The Dangers of a Wet Horse
The Dangers of a Wet Horse
I don’t think I have ever met a Farrier in any country that hasn’t complained to me about being given wet equines to work on. I have lowered the incidences of this happening in my own practice through education. There are perfectly good reasons why we hate wet horses to work on below.
I don’t want to sound like Mr Moan; however I do only have one absolute rule which is that horses have to be DRY! This doesn’t mean, a bit damp, almost dry, only a bit wet or any other not dry variation. When presented with wet muddy feet I feel personally insulted that anyone would have such a low opinion of my skill and worth.
If you were having a carpenter do some work for you, the last thing you would think of doing is taking the wood outside into a field get it saturated and covered in mud, then returning it to the craftsman to work on. You cannot cut, plane or attach anything to wet wood, the same follows for horses’ feet.
There are some very important reasons for taking this absolute stance.
It is miserable to shoe wet horses that I have to lean against and try to get some friction on to hold up their legs and feet.
When trying to remove the shoes, the shoe pullers compress the hoof walls, which can be very uncomfortable to the equine patient, making them unlevel and sometimes chewing bits out of the walls when the shoes are pulled.
We are reliant on texture and other landmarks for accurate and safe hoof preparation and when wet we lose all the landmarks, which makes it a hit and miss affair at best and very unsafe for all parties.
Our rasps and sophisticated hoof planes with multiple blades, when the hoof is wet these teeth just clog up and become blunt making it impossible to level the hoof walls for the shoes to be fitted to.
Burning shoes onto saturated hoof walls creates super-heated steam which can scald horses, creating lameness that can last for weeks at a time.
We are reliant on the sound and feel when driving nails into the hoof walls. When the walls are wet, there is no sound or feel so the risk of driving the nails into sensitive structures is high.
It is impossible to get the shoes tight onto the hoof walls as the harder you pull the nails down the hoof walls, they just rip everything underneath the nails.
When the hoof walls dry out, they shrink and the shoes then become prematurely loose making shoe loss more prevalent.
I have shod horses with wet feet in the past, however not for the past forty plus years as working down to such a low level is unpalatable to me and I don’t feel comfortable depriving our equine friends of the skills I have at my disposal.
I hope you can see that my explanation is not a rant but a serious attempt at giving my reasons why we need horse’s feet DRY for trimming and shoeing.
By David J Nicholls Total Foot Protection Ltd
For more information on horses hooves in wet or dry conditions follow the link below –
