she has.
 
be positive said:
A healthy foot comes from the correct diet outside conditions should not do that much damage, if she is obviously footy then she is lame and still not coping although shoes are covering up the problem, it needs to be solved if she is going to be able to go hunting, what do you feed her? getting the diet right will be far better than putting stuff on the outside which long term will not sort out the underlying issues she has.
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I have been feeding her biotin for the last 6 weeks also. she currently isn't fed much hard feed as she is a good dooer. I give her some happyhoof chaff and fast fibre.
 
I feel I should also mention back around 6 months ago she was very run down for a few weeks. She had an allergic reaction to something and was left with nasty itchy sores all over her for nearly 2 months (unfortunately the vets I was using proved to be totally incompetent) I changed vets and the issue was sorted within 2 weeks with the right treatment). Her feet started to deteriorate a few weeks after that.
 
Happy hoof is not great as it has a fairly high sugar content and that will not help, you probably need to give her a better balance of vits/ mins to support her feet, biotin alone will not be enough and there is some in the HH, take a look through the barefoot threads, the diets are not just for barefoot horses, a really good supplement such as the forage plus or equimins may make all the difference to the foot she grows.
 
I'd definitely echo bepositive's thoughts about looking at a higher ration vitamin and mineral supplement. My native has always been barefoot, but I saw a massive difference in the quality of his feet when I changed from just feeding biotin to looking at his whole diet. He hacks out over all terrain now, where he struggled before on hard or stony ground.

Mine is now fed: Allen & Page fast fibre, Equimins advanced complete powder (I tried him on their cheaper version to see if I could save some money, but I noticed he was slightly less confident over all stony ground and considering we do a lot off road hacking it wasn't really worth it for me for the price difference ), magnesium oxide and micronized linseed.
 
Paint iodine solution with a bit of sugar added to soles. Remove all sugar from diet, that includes carrots, apples etc. My mare gets unmolassed chaff, micronised linseed and biotin.
 
Keratex hoof hardener made a noticeable difference to my mare's feet. First week, you paint it on the sole (but not the frog) every day and then twice weekly going forward. A £27 bottle lasts me about 5 months. Make sure you buy some disposable latex gloves though to apply as it contains formaldehyde?! Another tip is just filling the bottle cap with it to apply so if it gets knocked over you only lose that and not the whole bottle!
 
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