Hilary Clayton Equine Biomechanics Lecture in Pennsylvania September 24th

ANNOUNCEMENT: Hilary M. Clayton, BVMS, PhD, MRCVS will be the speaker at the Dressage at Devon Forum in Devon, Pennsylvania on Wednesday, September 24, 2008. With her lecture The Bio-Mechanics of the Horse, participants will also be able to participate in one of Dr Clayton's lively question and answer discussion sessions.

The lecture, Fitness Training to Maximize Dressage Performance, will address the fitness requirements of dressage horses at different levels of training, including exercises that can be used to improve the horse’s fitness and strength in a highly sport-specific manner. Descriptions will include exercises performed from the ground,cross-training exercises and strength training exercises. Dr. Clayton will also discuss performance issues related to lack of strength or suppleness.

A graduate of the University of Glasgow, Dr. Clayton is a professor and the McPhail Dressage Chair in the Department of Large Animal Clinical Sciences at Michigan State University. She has focused her professional career on the study of the movement of horses, including gait analysis, lameness mechanics and the conditioning of sport horses. Dr. Clayton is also an accomplished equestrian with Bronze, Silver and Gold medals from the United States Dressage Federation.

Fitness Training to Maximize Dressage Performance will be held in the Devon Room at the 34th Annual Dressage at Devon Horse Show, on the Devon Horse Show Grounds in Devon, PA. The Forum will begin at 7:00 (doors open at 6:00 pm.). Tickets are $40 and a gourmet boxed dinner and soft drinks. There will also be a cash bar. For information or to purchase tickets, contact Anne Moss at 610-380-1518 or email annemoss@verizon.net.

Dressage at Devon is the highest rated international dressage competition and most complete breed show outside of Europe. Olympic medalist Robert Dover calls Dressage at Devon “the standard by which all American horse shows should be judged.” Dressage at Devon takes place at the Devon Horse Show Grounds, Route 30, in Devon, Pennsylvania, September 23rd through 28th. For more information on Dressage at Devon please visit
www.dressageatdevon.org.

Dr. Clayton's new book and dvd set, Activate Your Horse's Core, is now available from Hoofcare Publishing. The 95-minute dvd and laminated stable manual help trainers and riders understand the biomechanical stresses on sport horses and how to develop balance and strength of movement. The cost is $50 plus $5 postage in the USA, $12 postage to the rest of the world. The set was co-authored with Dr Narelle Stubbs.

Golden Horseshoes: Holland's Farrier in Hong Kong

He's going for the gold. Lift up one of Salinero's shoes and the entire country of The Netherlands would believe that they are made of gold.

In the next few hours, Anky Van Grunsven of Holland and Isabell Werth of Germany go for the gold medal for individual dressage at the Hong Kong Equestrian Games of the Beijing Olympics. The two women are separated by a few one-hundredths of a point...and years of tooth-and-nail competition and micro-point finishes. Or will a dark horse come up from the ranks to take first place?

Each of the top two horses is shod by one of the world's leading sport horse farriers, Rob Renirie for Holland and Dieter Krohnert for Germany.

Anky takes her own farrier to the Olympics with her, and he is also the official farrier for his country. Rob Renirie is a cool study in composure and has an analytical eye for the horse he loves, Salinero.

In Sydney in 2000, Rob ran out into the arena to grab the bridle of Bonfire, Anky's first gold-medal winner, when he exploded from all the controlled energy after his test. Rob studies the horse and knows the rider well.

Holland had to settle for second to Germany in the team medals, and missed the use of a top horse, Sunrise, who went lame. It is all coming down to this one ride, since Anky has announced that she may retire.

If you have a chance to go to a seminar with Rob Renirie about shoeing, go. The former jumper rider turned farrier has also studied equine biomechanics at the University of Utrecht and he has created a place for himself at the pinnacle of sport horse farriery by combining the expertise of a rider, a trainer, a scientist and a skilled farrier into one person.

If you missed his four-hour master class on sport horse shoeing at the Palm Beach laminitis conference last November, you really missed something.

Someone showed me a picture of Rob taken in Hong Kong last week. It was late at night. Pouring rain. Rob with his white head was unmistakably, crouched under an umbrella with Anky's groom, Willeke. They were watching Anky school in the middle of the night, when it might be a little bit cooler. The rain didn't matter. Rob's eyes were locked on the horse's hooves. He was willing them to turn gold.

Post script: Anky Van Grunsven of Holland won her third consecutive individual Olympic gold medal in dressage in Hong Kong.

Golden Horseshoes: German Farrier Shoes the Olympic Champions

Dieter Krohnert, Official Farrier of the German Equestrian Teams

Since 1990, the German equestrian teams have not left home without him. And since 1990, they have won all the Olympic team gold medals in dressage.

Dieter is an enigmatic globe-trotter. If he sat down next to you on an airplane, you might think he was a spy. Or a race car driver. Or a hundred other things...but probably not a farrier. He is clever, inventive and thinks on his feet. Dieter pushes the envelope by narrowing his eyes and nodding, ever so slowly....and coming back from the anvil five minutes later with an answer to your problem cradled in his big hands.

Dieter brought my attention to spider-plate shoes and thumbprint heels and Luwex pads. A seminar for farriers he gave at Rochester Equine Clinic five (or so) years ago was exceptional.

Dieter's English is very good, although he is one of those people who tells you a lot if you pay as close attention to what he doesn't say. He is proud of his country and its horses and of his work.

Dieter has his own farrier clinic near Hamburg, Germany and also works with a vet clinic, so his lameness cases are as interesting as his sport horse tricks.

If they gave gold medals for farriery, Dieter's neck would be very tired from holding them all up.

Congratulations, Dieter, on Germany's three gold medals in these Olympics. One to go!

