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Rebel horse care

Casa
España
Vilanova de Sau
Rebel horse care

Everything is connected. Environment, hoof care, gentle training and balanced, bitless riding. Working for better horse welfare through education.

Based in Catalonia Spain.

19/11/2025

My Arabian mare Vinta came to me in march 2023 with very overgrown and neglected hooves.
Now 2 years and 8 months later her hooves are short, strong, tough and she is incredibly sound.

I trim her hooves every 2-3 weeks and she lives with her herdmates in a track system built on a mountain side.
She has 24/7 access to good quality hay, distributed in 15 haynets spread around the track. She gets a simple vitamin/mineral supplement every day and she goes to a large paddock with great plant variety for a couple of hours twice a week.

I do varied training with her and make sure she uses her body and mind in different ways.

Hoof rehabilitation takes time.
Vinta has been quite sound during this whole process but this is not always the case.
Hoof boots can be a great help in the rehab process.

Many times other types of tools are used to make a horse sound quicker, but usually this is at the expense of long term soundness and health.
Being patient and facilitating the conditions needed for the horse to heal and build tough hooves is a better approach in my opinion.

04/11/2025

2 years ago one of my clients moved her two horses from a boarding facility to her own farm here in Spain.
The horses came from a paddock with very little grass to a pasture with lush green grass, and this was more than my clients pony could take. He developed laminitis over the winter.

He got better over the spring and summer, but sadly had another flare up in the fall.
Now the situation is under control, he is healing and doing great, he is sound and lives a happy life on a hay based diet with his two friends in a large grass free paddock.

And now to my point with this post:
I was trimming this pony’s hooves before, during and after he had laminitis.

This pony did NOT get laminitis because of incorrect trimming.
This pony did NOT get laminitis from having his heels left too long.

He got laminitis because of carbohydrate overload from the rich, green grass, and most likely the stress hormones in his system from moving to new surroundings also added to the equation.

Put very simply, horses develop metabolic laminitis when they digest more carbohydrates than their system can tolerate.
Many factors play into this, and some horses are much more sensitive than others.

Bottom line is, diet plays a key role in the development of laminitis in horses.
How we choose to trim and treat the hooves once the laminitis is present is another story and material for another post.

Slide to see the development in the pony’s hooves.

31/10/2025

Kathy has been on our farm for almost 4 months now.
I’m tracking the development in her hooves and even though I’ve seen hoof transformation happen many times before, it always amazes me how quickly a horse can go from sensitive to sound with the right conditions provided.

Kathy needed boots in the track for the first 3 weeks she was living in it full time, and then I could ease her out of the boots.
She now tackles the challenging track completely barefoot and completely sound.
The clips of the hooves are 3 months apart.
Her feet still have some healing to do, but they are developing beautifully.

The biggest change for Kathy has been the amount of movement she gets.
From living with a couple of big hay stations, to walking all day between 15 hay nets in a track system with hills, gravel, sand and rocks.

She is leaner, stronger and happier and she has ganged up with my mares Enya and Vinta.

Never underestimate the power of movement and blood flow.
hop

26/10/2025

What a beautiful week it’s been!
This past week we have had a visit from
Janne has attended two hoof care workshops with me in Denmark, and we arranged for her to come to Spain to learn more about hoof care, and to spend some time with me and my horses.

Janne works with intrinzen horse training, and I always find it fascinating to learn about different types of training methods that align with my own philosophies around horse training and horse welfare.

I had begun the process of teaching my two older girls Enya and Caroline how to do crunches, but felt stuck.
Janne gave us a massive push forward and some ideas to advance with this exercise, so cool!!

In return Janne got some inspiration from some of the work I do with my horses, liberty work, gymnastic groundwork, bitless training and off course more practice in hoof trimming and understanding of how to build strong hooves by facilitating a proper environment for the horses.

Sharing knowledge, ideas, thoughts, worries and joys with likeminded horse people who have chosen a different path in horse training and in life in general, makes me feel grateful, touched and happy to be alive.

It’s so easy to get stuck in our ways. For all of us. And so wonderful to get inspired and to inspire others, without the ego getting in the way.
Until next time my friend. ❤️😄

03/10/2025

Learning to be calm, relaxed, attentive and present during hoof trimming, is one of the fundamental skills that any horse should have.

Most horses are going to need their hooves trimmed regularly for all of their life, and yet being able to stand quiet and be ok with having the legs and hooves handled, is a skill many horses have not learnt.

In my professional work as a hoof care provider I have come across horses from many different disciplines who had impressive careers as competition or pleasure horses, and yet they could not stand still for trimming.
This tells me that there is a crack in the foundation of the training of these horses, or maybe many cracks.

I never blame the horse, and do what I can to help them learn, but it wears on my body, and it really shouldn’t be the trimmer or farriers job to teach the horses to be ok with hoof care.

If you have a breach in the training foundation or maybe just haven’t built a foundation yet with your horse, maybe I can help you.
I offer online classes in foundational horse training built on kind, gentle, calm, clear and consistent communication. 😊

02/10/2025

Farewell amazing soul ❤️

28/09/2025

Hoof abscesses can almost always be solved with soaking.
Soaking the hoof in warm soap water causes the hoof capsule to expand slightly and softens the coronary band, making it easier for the abscess to move inside the hoof capsule and find a place to break out.

Depending on where the abscess is located inside the hoof capsule, it will travel up to the coronary band above the toe, quarter or heel.
Once it opens up, the puss can come out and the pain and lameness quickly resides.
I always keep soaking for a few more days after the abscess has broken open, to be sure to get all the puss out and that the wound doesn’t close too soon.

Abscesses can be caused by bacteria entering into the corium through tiny cracks in a weak white line, because of inflammation in the lamina due to laminitis, because of a severe bruising of a thin sole, because of a foreign object penetrating the hoof capsule, in the healing process after shoe removal and sometimes they occur in fairly healthy hooves and it can be hard to figure out what caused them.

I believe sometimes they happen simply as a cleansing out of waste products in the system.

24/09/2025

This is what it can look like when your horse needs a foot soaked because of an abscess.

When we have built a foundation of trust, mutual respect and care with our horse, things like soaking a hoof becomes less of a big deal.

I don’t need to have a whole lot of preparation practice in this particular situation to have a communication of calm understanding between us.

We have a general language that works in our every day life together and Caroline knows the language of positive reinforcement, so I can apply it in this situation too and she quickly understands that I would like her to keep the foot in the bucket.

After a little while she feels the relief of pressure in the hoof from the warm water, and that then becomes rewarding in itself.
She relaxes into it and almost dozes off.

And yes I’m aware that these kinds of situations are not always easy peasy, but having created a solid foundation of communication that both parties understand and feel calm and confident about, truly helps in any situation.

🐎

Dirección

Vilanova De Sau

Página web

http://www.rebelhorsecare.eu/

Notificaciones

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