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A client's draft horse went from constant abscesses to clear feet in 8 months after we changed his feed.
I've been working on a big Percheron named Gus for about two years now. His owner, a farmer up near Spokane, was at his wit's end because Gus would get a new quarter crack or abscess almost every other month, no joke. We tried every trim and shoeing tweak in the book. The real shift happened when the vet suggested we look at his diet. Turns out, the farm had switched to a new, super-rich alfalfa mix about a year prior. We cut that out, put him on a plain grass hay with a balanced mineral supplement, and the difference was night and day. After about 8 months of consistent trims and the new feed, his hoof wall grew in solid and those chronic issues just stopped. It really made me debate how much we should be talking about nutrition versus just the mechanical work. Has anyone else seen a case where a feed change was the real fix for a persistent hoof problem?
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the_keith23d ago
Jumped on the diet bandwagon myself after years of blaming my tools, and @wesley_grant33 is right that it can flip everything upside down. Had a little Haflinger mare who would get flares no matter what I did with her feet, swapped her grain for a ration balancer and suddenly I looked like I knew what I was doing. Guess I spent all that time tweaking angles just to realize I was basically a fancy hoof landscaper ignoring the actual dirt.
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wesley_grant331mo ago
How often do we blame the trim before checking the feed bag? I was pretty sure it was all about angles and balance until a similar case with a foundered pony. Swapping his sweet feed for a low sugar option did more than six months of corrective shoeing. Makes you question the whole approach.
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