Uneven heel heights?

digitalangel

digitalangel

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What can you guys tell me about uneven heel heights and what they mean? My new 'project' mare has come to me with what i would call terrible feet. Theyre very long, one heel is underrun while one is upright and high. the shoulder of the upright one doesnt have as much muscle. Dont know how a farrier would have been proud of his work tbh! Also her backs arent great either, they look unbalanced, not a great angle. Apparently she was barefoot some time ago so will at least take her backs off to start and get them balanced up. The quality of the hooves look good, cant see why she is shod all round personally!

My gelding has this very slightly, hers is more pronounced. Have the most amazing farrier in the world who i trust implicitly, so she is in good hands. Barefoot is not out of the question if she copes with it!

But not sure if theres something i need to delve into a little more? Can of worms probably!
 
No way i am an expert but my horse had a similar problem with being low at the heels she had been ridden with no shoes at the back and was wearing down on the outside. After talking it over with my farrier who is also my friend we shod her all round with a lateral extension at the back and bar shoes at the front what a difference in her way of going of course he did some nifty trimming over the course of about 2 years and is in normal shoes at the front now but still has an extension at the back as her conformation is not that good. Dont know if this is of any help to you. On a personal note i prefer my horses shod rather than unshod but thats just a personal choice.
 
Do you mean one foot is heel high and the other is heel low, or that on one foot the balance is off inside to outside?

If it is one foot vs the other, google "high-low syndrome", it can be corrected, but it may be difficult as it stems from grazing as a foal, always with the same foot forward. As it happens as a foal, it can cause bone remodeling - hence the difficulty in correction.

having said that, if the heels are truely under-run, opposed to just very low, that should be able to be corrected with decent trimming/farriery.
 
Sounds like the farriery has not been great but sometimes if a horse does not have a matching pair of feet at the front there is only so much a farrier can do, some try to change one foot so it matches the other but this is not right, if you have a good farrier speak to him about your concerns he should be able to sort them out in time.

One of my horses has a more upright foot than the other its not terrible but the heal is slightly higher he also has a smaller shoulder muscle on that side, I make sure he s shod 5 weeks in summer and 6 in the winter and the toes must be kept short and they must be totally in balance or he starts to look unlevel in trot, it took a while to get his feet right and I went through quite a few farriers, he spent a few years in natural balance shoes but he just has normal ones now but without toe clips so the shoe can be fitted further back a bit like a natural balance shoe. I also find the more upright foot can be prone to getting flares on the inside mainly hence why he is shod regular as this seems to stop them occuring.
 
thanks so much! here is a pic:

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You can tell the off side hoof is more upright than the other one, but I would say the toe on the other one is still too long although they are not a pair of feet the toes still need to be short, you will never get the heel height the same if one is more upright and boxy than the other you just have to work with what you have, if you pm me your email I can send you some pictures of my horses feet if you want, I cant post them on here from ipad.
 
My OHs gelding was like this - N/S fore flat and splayed and O/S boxy and upright. He went barefoot about 2 years ago and it did get better, however since dealing with an underlying SI issue and getting him moving much better and straighter his feet have changed loads and he now has front feet that almost match. The difference is astonishing. My trimmer says that it is often caused by something much further up - might be worth having a physio assess her?
 
Looks like a club foot to me . . . a sympathetic farrier/trimmer should be able to help you with this, but I would caution against doing anything too radical to correct the problem as your horse will have developed a way of going to compensate and any radical/sudden changes will cause problems elsewhere.

Tbh, it's a bit of a chicken and egg thing . . . is the foot growing that way to compensate for problems further up, or are there issues higher up because the foot naturally grows that way?

My (now) 15-year-old gelding has a club foot . . . it's likely he's had it all or most of his life and we manage it sympathetically . . . he has learned to compensate for having one leg (effectively) longer than the other and any sudden changes we make will compromise him/his movement/his musculoskeletal well being.

Talk to your farrier first . . .

P
 
Yep will be making sure farrier comes tomorrow - hes in my area every tuesday anyway and bonus is that he is AWCF and also the best farrier (imho) in the country. He got heels on my grey, which i honestly thought was high on impossible and my farrier is the only reason my grey is sound! Woudnt let any other farrier touch him.

Anyway onto my girl. I managed to find some pics of her from around a year ago, i zoomed in and they dont seem nearly as bad ( she was also barefoot then ) so im trying to chase up her previous, previous owner to get an idea on how it was managed or if this is just simply some kind of neglect of her feet. they are certainly stupidly long, poor girl.
 
Does your horse always stand like that (acknowledging that you've only had her a short while?) It definitely looks like high-low.

Depending on how fast her feet grow it is possible it's a 6 week cycle - though if it is she may benefit from a shorter cycle :)
 
ive just had some information that one shoe was lost at some point so one foot might have been done but not the other which might explain the discrepancy - this is what her feet were like in july when she was barefoot. i appreciate theyre not the best. I can see the high hoof is still high but not nearly as high- but the lower one looks a lot better here.

10450179_10152331324966246_2996768902678873290_n.jpg


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and when shod in july

10411424_10152331324976246_6148701897040479565_n.jpg
 
I think there will have been a problem further up (perhaps the shoulder) which has caused the right hoof to become boxy. This can also happen after a severe abscess. My late mare always had one boxy foot but then it was made much worse by a massive abscess which tracked down from an injury to the coronet band which resulted in resection of the whole of the front of that hoof. Later in her life she had a career ending shoulder injury on that side which made it even worse. However, until the shoulder injury, she was one of the soundest horses I have known (apart from that one abscess). I agree that it is best not to try too hard to make mismatching feet look the same. They usually grow like that for a reason and trying to correct it can cause real soundness problems for the horse. Personally, due to the other foot being so under run, I would attempt barefoot rehabilitation with this horse.
 
Thanks Wagtail - up until 2 months ago she was always barefoot so no idea why she was shod! I wouldnt rule it out but going to see what the farrier thinks tomorrow - i just tucked her up for the night and had another look at her feet - the clenches are risen and the back of the shoes arent near the heel either. sometimes she was left foot forward, sometimes she would stand square. Shes sound, so not going to play about with it too much, though she does have uneven shoulders.
 
Farrier has just been its good news - hes not worried - he thinks her feet havent been touched since july ( which is what i thought! ) anyway we trimmed them down again and will see how she copes, trotted her up sound as a pound and will also address the shoulders with the osteo so happy days!
 
My boy has the exact same feet. High/low heels. The foot they place further forward tends to be underrun and long toe and the foot the tend to bare weight on is the upright boxy foot. My boy also favours the left foot forward and right hind back.
 
It's a chicken and egg situation. Anything which causes the horse to avoid weight bearing on one front foot will result in it putting that foot forward and standing mostly on the other. That in turn will create feet like that, which will then make it more comfortable for the horse to carry on doing it.

The original cause could be something as simple as a stubborn abscess, but it becomes permanent because the horse makes changes in the body to adapt to it. I would always be looking for stiffness higher up in a horse with feet like that. Or for one front leg longer than the other, that will do it too.
 
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