Another Country Heard From: Meet the Hooves of Japan's Casino Drive

Casino Drive's Feet, originally uploaded by Rock and Racehorses.

Racing is full of "What ifs" and there were probably echoing off Casino Drive's stall walls when Big Brown failed to fire a week ago in the Belmont Stakes.

Casino Drive was visiting from Japan with the sole purpose of stealing the Belmont from Big Brown. He certainly stole the Peter Pan in a very dramatic run for the finish line a few weeks earlier, but a bruised foot caused his connections to be cautious and skip the Belmont instead of poking and prodding and poulticing and patching the colt's foot.

Meanwhile, my friend Sarah Andrew (a.k.a. "Rock and Racehorses") tracked the poor horse down to take photos of his feet for this blog. I wonder what the Japanese team thought of her pointing the camera not at his handsome head but at his feet and knees?

Casino Drive is out of the same mare who foaled the winners of the 2006 and 2007 Belmont Stakes. What if....

(Casino drive and his long feet have gone back to Japan, promising to return for November's Breeders Cup, which will be raced on an artificial track surface for the first time. I hope he can stay sound and healthy and show up with his race face--and feet--on.)

Can someone tell me about this shoe?

My friend Xavier took this photo...it was on a display board and is not an antique shoe out of a museum.

I have a theory, what's yours?

And can someone explain why and when you'd want to double-fuller like that? It would be a good forging test to get the arcs parallel; this farrier did a good job. A smooth arc on a single crease is an art...but parallel ones?

Maybe one of the British farriers can tell us if there is a name for double fullering. However, this is not a British shoe, as far as I know.

Leaving a comment to explain your theory about this shoe is easy: scroll to the bottom of this post and click on the word "Comments". A new window will open. Type your comment in the box on the left. On the right, click on "name/url" and a little box drops down. (Or at least it does on my Mac with a Firefox browser.) Type your name or nickname in the box marked "name".

Then hit either "preview" to look over what you typed in the big box, followed by "publish comment". And you're done!

If that's too much to ask, you can email your comment to me and I will post it for you.

If you have a Google or Gmail account and are signed in, you can ask the blog to automatically email other comments about this shoe to you so you can respond to people who respond to you.

The Hoof Blog has a new policy of moderating comments, by the way, since some people have been getting a little edgy and maybe a little too presumptuous of my laissez-faire attitude, so it may take a little while before your comment shows up on the blog until I approve it.

And if you don't like horseshoes, please don't feel obliged to preach to those who do. Just wait til there is a subject you do like. Let's accentuate the positive, my friends. There's plenty of hoof to go around.

Big Brown's Trainer Called to Testify Before Congressional Investigative Committee

The New York Times is reporting this morning that Rick Dutrow, the trainer of Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner Big Brown, will testify before the United States Congress next Thursday when a special House of Representatives Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection hearing on “Breeding, Drugs, and Breakdowns: The State of Thoroughbred Horseracing and the Welfare of the Thoroughbred Racehorse” will be held.

The Subcommittee is investigating the reasons for the deaths of so many racehorses recently, spurred by the double-breakdown of the filly Eight Belles who finished second in the Kentucky Derby and was euthanized on the track.

Others who will testify, according to the New York Times, are Richard Shapiro, the chairman of the California Horse Racing Board; Arthur Hancock III, the owner of Stone Farm outside Lexington, Ky.; Jess Jackson, the owner of Stonestreet Stables; Randy Moss, the ESPN analyst; Alan Marzelli, president of the Jockey Club; and the trainer Jack Van Berg.

Additional witnesses may include Susan Stover, the director of a veterinary research laboratory at the University of California at Davis; Larry Soma, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s New Bolton Center; Dr. Mary Scollay, the Florida state veterinarian who has been hired as the equine medical director of the Kentucky Horse Racing Authority; Dr. Wayne McIlwraith of the College of Veterinary Medicine at Colorado State; and Alex Waldrop, the chief executive of the National Thoroughbred Racing Association.

Dutrow is likely to face questions about the use of steroids in racehorses. He recently admitted that Big Brown, like all his horses, was given monthly injections of a steroid called Winstrol. Dutrow reportedly said he didn’t know what the drug was or what it did. He told the Times that he might take his veterinarian to the hearing with him.

Let’s hope the hearings are on C-Span. Audio web-casting will be available if you have a Windows Media Player installed in your computer.

MSNBC Salutes Molly, the Three-Legged, Dog-Bitten, Katrina-Surviving Wonder Pony!

