Corrective Shoeing For The Sports Horse

Neal Tredinnick is an Olympic Team and Individual Gold Medalist Show Jumping Farrier originating from the UK, he holds the DIPWCF and Accredited Training Farrier Status from the Hereford School of Farriery in the UK. Neal operates his farrier business from Wellington Florida and has multiple high-profile clients such as Kent Farrington, Ben Maher, Leslie Howard Burr, Jad Dana, Alberto Michan to name a few. Neal now finds himself working alongside some of the most well-respected vets in the industry and today we have asked him to discuss the concept of corrective shoeing in the sports horse.

that leads a client to believe the farrier is doing something more than a regular basic set of shoes. The term ‘corrective’ implies that the farrier is ‘correcting’ something that is incorrect, for an example a conformation issue or a previous shoeing that has caused issues to the horse in some respect. In real terms, in the competitive horse Neal would argue that every trim, every set, every pair is ‘corrective’, it isn’t an illusive stand-alone concept that differs from a regular visit from the farrier. If the farrier isn’t ‘correcting’ the hooves and supporting the horse to do what it needs to do, then the job isn’t being done well enough. Farriery has moved on light years from the generation where the job only involved banging on 4 shoes, occasionally a vet might get involved and take some x rays and things would be adjusted accordingly, nowadays everything is being scrutinized down to the final hair on the leg. We are more educated, we now know how important limb alignment is, we know the effects of unbalanced hooves and the damage that can be done, we have technology to assist us but at the end of the day its up to the farrier to do as good as job possible to avoid future injury and shortening the competitive life of our equine athletes.

Every time we trim the horse, be it to remain barefoot or for the hoof to be prepared for shoes we correct the balance of the foot. A horse may be predisposed to growing unbalanced, it may have a conformation issue that causes the hoof to grow higher on one side or the other. It may not have been trimmed balanced in previous times which now needs correcting. Everything a highly skilled farrier does is ‘corrective’, doing what they can within safe parameters to enable that horse to be as balanced and comfortable as they possibly can which in turn leads to increased positive performance. Corrective shoeing doesn’t have to mean putting the most complicated set of shoes on a horse ever seen to man, it doesn’t mean creating something that looks worthy of space travel to nail to the hoof. In most cases where Neal has had to assist in horses that have had a drop in performance or soundness the best remedy has been to take it back to basics. It doesn’t matter if the horse has the most expensive set of shoes known to man with pads, rockers, glue, silicone, none of this is worth anything if the horse’s hooves were not balanced and symmetrical when they were trimmed. I take time to watch horses move, I like to get to know them, I know how my client’s horses hooves grow, I know their conformation issues and how they compensate and as a team we make the best plan possible to allow the horse to move as freely and comfortably as possible. Sometimes that means going back to basics! I recently visited a new client; she had a prized jumper horse and also a non competitive kids pony that was ridden a couple of times a week. The jumping horse had a multitude of things going on with her feet and had every item possibly available from the farrier store on its hooves, the set of shoes must have cost the equivalent of an all-inclusive vacation. Needless to say, the horse was lame, and the vet had intervened, and I got called to see if I could help. We took off everything, trimmed the hooves balanced and shod the horse is a simple set of regular shoes. The horse trotted up sound and 6 months later the horse is still sound. The most shocking part of this experience was when the owner took the pony out of his stall to be shod, the pony had exactly the same phafanial on as the jumping horse. When I asked why this pony was shod like this the owner said she was told it needed all of theses things!! The pony now has a simple pair of front shoes and is happily trail riding a couple of times a week. What’s corrective shoeing in this case? All the materials that typically would be deemed to be required for ‘corrective’ shoeing? Or the correct shoeing that was required to correct the ‘corrective’ shoeing? www.EliteEquestrianMagazine.com