Kentucky Adopts Toe Grab Limitation Model Rule Change; Process to Ratify Begins

Lisa Underwood, executive director of the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission, confirmed tonight that her agency today announced that they would adopt the model rule proposed by the Grayson Jockey Club Foundation's Thoroughbred Safety Committee and significantly add to the language describing how horses may be shod for racing and training on all types of racing surfaces in the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

On June 17, the Committee issued a model rule suggestion to the individual state racing jurisdictions around the country.

The recommendation calls for :

1) An immediate ban on toe grabs other than 2-millimeter wear plates, turn downs, jar caulks, stickers and any other traction devices worn on the front shoes of Thoroughbred horses while racing or training on all racing surfaces.

2) The Association of Racing Commissioners’ International (RCI) and all North American racing authorities to implement this ban by rule as soon as possible, but no later than December 31, 2008, and for all racetracks to consider immediately implementing this ban by “house rule” in the interim.

We all know that most of those adaptations are worn on hind shoes, but this does clarify the previous model rule change suggestion, which called for a ban on toe grabs higher than four millimeters.

The new rule sounds like it would limit horses to wearing flat plates in front.

Hoofcare and Lameness will host a forum on the topic of racehorse shoeing regulations on Tuesday, August 5, 2008 as part of our "Hoofcare@Saratoga" event series. Come and meet Bill Casner of Winstar Farms, chairman of the Grayson Jockey club's Welfare and Safety Summit's Shoeing Committee, and hear farrier instructor Mitch Taylor, who will present new research conducted by the Welfare and Safety Summit (WSS), and get real-world insights from Kentucky Thoroughbred shoer Steve Norman. Introductory lecture about artificial surfaces will be by the "mad genius" trainer, Michael Dickinson of Fair Hill, Maryland and Tapeta. Other speakers and participants will be announced.

All in the horseshoeing and racing worlds are welcome to attend...and it might be a good idea, given these new rule changes. Watch this blog for more news about this important event, or send an email to Saratoga@hoofcare.com to get on our email notification list for the Hoofcare@Saratoga series.

Photos for this post courtesy of Dan Burke of FPD, distributors of Kerckhaert shoes in the USA. Thank you!

Strasser Trimmer's Conviction on Cruelty Charges in England Loosened on Appeal

Joanne Kowalski (left) with Hiltrud Strasser DVM outside a British courthouse during Ms. Kowalski's first trial for cruelty by means of radically trimming the hooves of a foundered pony. An appeals court lessened charges against the trimmer.

Amazing news from England today. A hoof trimmer who worked on a foundered pony following instructions from German veterinarian Hiltrud Strasser has had her conviction and sentence softened considerably.

Josephine Kowalski had been convicted of cruelty and of intentionally not seeking veterinary care that might have spared the pony some pain. She had been charged with 100 hours of community service and 10,000 pounds (about $20,000) in restitution.

Kowalski appealed and, after serving 30 hours of community service, was cleared of charges in a British appeals court, although she still appears to have been reprimanded for not seeking a veterinarian to medicate the pony.

This story is painful to read, but if you would like to, here's a link to the British newspaper.

Is the Biggest Horse Around Here the Biggest in the World?

Shoeless or shod, New Hampshire's "Tex" is pretty big. But is he big enough? (Concord Monitor photo)

To make it into the Guinness Book of World Records, a Belgian pulling horse named Tex had to have his shoes pulled. Farrier Rick Sharp pulled the shoes for an official measuring ceremony recently. Guinness requires that the horse be measured both with and without shoes.

According to the Concord Monitor newspaper, the six-year-old Belgian stands about 7 feet, 6 inches from hoof to head and weighs 2,450 pounds. This hoof is ten inches across, according to the article.

Tex is trying to tower over Radar, a Belgian in Texas who currently holds the Guinness honors, according to the newspaper. It's not clear whether Guinness goes by the overall height of the horse or the actual hands at the withers. His owners are hoping he makes 20 hands.

Shire horses in Australia and England are also trying to claim the title.

You can see why Guinness requires the shoes to be pulled before a horse is measured. This is not Tex, but another very large Belgian pulling horse that I saw worked on at Rood and Riddle Equine Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky a few years ago. Tex is probably shod in a similar way for the competition season. This horse had laminitis, but farrier Aaron Gygax managed to get him sound enough to keep pulling. This horse was shod in a very low-tech way for a high-tech place like Rood and Riddle: Aaron made the horse's new shoes. In this photo, you see his old shoes. I think he could climb telephone poles, too.