To launch the video, just click on the "play" icon. It will play right in the blog window.

As marketer of the book MOLLY THE PONY, Hoofcare and Lameness is tuned in to the story of the spunky little New Orleans pony who survived being abandoned in a collapsed barn during Katrina, didn't die after an attack by pitbulls, and finally, made a huge comeback from rare amputation surgery that left her hobbling around the bayou on three legs.

Molly has a safe new home now, and a new job in life as a therapy pony visiting hospitals and schools.

And we have a hit book on our hands!

Enjoy this little video about Molly, and thanks to everyone out there who helps ponies and horses like her! Molly is giving back a lot to the world that saved her life, more than once.

Thanks also to the Soft Ride hoof boot company, for their donation of a support boot for her "good" front leg. So far, Molly has not developed laminitis in the 18 months since her surgery, but we do want to keep it that way. Donations of products and techniques to keep her comfy or offer support are most welcome; Molly now has her own tax-deductible charity, called "Kids and Ponies".

To order a copy of Molly's book, go to Molly's web page on hoofcare.com.

Quarter Crack Repair: The Lost History of Hoof Patches

This story was updated in 2022

This is an example of a quarter crack repair by lacing technique, using stainless steel sutures threaded through tiny and shallow guide holes drilled with a very fine drill bit. The idea is not to shut the crack but to hold it open and stabilize it so that any infection or "heat" can dissipate before a patch is applied. Quarter cracks have varying risks for infection and may or may not be associated with an abscess somewhere else under the hoof wall. The new complete hoof wall grows down from the hairline, much as you grow a new fingernail. (Ian McKinlay photo)

Did you know it’s been more than 50 years since the “invention” of the modern quarter crack patch?

Farriers have been stitching and clamping quarter cracks together for well over 100 years now, but a unique “modern” quarter crack patch was patented in 1964 by an enterprising Los Angeles racetrack horseshoer named William R. Bane. 

At first, Bane offered to patch horses for free, just to get the word out.  Bane's first patch was on the Thoroughbred Destructor, trained by John Nerud.

A horseshoer based at southern California tracks, Bane enjoyed early success with a champion Thoroughbred aptly named "Prove It." Once patched, Prove It won six stakes races in a row, including the Hollywood Gold Cup.

In January of 1964, the US Patent Office awarded him patent number 3118449, to protect his secret method for repairing cracked hooves of Thoroughbred and Standardbreds so they could race again--and win.

It was enough of a big deal to be written up as a headline story in the New York Times.

Bane’s plan had been to train others at racetracks around the country, much like a franchise, but he ended up spending a lot of time on airplanes because owners and trainers wanted him to personally patch their horses. 

Bane’s patented secret turned out to be to cover the cleaned crack with a synthetic rubber called Neolite, a material very popular in the early 1960s for rubber-soled shoes, which were quite a sensation at the time. 

In 1962, Bane was called east to work on Su Mac Lad, who at that time was the world’s all-time high-money winning trotter. It took Bane eight hours to patch that crack for trainer Stanley Dancer, but Su Mac Lad was training the next day and raced a week later. He went on to be United States Harness Horse of the Year, with a patched hoof. He raced an impressive 151 times in his life; Bane patched him six times. The 1960s were the heyday of harness racing in the United States, and Su Mac Lad is still revered for his racing record.

Bane charged $250 for his patches in 1962, plus his travel expenses.

The steps listed for Su Mac Lad’s eight-hour ordeal were:

1. remove some of the wall behind the crack
2. reshoe the horse;
3. apply the rubber;
4. apply plastic cement;
5. wrap with tape;
6. heat treatment for an unspecified time;
7. remove the tape;
8. finish the patch to conform to hoof wall contour.

Fiberglas eventually gained popularity over Bane's rubbery patch, and then in the 1990s, two-part polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) adhesives came along for rebuilding walls, shoring up weak heels, and covering cracks after they were dry.

According to newspaper reports of the day, Bane was also called in to patch Northern Dancer, who won the Kentucky Derby and Preakness while wearing a Bane patch.

But no horse is more associated with Bane--and with quarter cracks in general-- than the great Buckpasser, who sat out the 1966 Kentucky Derby and Preakness while newspapers chronicled his crack woes, and what Bill Bane thought and did. Or didn't do.

Eventually, Buckpasser came back to racing and won just about everything, with 15 consecutive victories, setting track records and earnings records as he went, in spite of a recurring crack.

Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner
Big Brown in 2008; his cracks had cracks.
(© Ian McKinlay  photo)

I should mention that 13 (by my count) of those victories where in the second half of 1966 alone. Many horses today may not have that many starts in a lifetime, let alone do it on a cracked foot.

Buckpasser was never actually patched by Bane. He did fly from California to Florida to examine the horse days after the crack was noticed following the colt's victory in the Flamingo in March. Bane determined that the crack was infected and should not be patched right away. He stayed and checked the foot repeatedly, waiting for it dry up. He refused to patch it until he deemed it free of infection.

Bane also told the press that the crack was far back in the heel area, a difficult area to work on. Without a patch, the horse couldn't train.

A week later, a New York paper announced that the trainer admitted that Bane had not patched the horse, perhaps because of the unfortunate location or perhaps because of the persistent infection--or both. The world waited to see the great horse return to racing.

Newsday (New York) headline

Bane went back to California. Buckpasser ended up eventually being "patched" by Louis Grasso, an auto-body mechanic and sometimes harness horseshoer from The Bronx, who had some success patching Standardbreds. 

Grasso's high-tech materials were actually variations of auto body repair materials, which he described as more of a coating than a patch, when applied to a cracked hoof. He called his material "Nu-Hoof".

Ultimately, the crack bothered the horse enough to warrant his retirement after one of the most successful US racing careers in history, including setting track records, in spite of the crack. His jockey, Braulio Baeza, told the trainer that the horse had had enough and was running on heart alone, not hooves.

Penn Vet farrier Rob Sigafoos pioneered

multiple applications for polymers on the hoof.

In the 1980s, the great Standardbred Nihilator raced with quarter cracks that were patched by farrier Joey Carroll. His heel was basically removed, and he wore a z-bar shoe. 

In 1992, Carroll was in the news again, putting a patch on A.P. Indy before the Belmont Stakes that year, after the great horse sat out the Derby and Preakness, much like Buckpasser, while his foot healed. 

Before the 1992 Belmont, the New York Racing Association had to issue a press release denying that A.P. Indy was lame. Conspiracy theories sprang up when he was secretly vanned to a different racetrack to train without an audience. When Joey removed A.P. Indy's bar shoe before the race, and replaced it with a regular plate, it was news. (And he won.)

Buckpasser's quarter crack experience in the mid-1960s came at the same time that researchers Jenny and Evans at the University of Pennsylvania's New Bolton Center were publishing papers in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association on their experiments with acrylics for hoof repair. 

Twenty years later, Penn Vet farrier Rob Sigafoos continued their research with acrylics and polymers to not only patch hooves: Sigafoos had the first widely-recognized success with glueing cuffed shoes to the foot by using the hoof wall as the attachment site instead of the bottom of the foot.

Professor Bill Moyer (file photo)

Penn Vet's Dr Bill Moyer claimed to have worked on 74 different cases of quarter cracks in one year. That would average out to more than six per month. He said that most were Standardbreds; Moyer received funding from Standardbred leader Billy Haughton to study crack repair. He loaded feet in a vise and found that the crack closed when the horse was weightbearing, and sometimes even overlapped, which would pinch tissue and cause a horse a lot of pain.

Sigafoos and Moyer even collaborated on an instructional book.

The study of the hoof wall received a major boost in 1980, with the publication of Doug Leach's doctoral thesis at the University of Saskatchewan. "The structure and function of equine hoof wall" Importantly, in 1987, Canadian researchers Bertram and Gosline at the University of British Columbia delved into the structural properties of the hoof wall, as well as of keratin and the effects of moisture on wall strength.

Quarter crack repair is still a task best left to the experts. Done incorrectly, a well-meaning lacing and/or patching job done at the wrong stage of crack therapy can seal in infection so that a major problem erupts. 

Or, it could impede normal growth from the coronet, causing a hoof deformity or a growth defect in that area. The goal of repair is a clean, dry crack growing out under the protective patch so that the horse is sound and pain-free.

Today, equine podiatry has advanced to the placement of drainage tubes under patches, as well as antibiotic-impregnated hoof repair materials. We still need a way to evaluate weightbearing in field and clinic conditions, before and after patching and during the rehabilitation period, to prevent subtle gait changes or imbalances that will affect healthy wall growth around the entire circumference of the coronet.

I am fortunate to have a great library of new and old books, as well as files that bulge with notes and proceedings from the hundreds of meetings I've attended, and (most of all) input from farriers and vets who generously share their cases, experiences, videos, and photos. 

