Insulin-Resistant Horses Sought for British Researcher's Study

Dr. Robert Eustace of the Laminitis Clinic in Wiltshire, England has developed a new feed supplement that he believes will be helpful to horses suffering from insulin-resistance and its complications of laminitis.

Dr Eustace writes:

"We are beginning a trial to evaluate the use of a feed supplement to control Metabolic Syndrome / Equine Cushing's Disease. Our preliminary results from animals at the Laminitis Clinic are very encouraging. The trial is conducted through your own veterinary surgeon and poses no risk to your animal.

"We pay for the laboratory fees to analyse two sets of blood samples taken, by your vet, at the beginning and end of the trial. We pay for the cost of the supplement during the 28 day trial period. You have to pay your vet's fees to visit and collect the samples. We give you, and your vet, a free gift for participating in the trial.

"We will be measuring endogenous ACTH, cortisol, insulin, glucose, NEFA and triglycerides from the samples you submit. These should give us an excellent profile of your animals energy metabolism.

"Dependant upon the results of the first blood sample we will let you know whether your animal is eligible for inclusion in the trial. If your animal's results indicate that it is developing Cushing's disease we will contact you and your vet to disucuss your options.

"So your first step is to discuss the trial with your veterinary surgeon. If you both agree to participation then please ask your vet to contact us on 01249-890784. We will then send your vet the necessary paperwork."

This study is only open to horses in Great Britain.

© 2008 Fran Jurga and Hoofcare Publishing. 

Oregon Farriers ID Wounded Horse by Its Shoes, Shooter Arrested

Note: if you read this blog in the email digest form, you will need to click here to go to the real Hoof Blog to watch this video .

KTVZ, an NBC affiliate in Oregon, has provided a video clip from their news last night that would make any amateur detective smile.

Like the rewarding finale of the wonderful 1980s film, "My Cousin Vinny", two Oregon farriers came forward this week and identified a highly publicized horse crime victim...by identifying its shoes.

For the past week, an emaciated, abandoned horse has been recovering from two gunshot wounds to its head at the Bend Equine Medical Center in Bend, Oregon. Hunters found the horse wandering in a mountainous area.

Legal authorities in Deschutes County set out to find the gunman, and to find the horse's owner. Could they be one and the same? A private citizen offered a reward. The skinny dark brown Arabian looked a lot like half the horses in the county, with few distinguishing characteristics. The vets scanned the horse, but he had not been microchipped.

There was one thing, though, and one thing only to go on: the anonymous horse was wearing shoes.

Who would care enough to pay to have a horse shod, and then abandon it, let alone shoot it?

Farriers Laura Felder and Kyle Deaver came forward and provided photographic evidence that the horse was wearing their shoes. Their shoeing business records identified the horse as one they had shod this summer for a children's camp.

Watch the video to see where this trail leads...and then put that digital camera to work recording the horses you own or work on in your business. Thanks to KTVZ for making the video clip available.

These farriers deserve a medal!

© 2008 Fran Jurga and Hoofcare Publishing. No use without permission. This article was originally posted on October 31, 2008 at www.hoofcare.blogspot.com

Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog is a between-issues news service for subscribers to Hoofcare and Lameness Journal. This blog may be read online or received via email through an automated delivery service.

To subscribe to Hoofcare and Lameness, please visit our main site, www.hoofcare.com, where many educational products and media related to equine lameness and hoof science can be found.

Questions or problems with this blog? Send email to blog@hoofcare.com.

Boo! Halloween Hoof Face in German Farrier Shop

There's nothing funny about a keratoma but German farrier Loic Entwistle couldn't resist the temptation to turn this hoof into a jack o' lantern. Or is it the face of a ghost that made this photo suggest Halloween?

It looks like this foot may be growing out after a keratoma (hornsaule in German) in the toe of the hoof wall was surgically removed, and was brought back to the hospital for a trim and clean-up of the wall defect. The veterinarian probably marked the hoof wall area to be cleaned up with a marker...and it became a face!

A keratoma is a benign or non-cancerous tumor made of horn. I think they are either more commonly found in Europe or they are more aggressive in removing them as European farrier textbooks always have lots of photos of keratomas and they even explain the different types based on where in the wall the tumor is located and describe the common shapes the tumors will take depending on location.

