Incredible

The difference in Ace is just incredible. If I had been told about it rather than experienced it, I would have had trouble believing that it could have that much of an effect. He is relaxed right from the start, less spooky, not bucking or kicking at all and a different horse.

To answer ML's question I think we can put this together with what happened when the physio did some manipulation which she insists could not have hurt him, but which clearly did. I think if we could MRI his back, we would find that he has nerves coming out of his spine which are, compared to other horses, very unprotected by fat/muscle/connective tissue. So not only was the physio able to pinch them hard enough to bruise them, as she most certainly did, but the cold easily upsets them. Think of breathing in through your mouth on a very cold day when you have a tooth with an upset nerve, maybe?

So when I use infra-red on him, it penetrates right into his back because of the wavelength of the light, and it delivers heat right inside his body to those nerves. A bit like using Sensodyne toothpaste on that tooth. Thank goodness we discovered what would work for him, he must have been in some pain to have reacted as he did.

Woody was not quite sound  for his first trot on the road today, but it wore off in no time. I am really looking forward to schooling him and starting to sort out some of his straightness issues but we really need two things first. One is for him to be totally consistently sound on straight lines before I start working him on circles. The other is for him to make more adjustments to his feet, by wearing them on the road, to produce the right compensation for his legs, none of which are truly straight.

It is easy to understand why he could not be kept sound in shoes. He does not look obviously bent, it is quite subtle. But both his hind feet point inwards and his fetlocks skew outwards, which is the other way around from a "normal" horse. And both his front feet point inwards too. Shod "straight", because he moves straight and look straight, he would have had all sorts of pressures on the tendons and ligaments inside his feet.

I am fascinated that although he has not been shod behind for years, so that he did not remove his front foot wedges with his hind feet, it is the hind feet making the most obvious changes. He has a really huge flare on the inside of the right hind, which has now stopped screwing out at the fetlock as he walks. The left one, though, has begun the same path and is now screwing outwards in the same way, so I assume we will shortly have just as big a flare on the inside of that one too. Meanwhile the fronts have changed their landing completely. When he arrived it was just about flat, sometimes toe first. Within days it was flat, sometimes heel first. After 25 days it is very obviously and very solidly heel first. This is just what we wanted to see.

So I have two improving horses, and one who is pretty perfect already. How great!