How different things were in Bill Bane's day. But one thing has not changed: Quarter cracks are still a challenge to a horse and everyone who tries to help.

In spite of the availability of skilled practitioners, in spite of advances in technology, and in spite of advanced medications and therapeutics, quarter crack recovery is still compromised by owners and trainers who fail to act quickly to intervene and who fail to appreciate the need for continued care and monitoring.  A quarter crack is not a "fix it and forget it" problem for a horse; it can be a bump in the road for an equine athlete or a prolonged, painful lameness issue that limits a horse's career, value, and welfare. 

Click here for free signup for Hoof Blog newsletter updates.

© Fran Jurga and Hoofcare Publishing; Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog is the news service for Hoofcare and Lameness Publishing. Please, no use without permission. You only need to ask. This blog may be read online at the blog page, checked via RSS feed, or received via a headlines-link email (requires signup in box at top right of blog page). Questions or problems with this blog? Send email to hoofblog@gmail.com.  

Read this blog's headlines on the Hoofcare + Lameness Facebook Page

 

Disclosure of Material Connection: The Hoof Blog (Hoofcare Publishing) has not received any direct compensation for writing this post. Hoofcare Publishing has no material connection to the brands, products, or services mentioned, other than products and services of Hoofcare Publishing. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.

Big Brown's Owner Says Loose Hind Shoe "Not An Issue"

The Blood-Horse is quoting one of Big Brown's owners, Michael Iavarone of IEAH, this morning:

"His feet are ice cold, quarter crack not an issue. He had a very loose hind left shoe, but that’s not an issue."

The jockey complained that the horse was not handling the track well. Various reports from the media describe the track as loose and deep and suggest that the track was not watered because of the water pressure problems at the track yesterday (which left almost 100,000 racegoers without toilets).

(CORRECTION: This turned out to not be the case, according to one eye-witness. The track was watered. The grandstand had no water or toilets, but the track did! Other comments suggest that the holding barn did not have water, either.)

Much has been written about Big Brown's problem-packed front feet, but not much about his hinds. He won the Derby with turndowns on his hinds; turndowns are popular at Churchill Downs, according to crack specialist Tom Curl, who worked on Big Brown's right front foot. My guess is that all or most of the runners in the Derby also had them.

A turndown is the practice of turning the heels of the hind raceplate down so they become, in effect, like mud calks. They are believed to help with traction.

Big Brown's hind shoes were pulled after the Derby and he exercised and lived barefoot behind for a couple of days until Todd Boston, a shoer at Churchill, re-did his hinds.

I don't know what he had on behind for the Preakness but I do know that turndowns are illegal in New York. They do allow a small bend, but no sharp angles, that's for sure. Fred Sellerberg is NYRA's man in the paddock; his job is looking at the shoes. The guy has some sort of x-ray vision and seems to be able to spot an illegal shoe before the horse leaves the holding barn. Or at least he says he can. He just nods his head and says, "Believe me, Fran, I can tell". He is roughly my age and does not wear glasses, so I'm impressed.

Fred also would have seen a loose hind shoe. A paddock shoer, in addition to Fred, is on hand for exactly that reason and occasionally a race is held up in the paddock while a shoe is re-nailed.

So a loose shoe was probably a function of another horse stepping on it during the race or the horse stumbling and grabbing, or just normal wear and tear in the course of the race. Big Brown hit serious traffic problems in the first mile of the race and one ABC commentator suggested that he may even have been kicked by Da'Tara as he came up too close and had to be pulled back.

Watch the replay on slow-motion mode; at times it looks like Big Brown is a carousel horse, going up in the air, although still making forward progress.
Even more likely is that it was pulled loose when Big Brown was yanked up by the jockey. There are some dismal photos of the horse in biomechanical disarray as the rest of the horses charge past him. I wonder how his mouth feels today.

Tale of Ekati received a tough gash in the race and has a pretty serious wound on his leg, according to trainer Barclay Tagg.

When Rags to Riches didn't come back after the Belmont last year, she was sent to New Bolton Center for a complete medical and orthopedic analysis, from head to toe. Coolmore (her owners) insisted. They didn't find anything wrong that was ever made public but the filly spent the summer hanging out in her stall.

IEAH is the midst of building a new equine hospital next door to Belmont Park. Let's hope that they put their future staff to work checking out Big Brown so he can run again. If they are going to be in the equine health business this fall anyway, they can get a head start and protect the horse from further injury or illness if there is any doubt.