Well, Jeremy and I decided to make a small investment in a horse to transform from a poorly shod horse to a performance barefoot horse. I’ve been learning to trim my own horses using the Equinextion method. They have an online forum which makes trimming easy with personal critiques on your photos. I have seen four of the horses at our farm transformed by this kind of trim as well as some horses belonging to a friend. The principles of the trim are to give the horse the same kind of wear a wild horse would get on their own feet. By keeping horses in small enclosures with limited variety in terrain, we keep them from wearing their feet as they do in the wild. So, just like artificially providing them with other things they’d find on their own in the wild such as hay and minerals, we artificially provide ‘wear’ on their hooves. I realize I alternate calling them feet or hooves, but I mean the same thing by both terms. Hooves are feet and feet on a horse are hooves.

So many horses end up with hoof diseases as a result of improper trimming and by shoeing a horse. People have been putting metal shoes on horses feet for thousands of years, I realize. By restricting movement and blood circulation, it by all means can make a horse instantly sound and I can see why people resorted to doing that when horses were a means of transportation and livelihood. Now, we can deal with a horse being sore on their feet temporarily to end up with healthy hooves for a lifetime. My goal was to find a horse with screwed up feet and transform it and then sell it as a performance horse. Then, I found Teddy. He actually didn’t seem to have that much wrong with his feet, except for an old leg injury but he was in definite need of an overall re-haul. The poor thing was starved, had a skin fungus, and had horribly long feet, causing him to kick the bottoms of his front feet with his back feet as he walked and occasionally kicking the sides of his front legs with the other leg, enough to draw blood and to wear a regular scar there. It seemed straightforward enough on the feet, but getting weight on him is in first order. I decided to put together his own blog to keep track of his progress as he is restored to health and then put into eventing (the kind of riding in the Olympics) training once he is ready. He is a very willing horse under saddle and despite all that’s happened to him, he is incredibly sweet.

You can read all about him here: Theodore Recovery