So here's what's happening with that. I LOVE the Easywalker horseshoes. They are a great product and if you are looking for a good alternative to metal shoes, you should consider.
The thing is, they are not working out for Peg. Peg has A LOT of leg issues, she is bow legged, walks with an obvious extreme twist and her breakover is on the outside quarter of her front feet. All of this creates MAJOR pressure on any kind of shoe and they keep getting loose. So I have to renail them on and it is getting to be a pain for me and I'm sure Peg is getting sick of me always fixing her shoes! She is pretty hard on them too, she lands toe first on them when she is not paying attention, her awful hoof twisting on the ground as she walks and the side breakover is probably really hard on the shoes and creates pressure and weakens the nails. She acts up like crazy in the field, she runs everywhere and keeps pawing at the feeder, which I am scared that she will get a shoe caught and hurt herself.
My decision: pull the shoes, find another alternative. If anyone has any suggestions, I am very open. I am currently looking at hoof boots to put on Peg when we ride her. We don't use her much, she is mostly a big, huge, 16.2 hh pet, so there is no need to really have shoes on her. When we use her, we are usually going for a short trail ride that never exceeds 2 hours, but we do see all sorts of terrain. Peg has a bad habit of always wanting to walk on the asphalt when there is some at proximity, it wears her hooves VERY quickly, compared to Dandy, who could walk all day on asphalt and it wouldn't even wear her hooves enough to skip a trim. Dandy has very thick resistant soles and could basically only walk on her soles, it doesn't bother her. But the Standards only have been in rehab for a year and there is still a lot of work to be done, mostly because their hooves grow so slowly. I have noted improvements in the wideness of their heels, but that comes with flat soles, then the hoof reshapes itself and concavity occurs, that's where Peg is right now.
For the boots, I am considering the Old Mac's G2 boots, if anyone has ever tried them, please let me know what you like / don't like about them, I would really appreciate.
So here are my pictures. This is the first time I ever put shoes on a horse, unfortunately, it had to be one with issues. All went very well, I knew what to do and Peg was SUPER patient (even if Dandy was in her face from the other side of the fence... that's a change) and really respected that I needed to take my time!
I also took short videos, but it didn't turn out good, because I had just put the shoes on and Peg was still limping on her bad foot (less than before, but still) and she kept acting up and wanting to run off, so I gave up and left her in the pasture, where she ran off like a toroughbred racehorse and put on a show for ten minutes... I kicked myself for having put away my camera at that time! GRRR!
Here's the first shot, from the top. There is 8 nails in each of these shoes, plus side clips. I left the clinches a little long, but overall, it is not bad at all (I think)!
This is what the shoe looks like from underneath, we had trimmed the right part of the shoe that was stiking out a bit too much for my likings, we were debating wether to trim the left side or not, these shoes are solid and my nippers could hardly mark them... so we took a hand saw and I rasped the remainder. You can see remains of Cool Clay on Peg's left front leg... that's her bad leg. I've tried to brush it off, but it won't come off!!! Ah well, they are all scheduled for a bath as soon as it is warm enough out.
This is after we were done. You can see how her legs kind of bow outwards. It makes her feet point inwards, putting the breakover on the outside quarter of the hoof. You can see that the coronet bands are straight compared to the ground and that the whole hoof is pulled inwards because of the leg issues. I could easily trim the hooves to put everything straight, but Peg would be lame forever, besides, since her coronets are straight, the hoof is technically straight, it is only pulled to the inside after years of wear and tear. That's the way her legs are made and I won't force things to go in a straight line if that is not the way it is intended. I do keep in mind that she has that problem and try to make her as comfortable as I can with each trim.
So here's the first video, yeah, I'll show you my crappy videos, just so you can see how Peg really walks, she is not used to her shoes yet, this is the first try with the shoes on. You can see that she walks fine until the last few seconds, where she starts limping again on her bad foot. But she seems to forget to limp for the first part of the video...
This next video, I asked my sister to trot Peg along... That turned out to be a disaster. Peg started to trot... then switched to a pace, then tryed to jump the old bits of hay on the ground, galoped for a stride, cut my sister off and stopped. In the first seconds, you can see Pearl in the pasture running along. That ended my quest for a video... depressing. :'( Needless to say that Peg does not limp today... this was the first few minutes of wearing her new shoes. I think that after that, she realized that her feet didn't really hurt anymore.
So there you have it... Peg's new shoes.
Oh and just for fun. Here's Dandy just before we left the barn... she's always anywhere people are. In this picture, she hasn't yet lost her winter hair, but you can see that it is dying off, turning red. Last week, she was starting to loose some, so this weekend will be time for a good brushing, She is also due for a trim, being sick for 2 weeks, I missed out on keeping her hooves short and easy to maintain... so now I will have to nip those cement hard hooves... *sigh*. She maintained good shape during winter too! She spent the whole winter outside with free choice hay and about 2 cups of oats per day. Dandy turned 4 on March 27, 2010.
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