One for the foot geeks.

This is the hole in Radar's sole. It is around about an inch wide, and the black hole at the bottom forms a perfect tube which penetrates right through a centimetre of sole, to an empty void underneath. He did himself a lot of damage with whatever he trod on, and I am exceptionally lucky that he caught it at the edge of his toe, where it didn't come into contact with the pedal bone. We were about an inch away from quite possibly losing him altogether. At the moment, I flush the hole daily with hydrogen peroxide and plug it with half a cotton wool ball. When I am absolutely certain that there can't possibly be any chance of an infection rebuilding, I have some Red Horse paste that a friend has given me to plug it with.  It looks a lot more frightening in real life, I must say, because in the photo you can't see the depth of it. 

And this tells an interesting story. These ripples occur on only one side of one of Radar's feet, the left hind. It's a foot that he has always grown an extension on the side of. In the early days of barefoot we were taught to take these off. Since then, we realised that for many horses they are diet related, and you need to fix the diet not rasp the hoof wall thin. And for others, like Radar, they are a structural response to a limb which is not perfectly straight.

The more I school Radar, the less of a flange he has on this foot. The lower ripple is when he came back into a lot more work after his summer break to get fit. The higher one was my mistake! I got too handy with the rasp one day, thinking that the flange was going to go anyway, I rasped it off and made his foot look pretty. His response was to put it back double quick, and produce the second ripple. I won't be making that mistake again.

C