Champion Desert Orchid Has Died

I'd like to write a tribute to Desert Orchid, the great steeplechaser of modern times, who died in England this weekend except that The Sunday Times' obit is such a fine piece of writing, I'd like to just post a few lines of it here. If you don't know who Dessie is/was, you missed a great one. From the Times, no author listed:

(begin quote) Reading The Catcher In The Rye, many Britons nod instinctively when Holden Caulfield remarks: “A horse is at least human, for God’s sake.”

This might explain, to bemused foreigners, why today’s newspapers are so brimming with news of the death of the great steeplechaser Desert Orchid.

Every decade or so, in a process almost as mystical as the emergence of a new pope, the name of a thoroughbred escapes the cloistered world of racetrack bookies, and of punters hunched in betting shops tearing up betting slips scrawled with the names of nags so slow that they were beaten to the finishing line by the groundsman cutting the turf for the next meeting, to become as familiar to the general public as Lester Piggott’s tax returns.

Desert Orchid belonged to this elite stable, which stretches from Arkle — reckoned to be the greatest steeplechaser of all time — through Nijinsky, the last horse to win the English Triple Crown, Red Rum, the only one to win the Grand National three times, Shergar, the kidnapped winner of the 1981 Derby, and the explosively fast Dancing Brave, to Best Mate, the first steeplechaser since Arkle to bag three successive Cheltenham Gold Cup wins.

These are names as well known to most Britons as Silver, the Lone Ranger’s mount, Roy Rogers’ Trigger or Boxer, from Orwell’s Animal Farm.

We have measured out our lives in great horses. There is now a vacancy. (end quote)

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,542-2452393,00.html

"Castaway" Day for Barbaro at New Bolton Center

KENNETT SQUARE, PA-- Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro’s right hind leg cast was removed today, according to his medical team. “Barbaro was placed under general anesthesia for the cast removal,” said Dr. Dean W. Richardson, Chief of Surgery. “In addition, his foot was trimmed and a new shoe glued on. A padded bandage with plastic and fiberglass splints was placed on his lower limb for support.”

Barbaro's lower right hind leg had been in a cast since surgery at Penn’s George D. Widener Hospital following his accident at the Preakness on May 20. “He had a perfect pool recovery and immediately stood; he walked easily back to his stall,” said Dr. Richardson. “He used all of his legs quite well.”

Barbaro’s left hind foot, which had laminitis, was also fully evaluated while he was under anesthesia. “There are no signs of new problems with that foot, but the hoof needs several more months of growth before we will know how much foot structure and function will be recovered," said Dr. Richardson.

(This news report was provided by the University of Pennsylvania.)

Laura Florence Has Left New Bolton Center

Resident farrier and researcher Laura Florence has resigned her post at the University of Pennsylvania’s New Bolton Center after almost five years of service there. Laura reports that she will now pursue a private consulting practice under the name of Holistic Hoofcare, and that she plans to stay in the Philadelphia area.

“(My) impetus is to concentrate more on therapeutic benefits of trimming/barefoot. Though I won't be ruling out shoeing...it will not be a focus,” Florence predicted by email.

An interesting part of Laura’s work has been research on the hoof growth and adaptation of a herd of left-alone ponies at New Bolton Center with behaviorist Dr. Sue McDonnell. Florence’s research will be published soon in Equine Veterinary Journal; watch for the title “Hoof growth and wear of semi-feral ponies during an annual summer 'self-trimming' period”.

Laura's official title was Special Research Fellow of the Dorothy Russell Havemeyer Foundation for 2004–2006. To quote from the UPenn web site: "This appointment supports ongoing research of the hoof growth and natural trim cycle of the semi-feral equid. The goal of the study is to systematically describe equine hoof growth and wear characteristics under natural environmental and social conditions, using the semi-feral herd at New Bolton Center as one model."

Laura also played a key role in the 2nd International Equine Conference on Laminitis and Diseases of the Foot in Palm Beach.

We hope that Laura Florence will continue to provide positive input to Hoofcare & Lameness Journal.

"Glue-y Ville" Hosts Breeders Cup: Shoes Stay On

Photo: Therapist Diane Volz of Louisville, a subscriber to Hoofcare & Lameness Journal, helped at least 30 of the Breeders Cup entrees with bruised feet, sore backs, aching legs, and anxiety problems during the week leading up to the races. Photo by Fran Jurga, copyright Hoofcare Publishing.

