3. Flares by Cindy Sullivan
http://tribeequus.com/flares.html
Excerpt:
Are you obsessed with chasing flares? Is your horse coming up sore as a result? STOP! Step away from the rasp!! Think!!
You are fighting what you perceive as flares. But are they really?One of the biggest problems I see out there - more and more recently - are people going insane over flares, but not having a clue what that means. There are flares, but there is also (and these are my own terms) dorsal divergence, directional extension, and expansion deviation (aka “belling”).If you have been routinely aggressive in removing flares, concerned yourself with “cleaning out” around the frog perhaps seeking to encourage that elusive concavity, you may only have succeeded in taking away the adaptive support the horse was desperately trying to put down setting it up to go flatter, or remain flat. The thinning of the wall, as in an aggressive effort to remove “flares”, or relieving it from its job as a weight bearing structure reduces containment in the distal aspect of the hoof capsule. Inner structures then expand the capsule outward where the wall is too thin and the foot becomes flatter. From the dorsal view with the foot on the ground, it appears as a bell shape which is misinterpreted as flares. But it cannot be a “flare” if the wall isn’t there in any substantive measure and the whiteline is intact. This is what I call “belling” the capsule angle turns outward at the bottom like a bell and it is entirely human created by over thinning the outer wall. If your horse has that form naturally and is sound…then don’t try to read something into it
September 21, 2007 at 11:13 am
I have a competition horse who is 7 years old. She was shod for 5 of those seven years. She is quite badly pigeon toed and i’ve been barefooting her for the last 12 months and have been battling dirt compacting into the lanimer line and forcing the wall and white line apart.
Under instruction of my vet, i’ve been cutting the wall back to were the infestation of compressed dirt begins in atempt to eliminate the groove so that no other dirt can pack there in the future. However, as she is pigeon toed, most of the wight is bared on the outside of the foot
and is the primary area were the dirt packs in between the white line and the hoof wall.
And when i trim the wall back as instructed it only seems to exasabate the problem as it allows the outside of the hoof to be shorter and bear more weight.
Any advice you could give me would be much appreciated as i’m a little sceptical of the advice i have thus far recieved.