Objective "Lameness Locator" System Will Be Marketed by UMissouri Veterinarian

Dr. Loni Taylor runs alongside a test horse. Three sensors are placed on the horse's head, the right front foot and the dorsum of the pelvis. The sensors measure the head acceleration, the pelvic acceleration and the right front leg angular velocity. By reading these measurements veterinarians will be able to determine whether or not a horse is lame before it shows any signs. Photo by Brooke Fletcher. (Story provided by University of Missouri)

In the equine veterinary industry, lameness in horses has been assessed subjectively for centuries, said Paul Schiltz, a veterinarian for Equine Medical Services in Columbia. Each vet has his or her own opinion about what's wrong with a horse - and they often disagree.

But Kevin Keegan, professor of veterinary medicine and surgery at MU, has a solution to this problem with the technology he has created that is going commercial in the next couple of weeks to months.

In the late 1990s, Keegan began working on the Lameness Locator with a simple goal: to develop an objective way of detecting lameness.

"Each practitioner says something different when observing, so we need a way to teach our students exactly what to look at," said Keegan, also director of the E. Paige Laurie Endowed Program in Equine Lameness at MU.

Through a lameness evaluation performed by multiple vets, he found, for example, that in looking at a horse's front legs, these vets agreed only 25 percent of the time.

Keegan then began observing horses on treadmills and putting markers on their bodies to record movements and transmit them to a computer. He attended MU engineering meetings and developed rules and equations to analyze the movements, pairing up with MU engineer professor P. Frank Pai, who has worked with airplane vibration evaluations.

The Lameness Locator is a spinoff of Pai's work with airplanes. The locator analyzes vibration damage to see where the horse's movement is off, Keegan said.

But the invention wasn't practical for other industry professionals. It was then that Keegan began collaborating with Yoshiharu Yonezawa, an electronics engineering professor from Japan, Keegan said.

Keegan and Yonezawa worked intensely on decreasing the size of the sensors and the number of other instruments and wires they put on the horses to record the movements, he said.

One of the first steps was to use fewer sensors. Their previous work showed they needed only four markers to determine the lameness: on the top of the head, the right front leg, the top of the pelvis and the right hind leg. A year ago, they stopped using the locator on the right hind leg because it was transmitting the same information received from the right front leg, Keegan said.

The equipment, now wireless, measures the acceleration of the head and pelvis and the angular velocity of the front leg. If they're sound, the data looks like a symmetrical sine wave, and if they're not, Keegan and Yonezawa measure the shape of the signal. A lame horse has a disruption in the shape, Keegan said. A frequency analysis, which pinpoints the location of the lameness, is performed.

With the Lameness Locator ready to go for a wider market, Keegan needed funding. He started a business called Equinosis and got a license. His company raised money from Angel Investors in Columbia, and production will begin in the coming months with 100 units this year for vets across the country, Keegan said. A price has not yet been set.

"I've been impressed," said Schiltz. "It's a new approach to a very old problem. Depending on the price, I don't know any lameness clinic that wouldn't want one."

Schiltz said it will benefit vets when they're observing subtle lameness that isn't visible by simply looking at the horses. He said that because lameness is a specialty in equine vets, another big advantage is that vets who don't look at lameness every day could have a way to evaluate the horses without relying solely on their experience. It would also be a great teaching tool, Schiltz said.

Tom DiSalvo, co-owner of the thoroughbred racehorse American Thunder, didn't know about the Lameness Locator before bringing his horse to the MU Equine Clinic from Illinois, and he is impressed.

"I think the system is great," said DiSalvo. "It helps Dr. Keegan focus on the problem and save time in diagnosing."

It will also help vets locate multiple problems that might have been overshadowed by an obvious lameness in another area, Schiltz said. All of the lameness will be shown at the same time, he said.

"It would be useful for any vet practice that deals with lameness, but the limiting factor will be the cost of the equipment," Schiltz said. "I think it's such an applicable program that I would be able to justify buying it even if it's not cheap."

Shoeing for the USA": Todd Meister

(photo courtesy of Chespeake Dressage)

Todd Meister is one of those special guys. He calls himself a farrier, but as he told me once, "I'm a farrier who keeps his veterinary license up to date". Lest you think he is a vet who talks hooves and then leaves a prescription, think again: Todd is a certified as a journeymay farrier by the American Farrier's Association. He specializes in event horses and I've watched him work with team vet Brendan Furlong at the Rolex Kentucky Three-Day Event.

For the past ten years or so, Todd has been partnering with Steve Teichman and Vance Glenn in running one of the USA's most successful group farrier practices, Chester County Farrier Associates in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania.

He is a 1995 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania's College of Veterinary Medicine. His wife Missy is a veterinarian as well, but she doesn't shoe horses.

"My Shoes Are There!" Meet England's Nigel Turner

Life goes on at home for Nigel Turner but his shoes are going for the gold on the hooves of Tim Stockdale's "Ruby".

Farrier Nigel Turner is the regular farrier for British show jumper Tim Stockdale and his stunning gray mare, Fresh Direct Corlato (stable name: Ruby). Watch for them as the show jumping gets underway. Actually, you can't miss them; the cameras will love this horse. And as she sails over those jumps, she'll be flashing the shoes that Nigel prepared for her

Nigel, who lives near Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire, England, has been shoeing for Stockdale for about five years. Tim and Ruby have been together for seven years, although she has been out of the limelight and the headlines for a while. The mare suffered a terrible fall while showing in Portugal two years ago but has made a dramatic comeback.

In the newspaper interview, Stockdale said, "At the end of the day having a good team is an integral part of this and with the feet of the horse you can't take any chances," he said. "You have got to have people that are the best at what they do."
Read a local newspaper article about Nigel here.