Adrenalin, anyone? Today's Breeders Cup had thrills and spills and the hoof angles (pun intended) are still pouring in. The biggest story seems to be how many horses had their shoes glued on. But there's more...

First, let's talk about Round Pond and her heartwarming win of the Distaff being marred by the tragedy of the death of Pine Island and the breakdown of Fleet Indian. I am sure that those crashes are being replayed on the evening news tonight around the world. Just last May, Round Pond's trainer Michael Matz was watching from the stands at Pimlico when his star horse, Barbaro, stumbled to a halt on the track in front of him, his fetlock dangling.

But today, Matz was back in the winner's circle where he had stood with Barbaro after the colt's dramatic win of the Kentucky Derby in May. And he was looking over his shoulder at the horse ambulance. Did someone call the screenwriters' guild?

But Round Pond has a hoof story. According to the web site allaroundphilly.com, Round Pound sat out nearly five months this year because of hoof problems. Originally thought to be a foot bruise, the injury didn't clear up, so the filly was shipped to the podiatry unit at Rood & Riddle Equine Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, where she was treated by Hoofcare & Lameness Journal consulting editor Scott Morrison DVM and his staff.

"They figured out that Round Pond has very thinly soled feet, and the nails from a standard shoe tend to pinch her feet," explained Round Pond's owner, Delaware car dealer Rick Porter, in the Philadelphia newspaper article. "The answer was to use glue-on shoes, which she used in the Beldame and will wear for the Breeders' Cup."

To read more about Round Pond's roundabout trip to the Breeders Cup, visit http://www.allaroundphilly.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=17421114&BRD=1671&PAG=461&dept_id=17782&rfi=6

Round Pond, by the way, is a real place; it is one of my favorite little Muscongus Bay towns on the coast of Maine.

Also dipping into the glue were three top horses wearing the Burns Polyflex shoe (http://www.burnspolyflex.com)

The filly Malibu Mint recently set a Polytrack record at Keeneland in Lexington, KY wearing the shoes; she didn't do quite so well against the colts in the Breeders Cup Sprint today. Gary Mandella's Silent Name in the Mile also wore the shoes, as did Brother Derek, trained by Dan Hendricks, who led for about half of the $5 Million Breeders Cup Classic (powered by Dodge) before fading.

Curtis and Diane Burns currently make the wire-cored urethane shoes themselves; scroll down for a more detailed article about the shoes, deeper in this blog; you can also click on the August archive link button in the right hand column.

Brother Derek, by the way, is usually shoeless; Hendricks prefers to train the colt barefoot. He had farrier/inventor Curtis Burns glue the see-through shoes onto the colt before the Goodwood at Santa Anita, where the horse ran second to Lava Man. The horse continued to train in the shoes, shipped east, and ran in them today.

I haven't checked in with my friends Dan Burke from Farrier Product Distribution and Steve Norman, ace shoer at Churchill to see what sorts of special shoes they whipped up, or saw whipped up, but I will update this story when I hear from Dan. He's in Virginia at Danny Ward's big farrier clinic today--along with everyone else in the farrier world!

Not to be outdone by the farriers, Hoofcare & Lameness subscribers Mimi Porter and Diane Volz have been hard at work all week providing therapy to the horses at Churchill. According to a news story on businesswire.com, Diane has used the Equitonic massager on 30 horses bound for the Cup races today. Since she provides therapy for the Todd Pletcher stable, that would be 17 horses right there. I know Diane will be heartbroken by the injury to Pletcher's Fleet Indian, but it sounds like the filly will recover.

AAEP On Call veterinarians Wayne McIlwraith and Larry Bramlage had a busy day. ESPN seemed to keep a bit more distance from the tragedy than the network sports broadcast team at the Preakness.

(An amazing fact from today's races is that trainer Todd Pletcher sent out 17 horses and did not win a single race. But he scored enough placings to take home almost $2 million in purse money, according to the Louisville Courier-Journal. Without winning a race. Think about it.)

Finally, the day ended with South American superstar Invasor running down the favorite Bernardini. I don't know what that horse had on his feet, but they worked just fine. I know a little bit about Invasor. Every time I saw him at Saratoga this summer he was sulking in his stall, but his existence here is thanks to Hoofcare & Lameness friend Hassan bin Ali, endurance racing trainer for Sheik Hamdan al Maktoum, and a former bloodstock agent for Sheik Hamdan's Shadwell Stud.

