Such a delicate flower

You are so right about these delicate flowers of TBs. You can't mistake when there is anything wrong with them, can you? Tia's back leg is now completely cold. So there was an infection in there which must have been miniscule to have come out through that tiny hole! But her leg was outrageously hot yesterday, as if it was going to burn its way out through her skin :-0 Thanks to Claire for encouraging me to put a poultice on. I would have waited another day, without her suggesting that it would be a good idea, and by then it could have got into her bloodstream. You just don't expect infection in a wound which healed 5 weeks before and which you know you kept open to allow to heal from the bottom up, do you? There must have been a tiny spec of foreign stuff in there which took a while to cause enough irritation to break out.

Anyway, now she is much better in three of her feet, leaving the off fore very slightly warm compared with the other three - and noticeably lame! Delicate flower stuff again I'm afraid. The heat is not enough, and neither is her pulse enough, to suggest that she has an abscess. There is no filling in her leg at all. But the lameness is quite marked :-( I have found a little hole in her sole which doesn't go right through to the sensitive structures. So that is either a very old abscess, already grown out, or it is "inward" damage from a stone, which would account for a bruise. But she is not sensitive AT ALL to hoof testers, so goodness only knows what's going on in there ;-). I'm not having a vet out to start cutting holes or prescribing antibiotics, so I have been and bought her MSM, which she can go on tonight. That's an anti-inflammatory which contains sulphur which is known to help rebuild tissue injuries, so I hope it will help her.

It's still winter here today. Rain, 4 degrees, windchill factor down to minus 4. I gave up this morning and went to MacDonald's for breakfast and chucked the horses out. (This is a conscious decision with Tia - I think the best thing for her foot is to be in the cold wet mud all day as a natural cold compress/poultice - she doesn't do mad things out in the field, so if it is a soft tissue injury I don't think it will hurt her to be out strolling gently about.)

Barefoot fans will tell you that this sort of thing is common with newly unshod horses. I pushed the trotting too far on the road and we are paying for it :-( I haven't really used this forum to talk about barefoot because I don't want those of you who shoe to think I am trying to persuade you to barefoot. Honestly, I'm not. It's not easy, and if you don't trim for yourself it's not even cheap! Shoes work fine for most horses and owners. But I have some stuff that I want to talk about for the barefooters, so please excuse us for a while here :-)

Tetley is doing what he did last year, but with less disastrous consequences - his bars are getting spots of white line disease and rotting away. I've cut out three different bits in three feet in the last week. Thankfully, he's not unsound with it, but it is disturbing to see his bars go into shreds that you can peel off and see the lines in the laminae underneath. I treat the hole with peroxide and then harden the exposed sole with formaldehyde at 8% (basically, Keratex by another name). You can tell when there is rot underneath the bar because there is a black mark at the top. When I dig at it with a knife, there is usually an even bigger piece hidden underneath. The only solution is to cut it out, because the bugs that cause it can't live in oxygen and you have to get oxygen in there to kill them. If you don't open the hole, you can't get it in, so it's the lesser of two evils. Last year he abscessed in the same three feet, so this is a big improvement this year. (Tracey I know that you are still waiting for photos, I'm still waiting for decent weather and warm hands!) Sorry to anyone this is old hat to, I'm just writing it in case it helps the newer barefooters.

I hope to have better news of both Tia and the weather tomorrow.

C.