Horse hoof maintenance

The process can certainly hurt the animal if you’re too cavalier with your pick and clippers. Usually even the most gunho effort won’t do too much damage if the hoof is healthy but a diseased hoof is very painful and by definition they are somewhat... delicate because any level of disease in a hoof will leave semipermanent underlying structural defect because of the way hoofs grow.

I am not an equine person and I hurt a horse the very first time I picked it’s hoof. We knew old lady had laminitis but we didn’t realize that it progressed from pain in the ass to life threatening virtually over the course of a week max.

My advisor knows I don’t like horses and has been pushing me to get more experience with them. When I went to help with a clipping, something we do every one in a while to help slow the progression of the type of Hoof disease OldLady (that was the horses name) had. I started cleaning one of her forefeet with a pick and was doing it very timidly until my professor told me not to be afraid to really get in there. Of course I put some force into the picking and next thing you know the horse freaked out. She bled a little bit, but as my professors would soon found out, her laminitis had progressed to the point that the distal aspect of her distal phalanx was essentially sinking through the hoof wall (more or less her finger tip sticking through her hoof/nail) and I was the lucky person who found that out.

Old Lady had X-rays and exams done regularly so there really wasn’t anything that could’ve tipped us off, especially because she was the most stoic chill horse which is why I they had me work with her, but seeing her freak out like that scared the shit out of me.

She was put down a few months later too, and while that was inevitable and she led a solid life (she was late 20’s or early 30’s). I still feel shitty on top of having been scared half to death by a skitting our horse.

But anyways rambling done, the moral of the story is if you can’t confirm the hoof health of a horse prior to a shoe removal, clipping, and cleaning then it is always a good idea to take it slow and be careful. Laminitis is one of those things you want to catch as early as possibly anyways so xrays before doing this are always a good idea if there’s access to them.

/r/educationalgifs Thread Parent Link - i.imgur.com