Invitation: Join Hoofcare@Saratoga at Professionals' Preview Evening for the New RIDE ON Exhibit at the National Museum of Racing in Saratoga, NY

"Ride on! Rough-shod if need be; Smooth-shod if that will do,

but ride on! Ride on over all obstacles, and win the race! "--Charles Dickens

You are invited to a special preview night for professionals to RIDE ON!

Hoofcare@Saratoga, Hoofcare and Lameness Journal

and the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame
invite you to attend a special evening

--Tuesday, July 29, 2008--

at the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame
109 Union Avenue in Saratoga Springs, New York
(directly opposite the main entrance to the racetrack)

6:30 - 8:30 p.m. in the Hall of Fame Theater

Program highlights beginning at 6:30 p.m.:

Equine Laminitis Update
Research Update and Field Practice Notes by Donald Walsh DVM of the Animal Health Foundation. Dr Walsh will survey current research accomplishments and treatment innovations from research funded by AHF at the Australian Equine Laminitis Research Unit and other research centers. Dr. Walsh's work on behalf of laminitis research is featured in the RideOn! exhibit.

Followed by
Thoroughbred Hooves: The Inside Story
Professional anatomical specimen creator Allie Hayes of HorseScience and Horsescience.com will compare and contrast Thoroughbred feet with other breeds and share a haunting collection of the preserved feet and limbs of Thoroughbreds, including breakdown victims and laminitis sufferers. Allie's educational anatomical specimen are featured in the RideOn! exhibit.

Remarks and short presentations by Thoroughbred trainer and footing expert Michael Dickinson and Cornell vet school farrier professor Michael Wildenstein FWCF (Hons).

7:30 p.m.
Exhibit Viewing
Doors open for a private viewing of RIDE ON! The Museum's new exhibit on advancements in the health and soundness of racehorses. Enjoy the exhibit and share your observations and experiences with our special guest, curator of collections Beth Sheffer of the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame.

About the New Exhibit:
The new exhibit focuses on colic, leg fractures, breakdowns, hoof and limb anatomy and laminitis. Artifacts in the exhibit include shoes, braces, and hoof-related equipment handcrafted and provided or loaned by contributors and editors of Hoofcare and Lameness Journal. The main part of the Museum will be closed on Tuesday night but will be open on Tuesday afternoon and on Wednesday. Tuesday night attendees will be able to see the Hall of Fame and the Ride On! exhibit.

About Hoofcare@Saratoga's Plans for August:

Hoofcare and Lameness Journal will host four Tuesday events in Saratoga Springs during the 2008 summer race meet, beginning on Tuesday, July 29 at the Museum. Confirmed speakers for August 5, 12, and 19 include (in alphabetical order) Bill Casner, Michael Dickinson, Ian McKinlay, Steve Norman, Mick Peterson, Conny Svensson, Mitch Taylor, Michael Wildenstein and others to be announced.

The series is made possible by generous support from LIFE DATA LABS, makers of Farriers Formula, as well as the National Museum of Racing, the Grayson Jockey Club Foundation, the Animal Health Foundation and the Van Lennep Equestrian Center at Skidmore College.

The series is presented with the help of CCE Equine and Equilite, maker of Sore No More liniment products.

Hoofcare@Saratoga would not happen without two special friends of the hoof in Saratoga, Frieda Garrison and Jim Santore, and our friends at the wonderful Parting Irish Pub. Join us for one program, or come for them all. Events are free, thanks to our generous sponsors.

HOTEL ACCOMMODATIONS: For the July 29 event only, hotel rooms are available at the spectacular new Hampton Inn on Lake Avenue in downtown Saratoga (directly opposite the Parting Glass Pub) for $159 per night. Call for reservations: 518 584 2100. A special rate of $159 per night is available for the entire Hoofcare@Saratoga series at the Comfort Inn, conveniently located at Exit 15 on the edge of town. Call 518 587 6244. You must request the "Hoofcare" rate. $159 is a very reasonable price during the race meet.

Saratoga Springs is a few hours due north of New York City, and 30 or so minutes north of Albany, where the closest major airport is located. Home of the longest-running Thoroughbred racing season in America, the town is also alive with major Standardbred racing, polo, and all sorts of pleasure and sport horse activities.

For more information, please email saratoga@hoofcare.com

Reservations are not necessary but an RSVP would be appreciated for planning purposes at the Museum. Please email saratoga@hoofcare.com. Do NOT call the Museum or the Parting Glass.

Watch this blog for more announcements of Hoofcare@Saratoga events or call the Hoofcare and Lameness office: 978 281 3222. The office will be closed Monday through Wednesday during the Saratoga event series.

"We Lost Kevin": North Carolina farrier Kevin Fahey has died

Kevin Fahey was excited when Chris Pollitt's book came out in 1995. He grabbed the first copy from me and turned right to the heart bar shoe section. He probably never read anything else in the book. He was focused.

