Hooves - your opinion please

[tristars]

If you have the same person again , speak to them. Heels look extremely long to me but its hard to tell much from photos . I used to have an old farrier that once said he could make any hoof look good , but it may not always be ideal for soundness for that particular horse .

This a hundred times , functionality over prettiness everytime

 

[tristars]

I think I might just do that as I won't get a farrier for a few weeks now. I'm sure I can't do any harm, but now i've seen it, I can't just leave it.

Yes thats it, recognising what needs changing is the start

 

[Hormonal Filly]

Looks a complete disaster all round to me

Thought the same as this. Has she recently had shoes taken off? She has so much heel

 

[dorsetladette]

Search - Farriers Registration Council

Search- Farriers Registration Council -

www.farrier-reg.gov.uk

@meleeka try this guy. He's recently qualified and still building his client base. I know his mum (bought a pony from her) but I can't vouch for his work, only that the family are heavily into showing so straightness will have been drilled into him from a pretty young age.

He should at least have availability to get those feet looked at ASAP. I'd be worried about the joints above the foot having unnecessary stress put on them being twisted in that way for any length of time.

 

[nikkimariet]

They all look off but this photo

View attachment 173407

really does me.

If I were being generous, I would guess the pony is hairy, has long hair, and was not so clean when he was done. Maybe it was also dull, and on uneven ground, so the farrier didn't get a good view.

If mine were so off, I would expect the farrier to mention it and explain why.

I would trim yourself TBH. Can't do much worse! It really isn't as difficult as you would think, and you can do a slight trim daily to start with, so get confident and make any changes slowly.

Did the farrier forget to do the other side?!

My companion pony grows a really deep collateral sulcus and the heel buttress always looks quite high - side and front on his feet are almost textbook! I trim it down as much as I can but always leave him balanced.

 

[Highmileagecob]

A farrier needs to be fully on board with trimming barefoot horses. It isn't the same as a pasture trim, and it is a lot different from setting up a shod foot. There are still a lot of farriers and vets who think we are odd having barefoot horses. My old cob is 31 and has never been shod.

 

[ester]

This isn’t a good ‘pasture trim’ either though (and I’m not convinced they exist as 2 entirely different entities beyond barefoot groups)

 

[meleeka]

Thought the same as this. Has she recently had shoes taken off? She has so much heel

No, the pony is a mini shetland. I found photos I took when this farrier first did him. He definitely didn't have such high heels then, although I thought at the time he'd left them a little high on the outside . What jumps out the most is how much his frog has shrunk. Looking at that photo, I should have sacked him then, but it was very difficult to find anyone at the time.

 

[Sanversera]

Heels look high

 

[PurpleSpots]

I'd not leave feet like that, but to offer a potential explanation...

I agree with @Red-1 who said it's easier to assess balance from photos.

The naked eye and the brain work together, and can fool you into thinking something's aligned when you're looking from an odd sort of angle. With smaller horses/ponies, it's easy to not be able to get your eyes so they are the same distance from the front foot, because the horse's body gets in the way. So the eye nearer the horse is closer to the foot (if you measure the distance between your eyeball and the part of hoof you're looking at), and the eye further from the horse is further from the horse. It's more exaggerated with small horses/ponies, but can happen with taller ones too.

When taking a photo, it's much easier to get the lens parallel to the view you're wanting to take - the body doesn't get in the way for starters!

I realised a few years ago that I was not getting my heels properly level thanks to the photos I always take, and corrected it with the hind feet by switching sides to assess heel balance. It was quite an eye opener (no pun intended!!). But the front feet were trickier, so I had to just find points of reference on the foot to retrain my eyes and brain to account for the slightly angled view.

I do think the farrier has done a poor job with regards to foot balance and ongoing hoof health in several ways, and I'd want someone else doing them too, but I don't think it's been done deliberately poorly, just a case of them not being aware enough of attention to detail.

 

[Highmileagecob]

And that's the rub isn't it? Not paying attention to detail, causing a serious issue through lack of attention and charging full whack for doing so. Not what you expect from someone who has trained to focus on hooves for a living. Sorry, I find it hard to put 'professional' here.