Electric fencing is your friend as it allows you to be flexible with where you make grazing areas or tracks and is perfect for strip grazing.Ī grazing muzzle is another way to limit grass intake but is not ideal. Products such as ‘crusher dust’ – the fine gravel left after making coarser gravel are also useful.Įven sand can be better than nothing, and pea gravel is ideal if you can afford it.Ī well-drained riding arena can also double as a dry area if nothing else is available.Įating too much grass can be solved by using a track or central point system or even a combination of the two. This can change the PH sufficiently to promote healing and continued hoof health. If possible use a ‘blue metal’ type of gravel. Try to surface boggy lanes and gateways with a permeable liner covered with gravel and rocks so they don’t disappear into the mud. Providing a dry pad of gravel can help hooves in winter. The best solution is to have a dry standing area that is central or several of them in resting places around a ‘track’ system. Neither will turning them out with access to high sugar grasses 24/7! Keeping your horse in a wet and constantly muddy area will not assist hoof health. You can also learn to balance your horse’s diet by doing a course yourself – I can highly recommend those offered by Dr Eleanor Kellon here. Use a qualified equine nutritionist or mineral mixes developed by one that is independent and well respected. Ideally, this mix will replace what’s missing from a hay/pasture analysis, but if you’re feeding hay from different sources, or your pasture is changing constantly, then a mineral mix developed from a broad range of data collected from your general area is the next best option. The best way to achieve quality hooves is to feed a balanced mineral mix that supports the production of sound hoof material. The hooves are a mirror to the horse’s overall health, reflecting deficiencies and excesses (such as sugars causing sub-clinical or full laminitis).Ī healthy hoof will have a straight wall with very few ‘hoof rings’ that indicate some sort of stress or a change in the diet. Straight hoof walls with minimal hoof rings indicate a sound healthy hoof. Repeat on a weekly basis, or as soon as you see the packing has come out of the hole.Ĭontinue treatment until the seedy toe has grown out which may take months and several trims. To keep the area clean it’s best to pack the hole with either cotton wool or beeswax. Treat itīefore applying any treatment, it’s best to soak the hoof in an anti-fungal solution such as apple cider vinegar (diluted 50/50 with water) or Nappy wash (contains sodium hypochlorite) – see this article for more info.Īfter the initial soaking for 20-30 mins, it’s best to let the hoof air dry in a clean environment before applying a treatment such as Bug Buster – an antimicrobial preparation that has a long-lasting effect. Others prefer to dig out the muck and then pack it to keep the treatment in and dirt out. Some like to resect the area to remove all the infected material which may be necessary for healing a large hole. Your hoof care provider will know how far to go with digging out the affected material (black crumbly hoof wall). Clean the hole made by seedy toe to get rid of the ‘crumbly’ black residue. Trimming removes lever forces on the hoof wall that can cause further cracking or splitting started by a seedy toe infection, allowing it to take hold. Seedy toe often occurs more frequently in overgrown hooves. Here’s what I found works best: Trim the hoof In the process of healing their hooves, I discovered there is a quick fix to kick-start the healing, but also a long-term solution to keep it at bay. That was before I refined their diet and introduced a balanced custom mineral mix which changed everything. Seedy toe (also called white line disease) used to be the one on-going issue all my horses had many years ago. A deep external crack is a sure sign of seedy toe infecting the white line.
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