How often do your foal's feet get trimmed?

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MillionDollar

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Rainbow was trimmed at 2 months old and Phoenix is being done this week, shes just over 2 months old. I was just wondering how often you have your foals feet trimmed after their first trim?

Obviously it depends on the foal. I'm so glad mine have their mother's NF feet and are good and hardy
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Every 4 weeks with out fail. We read an article about just how much a foal's hooves grow. I think off the top of my head, they grown 15mm in a month, a horse growns 6mm or something like that.
 
Every 4 to 5 weeks by a damn good farrier!! That way any deviations that may be trying to happen can hopefully be caught and corrected....... Easier said than done, but entirely possible
 
Well unlike the yearling (last year) this years foal has not been done yet. He has suffered a couple of times from being foot sore, & does not seem to have grown much foot, & he was born Jun.
 
I was talking to someone who has a good TB stud in Ireland and they said they used to operate on the crooked foals but now they have a brilliant foal farrier who 9/10 times can correct a foal just by its feet rather than anything more invasive.
 
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I was talking to someone who has a good TB stud in Ireland and they said they used to operate on the crooked foals but now they have a brilliant foal farrier who 9/10 times can correct a foal just by its feet rather than anything more invasive.

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Periostial Striping or PE striping. Worked with loads of foals that had it done in the US. The idea is if a foal's leg is growing wonkily, say when you look at it head on and one or both forelegs are very splayed out, then they do keyhole arthriscopy on the outside of the cannon bone (long bone) growth plate. They stratch the growth plate here, to irritate it, so that is grows faster and catches up with the inside - do you follow me? It's such a minor surgery that there is often only 1 stitch! The risk is that you get a lump at the site of surgery. I was actually talking to our vet (Partner in one of Newmarket's leading practices) about this earlier this week, as we were looking at 2 of our foals that have had extensions on due to epiphysitis (I can never spell that
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) and he said the reason why we don't bother doing it here, is that the effects are negligiable and more can go wrong. Screws and wires in the knees of yearlings are another matter altogether though.
 
Trimmed every four weeks at least, but foals are led up on concrete every week for the farrier to watch them move- just to make sure they are still straight and no slight alterations needed.
I don't think you can be too careful, as mentioned in an above post, their feet grow so much quicker than an adult and any changes need to be addressed asap.
 
my farrier said the legs tend to straighten in time and you cant do anymore than just keep the feet balanced
 
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