Hoof Trimming

I tend to post in spurts, since it's been so hot here we haven't been doing all that much. That means I don't have much to comment on :)

The last 3 days we've been working on trimming Amigo's hooves. When we got him his hooves were horribly overgrown, he hadn't been trimmed since February. Since he was living on very soft dirt he wasn't wearing them down very fast, once we got him here he started wearing them down much faster. We called our farrier the day we got him and then proceeded to wait for 2 weeks. We still haven't heard back from him and no one else has time to add new customers. We decided early last week we would get some tools and try to trim the horse's hooves ourselves.

I read up on a number of different types of trim methods and settled on the "wild horse" trim. It seemed to best mimic what Ginger's hooves do between trimmings. After looking at and reading a bunch of sites I decided that this was doable.

Here are a few pictures before and after.



This picture shows one hoof done (the one on the left) and the other one waiting to be worked on.



This is the bottom before.



This is the bottom after. I know I could have gone down further but I was afraid of making him sore. I want to see how his hoof wears down in the next week or so before trying to go any further.

Amigo's hooves still don't look perfect but they are much improved. I figure we will look at trimming them again in 2 weeks, after that he can probably go 4 weeks between trims. We even did Ginger's hooves which were much easier. It's nice to have a horse who's hooves look like the pictures on the trimming site, it makes for a nice comparison as we go along. The reason it took us 3 days was because they were so overgrown and the heat was really bad. After working on 1 or 2 hooves I was done for the day. Since we finished we have already noticed a difference in the way Amigo stands, he is more square and seems much more comfortable.