"We lost Kevin". That's what Danny Ward's message on my voice mail said. How could you lose Kevin Fahey, I wondered? You always knew when Kevin was around. Did he hike up a mountain? Did he get caught in a spiraling tangle of interstate interchanges somewhere or...did we "lose" him, in the most dreaded sort of a way?

It turns out the last one is what happened. Kevin Fahey, a.k.a. "Kev the Farrier", has died.

You probably don't think you know Kevin Fahey, and you'd be just like the rest of us, because he was a hard person to get to know. In a nutshell, he was a Boston-born Irishman with a distinguished background as a United States Marine. He tended to lock into ideas and people with an intensity that scared some people away. He left Boston one day to attend horseshoeing school at Donald Jones's North Carolina School of Horseshoeing...and he stayed in North Carolina for decades. But he never lost his Boston accent. That was how he talked and he was always going to talk that way.

Kevin showed up 31 years ago to help Danny Ward host his first big farrier event at his school in Martinsville, Virginia, and he came back 31 more times, making him the only person besides Danny to attend every event...and helping Danny grow the event into what people call "Woodstock for Farriers". It's the most fun time you can have, and Kevin helped make it that way.

When Kevin met laminitis expert farrier Burney Chapman in the 1980s, he locked into the heartbar shoe theory and the fact that, using it, he could help a lot of horses with laminitis. So that became his specialty. He only wanted to work on foundered horses. If you had a sound horse, you didn't need Kev. He also locked into a long, loyal friendship with Burney, and helped him when he was dying of brain cancer.

At some point, Kevin learned to make jewelry and he must have made hundreds and hundreds of horseshoe belt buckles in his spare time. He told me once that he would start out making other shoes, but somehow most of them turned into heart bars.

Kevin was a longtime veteran of Dr Ric Redden's Bluegrass Laminitis Symposiums, where he would sell his heart bar jewelry in the trade show and intensely study the disease that fascinated him so much.

Kevin had beaten cancer a few years ago, or so we all thought. But when it came back, and he was told that he only had a few months to live, Kevin did a very "Kevin" thing. And it would be the last Kevin thing he would do: He got behind the wheel of a camper, sick as he was, and he drove across the United States from his home in Colorado. He made a beeline for Martinsville, Virginia, the place he had gone back to time and time again in his life: to Danny Ward's horseshoeing school. My guess is that he didn't stop much along the way and he didn't look left or right. And Kevin Fahey didn't need a GPS.

Kevin made it to Danny's, but without much time to spare.

If you walk around a horse show or a racetrack or a farrier event and you see someone with a shiny horseshoe belt buckle, chances are you're looking right at Kevin. Especially if it's a heart bar.

Whenever you see him, say hello for me.

Do you have a favorite memory of Kevin? Are you wearing one of his belt buckles right now? Hit the comments button and leave a note to him and to his friends, or email it to fran@hoofcare.com and I'll make sure it is posted here.

Who's in Port Tonight?

Here's the web cam from our building, looking out over the docks. It updates every few minutes, so you can see what's going on here. The harbor has been very quiet this summer, as many of the pleasure boaters stay dockside rather than make too many trips to the gas dock. But you will see the working boats on the water. And if you visit the blog at night...you'll see a dark square.

There's a condensation spot between the layers of glass in the window, so it looks like there's a smudge on the image. (Sorry!)

Hoofcare Publishing's office is on a tumbledown old dock in the tumbledown old fishing port of Gloucester, Massachusetts, about 28 miles northeast of Boston. We like being tumbledown, for the most part, around here. If this place ever gets fixed up, we'd have to find a new office.

Visitors are always welcome, and we have quite a few each summer. Please call ahead if you are planning to be in the area (or already are), and bring your own lifejacket! Hope you like fish...

If you ever come to visit by sea, this is the Hoofcare neighborhoof; the office is in the reddish building on the left.

Dutch Study Uses Special Shoes to Analyze Gait in Water-Based Treadmill Therapy

Via press release from the Society for Experimental Biology. This research was presented today at the Society for Experimental Biology's Annual Meeting at Marseille, France.


A team of scientists from Wageningen University, led by Professor Johan van Leeuwen, has carried out studies both into the benefits of a method of equine rehabilitation. By using computer modeling and specialist horseshoes to measure acceleration, these investigations suggest that aqua-training rehabilitation is beneficial to horses due to lower impact accelerations.