Even though a keratoma can reside uneventfully inside a horse's hoof wall for a long time, it can also sometimes grow large enough to press against soft tissue and/or the coffin bone, or cause chronic abscessing.

To learn more about keratomas, read "Hoof Wall Resection and Reconstruction for a Tubular Defect" by Andrew Poyntom FWCF in Hoofcare and Lameness #78, and the chapter on different types of keratomas in the book Hoof Problems by Rob Van Nassau, available from Hoofcare Books. (Click here to learn more about this book and order your copy.)

If you read German, another excellent treatise on keratomas is in Uwe Lukas's Gesunde Hufe-kein Zufall available from the German Equestrian Federation's online bookshop.

Many thanks to Loic Entwistle and his amazing photo library for the loan of this image.

Favorite Video: A Horseshoe Is Born

by Fran Jurga, originally published October 28, 2008 at www.hoofcare.blogspot.com.

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I remember the first time I ever set foot in a horseshoe factory. It was in Australia. Carl O'Dwyer was squiring me around. We were off to the races or something when he stopped by the factory (O'Dwyer Horseshoes). It didn't occur to him that I would want to see the factory part of the business. Then he couldn't get me out of there. I remember his shoes were made by young Irish girls wielding huge tongs. I took rolls and rolls of film and not a single photo captured what I felt I really saw in that place.

If you haven't ever seen a horseshoe assembly line, it's quite an operation. There are two popular ways to make horseshoes commercially. One is to drop-forge and the other is to turn. Drop-forging is the "American" style. Turning is the European style, as used by Kerckhaert and Werkman.

American horseshoers were in a real battle in the early 1980s. Many farriers felt that the "keg" (machinemade) shoes available to them just weren't good enough and there was a call for "real" farriers to handmake all their shoes if they cared about properly shoeing the horse. Then two things happened in 1985: The first was that the Carlson family took over the St Croix Forge horseshoe company in Minnesota and pledged to design and make a superior American-made shoe. Which, to everyone's amazement, they did.

The second thing was that a charming Frenchman named Jean-Claude Faure came to an American Farrier's convention with a turned shoe from his Faure factory in Europe. He walked around the convention in elegant clothing carrying shoes in the pockets of his suit jacket. He did not speak English. He would pull a shoe from his pocket and ask a farrier to hold it, to look at it. For most of them, it was the first time they had seen a turned shoe or any shoe punched for E-head nails. (European shoes typically use European e-head nails; American shoes are punched to fit City head nails, but that's another story.)

While the farrier politely looked at the shoe and peered through those big nail holes, the gallant Mr. Faure grinned at them and said the two words he had learned in English, "You like?" in a hopeful voice.

Leading farrier Bruce Daniels agreed to be Faure's dealer in the USA. Kerckhaert was right there and Werkman not far behind. Farrier conventions became international festivals, just as now we have the slick Italian designer aluminums and the Chinese and Malaysian imports from Asia.

In 1985, the European shoes were a revelation; they had clips built into the shoes. They came in lefts and rights and fronts and hinds, with toe clips or side clips: an inventory nightmare. And they fit the new wave of big-footed European warmbloods that were becoming popular in America. St Croix geared up and answered the Euro challenge, inspiring improvements from all US shoe manufacturers. The golden age of horseshoe manufacturing dawned.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

In this clip you see snippets of the line at the Werkman factory in Holland. Most manufacturers are not eager to show their lines and equipment, and you will note that Werkman does not show the process in order, and you do not get to see how they make the clips, one of the steps that has always mystified me.

Two elements are missing from this video: the heat and the noise. Both are off the charts, if Werkman's factory is like others. But this video is a window into the world of horseshoes before they touch human hands, all with the matching mirror of a horse's hoof in mind.

Thanks to Werkman for this video clip; the horses have never had it so good.

© Fran Jurga and Hoofcare Publishing. No use without permission. Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog is a between-issues news service for subscribers to Hoofcare and Lameness Journal. This blog may be read online or received via a daily email through an automated delivery service.

To subscribe to Hoofcare and Lameness, please visit our main site, www.hoofcare.com, where many educational products and media related to equine lameness and hoof science can be found.