Hassan, who is an avid follower of shoeing technology innovations, popped in here one day last August in the middle of a heat wave, which was like a cold day in Dubai. He showed me videos on his cell phone and camera; he came here straight from Uruguay, where he had been buying endurance horses. To show off the sale horses, they galloped them on a paved road for miles, with Hassan following in a car with the windshield wipers flapping back and forth. It was quite a video.

I made a comment about road founder and he laughed. "Oh, and I bought a racehorse, too, while I was down there," he added nonchalantly. "The champion of Uruguay. I think maybe he will win the Breeders Cup."

The next time I saw Hassan was in the winner's circle after the Whitney at Saratoga. And today his impulse buy for the Sheikh won not just a Breeders Cup race, but THE Breeders Cup race, the Classic.

One of the saddest things about the end of the Breeders Cup, after the death of Pine Island, is that so many of the horses will not ship back to Belmont and Santa Anita, or even to Florida. They'll just take a 90-minute van ride to Lexington and their racing shoes will be pulled off forever as they start new careers in the breeding shed and broodmare band.

It was great to see older horse Better Talk Now charge up to second place in the Turf; sadly, 7-year-old Perfect Drift didn't do much in the Classic.

I'd like give a big thanks to all of the horses, and to the people who have worked so hard all year to keep them sound. This year had many fewer horses lost in the final weeks because of foot lameness. Is it the glue? Is it training on the Polytrack at Keeneland? Was it the wet summer up here in the North? I don't know, but racing has been great fun to follow this year, and the fact that they all have four feet means that the odds of me finding a story to tell are probably better than that I will ever cash a winning ticket.

And I wouldn't have it any other way.

Readers: if you have hoof-related stories from today's Breeders Cup, please send an email to fran@hoofcare.com and I'll share it!

This and all content on the Hoof Blog copyright 2006 Hoofcare Publishing. No use without permission. The Hoof Blog is created by Fran Jurga as an adjunct to Hoofcare & Lameness: Journal of Equine Foot Science. . For more information or to subscribe, please visit www.hoofcare.com or call 978 281 3222 in the USA.

Natural Balance Farrier School to Open in New England in 2007

Northern Maine Community College in Presque Isle, Maine is the latest college to launch a new farrier program. The first class will be offered in the summer of 2007, with farrier Bob Solman of Caribou as instructor. The new school will adhere to the Natural Balance theory of trimming and shoeing and will the third farrier school in the United States (that I can validate) to offer an exclusively Natural Balance approach to farrier education.

In an interview with Hoofcare & Lameness on November 3rd, Solman said that the course will have three modules: two weeks of trimming, four weeks of shoeing, and four weeks of advanced shoeing. Bob was one of the first group of farriers to pass the new Natural Balance certification testing process this summer.

While Bob says that the program has been approved, the college's web site says it is looking for horses for the students to shoe.

Keep an eye on http://www.nmcc.edu/farrier.php for more details.

French Researchers Study the Egg Bar Shoe

The fashionable use of the egg-bar shoe on performance may have peaked, but arguments over how and if the shoe helps performance horses or hurts them will go on and on and on.

Professor Jean-Marie Denoix of France has long been a stickler about the use of egg bars depending on if the horse is laid up or competing and, if competing or turned out, what surface the horse is working on.

We now have a new report from the vet school at Alfort in Paris, conducted by Denoix, with Henry Chateau and Christine Degueurce. They took the egg bar out of the hard force-plate track, which is how the shoe was tested by Alan Wilson's Motion and Locomotion Laboratory at the Royal Veterinary College in England. The French group tested it in sand.

Alas, the report does not specify if steel or aluminum was used, and what the thickness and width of the bar was. We will try to obtain that information. It is also not known if they measured both front and hind effects of egg bars. The data published is only on the front feet.

They used four sound horses and found that, compared to normal shoes, the heels really did sink less into the sand with the egg bars and that the horses' heels were raised at mid-stance phase, compared to plain shoes. Maximal flexion of the coffin and pastern joints was increased and extension of the coffin joint at heel-off (aka "breakover") was reduced.

In three-dimensional analysis, the egg bar affected the medial quarter's sinking into the ground.

Based on these findings, Denoix's group felt justified in recommending egg bar shoes for horses working in soft footing who might benefit from these changes in joint angles or who would work better moving more "over" than "into" soft footing.