High Desert Farrier service

06/24/2025

Let's always learn to really understand their emotions...

Picture credit: Horses People Magazine

06/04/2025

05/22/2025

Horse Conformation

05/18/2025

04/30/2025

Would you eat a salad without any dressing? Most would answer a resounding "no", and I think the general consensus is if I'm going to be eating this flavorless lettuce, it needs to be spruced up a bit. Salad dressing unifies the dish, and all the elements of the salad are blended together, equally contributing to the zest. And sometimes, the dressing is all that required to make a rather unsavory dish palatable.

Must like salad dressing, top dressing a hoof (or dorsal wall rasping) unifies the work done to balance the hoof, and sometimes it's the single factor that makes a biggest difference in extreme cases of flare.

Lately, I've seen comments that claim "there are no lever forces".

Lever forces refer to the force the hoof needs to breakover and particularly at the toe. The longer the toe, the greater the lever forces are needed to transition from loading phase to flight phase of the hoof. Ground reaction force refers to the force the ground puts on something that is in contact with it. Both of these are at play as the horse traverses it's environment.

Flare tells us that there is too much pressure. When we remove flare, we provide the hoof more time before that area makes ground contact, and the hoof can relax for a longer period before the lever and ground reaction forces cause distortions. This encourages the tubules to grow straight instead of curled/distorted.

Whenever I see comments about the nonexistence of lever forces, I wonder, how do you think the horse moves through the environment? How is the hoof breaking over? How is flare caused in the hoof then? If there are no lever forces affecting the hoof, shouldn't it theoretically always grow straight down without deviation? The logic just isn't there in my opinion. And in fact, it's been studied that long toes act as lever forces, and damage the balance of the hoof and structures way above it!

04/28/2025

Decoding the hoof capsule-defining 8 hoof types

04/15/2025