Questions or problems with this blog? Send email to blog@hoofcare.com.

Comments to individual posts are welcome; please click on the comment icon at the bottom of the post. Comments are moderated.

A Closer Look at the Pro-Ride Racing Surface

Pro-Ride Racing Surface, originally uploaded by Rock and Racehorses.

Sarah Andrew is on hand at Santa Anita for the Breeders Cup and shows this view of the Pro-Ride artificial surface. According to one report, the footing reached a temperature of 145 degrees today in the California heat. In this photo, which was surely shot in the early morning, you can see some material sticking to the horses' feet and shoes.

What's next, teflon non-stick horseshoes? Spraying the feet with Pam?

Thanks, Sarah!

Champion Australian Jockey Takes Off His Shoeing Apron to Don Silks

There's something about fillies: Australian jockey (and farrier) Glen Boss has been one of the world's leading money-winning jockeys in recent years. He rode to victory in three consecutive Melbourne Cups aboard superstar mare Makybe Diva. This weekend he rides favorite Samantha Miss in the $3 million Cox Plate.

As America gears up for the Breeders Cup championship races this week, all eyes in Australia will be on the $3 Million Cox Plate to be run at Mooney Valley. In the jockeys' room, however, one pair of eyes will be solemnly focused on the scales.

Remember those gut-wrenching passages in Laura Hillenbrand's Seabiscuit as the jockey tried to come back from injuries and keep his weight down, all at the same time? I remember a joke told by one of the Thoroughbred trainers about flying cross-country with a jockey. The trainer felt guilty eating the airline's peanuts. The jockey took one, and cut it into quarters...and rationed it to last the flight.

Now it's my turn to remember. I was at a farrier convention. The awards banquet followed a buffet dinner. I wasn't in a hurry to eat so I lingered by the bar. Then I heard loud grumbling. The line was halfway through...and the food was gone. All of it.

There couldn't be two people with different eating agendas than a jockey and a horseshoer.

Today, meet a man who is both.

Australian champion jockey Glen Boss has been trying to make the weight so he can ride the favorite--a young filly running against colts--in this weekend's Cox Plate. He'll be riding for his friend, the trainer, but under Australian riding terms, he needed to get his weight down to just (gulp) 47 kilos (103.4 pounds). He would need to lose more than 10 pounds from a body that already was so lean you can't pinch him.

Glen's effort has been poignantly documented in photos by an Australian newspaper. What attracted my attention was seeing a closeup of a jockey's head with the words "Fighting Farrier" stitched into a watch cap.

Yes, Glen Boss used boxing as one of his main exercise routines to drop the pounds. His trainer and advisor was fellow farrier and former Australian welterweight champion Julian Holland. According to the story, they met when shoeing in the Gold Coast region of Australia 20 years ago. Boss was able to put his race winnings to use and sponsor Holland. This year, Holland is returning the favor and training Boss to ride in one of the world's richest races.

The campaign for Holland's title would dub him "The Fighting Farrier" forevermore in Australian boxing history and that moniker certainly fits Boss now, as he emphasis shifts from fighting in the ring to fighting the scale.

Read the full story by clicking here. And stay tuned tomorrow to find out how Samantha Miss did in the Cox Plate.

Looking ahead a few weeks: Glen Boss will try to equal the record of consecutive Melbourne Cup wins when he rides Profound Beauty in that race for Euro trainer Dermot Weld. The race, run at Flemington Racecourse outside Melbourne in Victoria, is worth $5.5 million.

Or at least Glen Boss hopes to: ironically, the star filly who is willing to take on the colts in Australia's richest race is questionably sound with a bruised foot. Maybe Boss can take a look.

Glen Boss, left, spars in the ring with fellow farrier Julian Holland, former welterweight champion boxer of Australia, whose quest for that title was sponsored by Boss's race winnings.

Be sure to visit the photo gallery documenting what he's going through to make the weight. Click here to see 28 photos of a determined man.

Photos credit for this blog post: www.couriermail.com.au

© Fran Jurga and Hoofcare Publishing. This post was originally published on 23 October 2008 at http://www.hoofcare.blogspot.com.