Rehabilitation after equine joint and muscle injuries, including those of the back, shoulders and legs, now often involves 'aquatraining', whereby horses move in water-filled treadmills. Depending on the condition of the horse, different workloads can be obtained by regulating water level and walking velocity. Due to buoyancy, this treatment is currently thought to reduce weight-bearing forces, which can otherwise have detrimental effects on joints, but to date there has been a virtual absence of studies into the magnitude of these benefits.

Professor van Leeuwen's team has used special horseshoes to measure accelerations of horses undergoing aquatraining, as well as walking normally, which provide a good indication of the impact forces involved. "Our results, based on data from seven horses, show the accelerations are significantly lower during 'aquatic walking'," he asserts. "We will be carrying out further experiments to confirm these results, but at this stage, it appears that aquatraining may indeed be beneficial for rehabilitation after joint injury."

This work involved collaboration with the Department of Equine Sciences at Utrecht University, the Mary Anne McPhail Equine Performance Center at Michigan State University and the Dutch Equestrian Centre.

(end press release)

Here's a short video clip of a horse on an aqua treadmill. There are several units such as this one on the market, showing this video is not meant as an endorsement, nor do I know what manufacturer's treadmill was used in the Dutch study.

Irish Farrier Claims World Championship at Calgary Stampede

We were all betting on a kilt. Did the winner wear one? It's sort of hard to tell!

Paul Robinson from Northern Ireland is standing in front of about 20,000 cheering people right now in the rodeo arena at the Calgary Stampede, where he earned the title of 2008 World Champion after five days of fierce competition.

It's a little confusing, from this distance, because I know that Paul Robinson was on the Irish team at Stoneleigh last year, but Calgary has his residence listed as AYR, for Ayrshire, which is, of course, in Scotland. David Varini of Scotland was in second place, and hooray! for oldtimers, Grant Moon, representing Wales, was third!

Perhaps the biggest news is that five out of the top ten finishers were from the United States: (5) Jim Quick; (7) Bill Poor; (8) Chris Madrid; (9) Jake Engler; and (10) Troy Price.

If Paul Robinson really has switched over to the Scots, then Grant Moon was the only farrier in the Top Ten not from Scotland or the USA. You have to go all the way to 15th place, where you'll find Ireland's Paul Duddy, to find someone not from Scotland or the USA besides Grant.

Click here to see a photo of Paul with his $10,000 check for winning.

Click here to go through a gallery of many pages of photos from the competition. Just click on any thumbnail image to see a bigger view, but these are low-resolution proofs and not as sharp as you might like to see.

Congratulations to Paul! I bet the Guinness or perhaps the single-malt, depending on which country Paul Robinson is from this week, is flowing in Calgary tonight!

Calgary Stampede: Where the Competition is Hot This Weekend for Farriers from Around the World

Former World Champion David Wilson of Balmullo, Scotland has been the judge of the 2008 World Championship Blacksmiths Competition at the Calgary Stampede this week.

David, who is 71, was invited to judge for the fourth time in his career; no other farrier has judged the prestigious Calgary event so many times. He was the World Champion in 1985; I remember him on the stage in front of the entire rodeo audience receiving his award...dressed in a beautiful kilt.

The bronze sitting on David's anvil in the photo is the coveted trophy he won as World Champion at the Calgary Stampede.

According to an article in a Scottish newspaper last week, David has won 13 gold medals for draft horse shoemaking at the Royal Highland Show and has been show champion eight times, also receiving a special honor in 2005 to mark his 50th Highland Show. He also won the North American Challenge Cup Futurity in 1988. In 1983 Queen Elizabeth presented David with the British Empire Medal for services to farriery.

Word is that entries from Scotland were especially high this year, so there may be an entire flock of kilts on the stage tonight when the awards are presented.

Click here to read more about David Wilson, who will celebrate the 50th anniversary of his marriage to Mari this summer.

One person that David was judging in Calgary is Ben Yeager, who lives near Victoria, British Columbia. Ben is the current Canadian champion and was scheduled to compete in Calgary along with three teammates from the Vancouver area. They will also compete in the international team competition in England later in the summer.

Here's a little video clip from last year's Calgary Stampede shoeing events, courtesy of the Stampede:



I don't know for certain who the winner was tonight. I do know that former World Champion Grant Moon did come out of retirement and competed at Calgary this week.

Favorite Video: Elephant on a Trampoline

It's Sunday, it's hot, but for a few minutes, all my cares melted away while I watched this tiny bit of film. One of my all-time favorite videos, "7Tonnes2", is posted here for you, courtesy of the magic of YouTube.

Just click on the "play" icon (horizontal triangle) and you'll be as hypnotized as I was!

Kudos to creator/animator Nicolas Deveaux and Cube, the special effects studio in Paris who created this.

Feel free to believe that this is real. I do!