Lutine's Hooves: January 06

The photos above show Lutine's hooves how they were in January when I first got her. From left to right they show: sole on off side front hoof, sole on near side front hoof, heels on off side front hoof, and front off side hoof from the side. I couldn't figure out why the vet couldn't understand why she was lame... maybe I'd missed something in the translation from the owner.

There were lots of things I could see straight off: looking at the underneath of the hoof the frogs were way too small and were contracted, there was flared hoof wall, white line infection, seriously overlaid bars with infection nestling underneath, signs of old abscesses (apparently she abscessed with every change of shoes). From the sides - well, where do you start? The hoof was basically a cylinder shape and it should not have been. The heels are far too high (and they were imbalanced from side to side, the hoof wall was uneven in its thickness, and all four hooves had signs of extensive bruising in the walls. The owner again said 'we don't know why she has those bruises but she always had them and we can't get rid of them'. As well as all this, when I felt for the lateral cartileges, I could only just about place my thumb between them meaning they too were hugely squashed in on themselves inside the hoof.

I trimmed her hooves the week before she came to live with us, basically lowering the overall heel height by about 4mm to start, removing any overlaid bar where it was possible to do so without cutting into the sole and by removing some of the flared hoof wall and finishing with a bevelled edge. Then I gave her old owner (they had given her to me by this point) a bottle of boarx solution and asked her to scrub Lutine's feet with this when she came in from the field in the evening. From then on, the basic trimming approach has been the same: removing overgrowth where it's possible to do so without making Lutine's foot sore, re-establishing balance as far as possible and keeping any infection at bay.

On top of that, I asked the old owners to change her diet while she was there. Until then she'd been given a traditional French sports horse diet: about 80% cereals (mostly barley) and a small amount of hay overnight in her stable (maybe 3 or 4 kg per day). I believed, at the time, that this was going to be an important part of her rehabilitation but I had no idea just how important this would prove!

Lutine Comes Home

Lutine arrived home with us in mid-January 2006. The photo to the right shows how she looked when she arrived with us. Actually, the photo doesn't do her justice. She was even skinnier in real life! I had never seen a horse where you could see the whole length of her spinal column and count every single rib. I installed her safely in a seperate part of the paddock and gave her as much simple grass hay as she could eat. It's important with starved horses not to feed them too much, too quickly and so she was left with just hay and water for a few days. I then started to give her four small feeds per day of lucerne (alfalfa) pellets and wheat bran.

Just how malnourished she was brought home to me within a couple of days as Lutine developed swollen pasterns from the increase in protein in her food. I was worried at first but within a day or so, the problem receeded and hasn't been an issue since. I had been advised about Lutine's diet by an equine nutritionist, who had informed me how important good quality protein would be. The lucerne was critical to Lutine being able to rebuild the muscles she had lost.

Within a few weeks, even though it had been very cold and started to snow, Lutine was looking much happier.

Lutine Du Manaou: The Story Begins

Lutine Du Manaou was born on 23rd April 1999 at a small Anglo Arab sports horse stud in south west France. She is by an approved French national stud stallion, called Veloce de Favi, and her mother is also an approved French sportshorse called Titania d'Echez. Lutine was destined for 'big things' in terms of her competitive career, and she started this off by becoming French national champion Anglo Arab foal in September 1999 at Pompadour.

Things seemed to be going well for Lutine. She was looked after carefully according to all the traditional 'best practise' for sports horses and, at the age of 3, she was started under saddle very gently and did a summer of trail riding and competing in some appropriate young horse classes at some of the big shows (showing, known as 'Modeles et Allures' in French, and loose jumping only) in south west France. However, in September 2002, she went lame. No one could find out why she had gone lame but, at the age of 3, she was showing signs of a horse ailment called 'Navicular Syndrome'. For the next 3 years, she was given every kind of treatment the local vets and farriers knew of and nothing seemed to work. In addition, she was getting thinner and thinner, weaker and weaker until, in December 2005, she went to the local equine hospital for the 'last assessment'. The vet, an equine specialist, took more X rays, examined her and officially decided that she was still lame, they had done everything they could for her and knew of nothing else they could do. His advice was to 'ride her in straight lines until she starts to limp, then have her put down (euthanised)'. So, her owners decided that enough was enough and, after Christmas, she was to be put down.

I ended up taking on Lutine because of a series of unlikely events. Lutine's co-owner, a lady, was very upset about the situation. To her, having the little stud was a dream and Lutine had been a dream horse. She couldn't bear to see Lutine so poorly and, mixed in with her concern for the horse, was the loss of the thing that represented the epitome of her personal dream. The lady ended up speaking about her plight with another person who's father had been on a natural hoofcare clinic I had hosted and it was she who contacted me about helping Lutine. I said I would 'just go to see her' and, of course, that meant that I came home with a new horse.