When we pull the shoes, nearly all horses are found to have substantial internal damage to the hooves. It takes about a year of special care to re-build good feet; we call this healing time the "transition year." The occasional horse that doesn't have transition soreness generally had shoes for only a few months.
Horseshoes seem to have been invented in the Middle Ages in Europe, to keep the feet from falling apart when knights' horses had to live for months in slop-filled tie-stalls while the castle was under siege. At that time, the modern study of Anatomy and Physiology did not exist yet, so there was no way to study what the shoes did to hooves and legs.
Horses today are high-priced performance animals and valued companions, and are not kept in unsanitary conditions that rot their feet. A long life and lifelong soundness are important to most horse owners. Therefore, it is time to re-think the use of horseshoes.
There are more than a dozen ways that shoes are known to damage the feet, legs, and circulatory system of the horse (see A Lifetime of Soundness by Dr. Hiltrud Strasser). The worst damage comes from loss of circulation in the hoof, and loss of shock absorption.
Circulation: When the horse steps down on his foot, the cone-shaped hoof wall flexes wider at the bottom; when he lifts it off the ground, it returns to its narrower "closed" shape. This spread-and-squeeze acts like a pump, pulling blood into the foot with each step.
Horsehoes are nailed onto the foot when it is in the closed, off-the-ground position. With a shoe on, the hoof can't flex, so the pump doesn't work; not enough blood and nutrients are pulled into the foot to build and maintain strong tissues. Therefore, the quality of sole, wall, and frog is poor; injuries are slow to heal; and the white line deteriorates over time and becomes stretchy.
A rough estimate is that a medium-sized, barefoot horse pumps a gallon (4 liters) through its four feet in about 20 strides. If anyone has more accurate information I will put it here.
Shock absorption: In the tough yet elastic barefoot hoof, the flexing of the weighted hoof can absorb as much as 2,000 lbs. of concussion. But the horseshoe holds the foot inflexible, cancelling out 75% of its ability to absorb shock. Instead, the concussion goes on up the leg and damages joints and tendons that were not designed to take so much shock.
A third type of damage is that shoes contract the hoof. The hoof naturally grows in a cone shape; as the hoof wall grows, the base (the part that touches the ground) gets wider. But shoes hold the base to the size it was on shoeing day. The shod hoof changes from a cone to more of a cylinder shape. The heels are forced to curl inward, which puts incorrect mechanical stress on the hoof wall, and can show up as wall cracks, white line damage, or heel pain.
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An overgrown hoof that was not shod, showing how the hoof gets wider as it grows. |
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An overgrown hoof that was shod, showing how the shoe made the hoof grow in a cylinder shape with "underslung heels." |
The horse's feet keep growing till age 5, when he reaches his full adult weight. When shoes are put on a young horse, the coffin bone cannot grow wider, and the foot ends up small for the horse, and often contracted.
For these and many other reasons, the barefoot horse has a lot of advantages over the shod horse, both in health and in performance.
Here is what Marco Polo noticed on his journey to China:
- "Afghanistan produces numbers of excellent horses, remarkable for their
speed. They are not shod, although used in mountainous country, and go
at a great pace even down deep descents, where shod horses neither would
nor could do the like."
Can my horse go barefoot?
Many people ask me whether their horse "can go barefoot." Here are some considerations to help you make your own decision.
1) Since horses have succeeded as a species for millions of years without shoes, I believe any shod horse would prefer to go barefoot and feel the ground, if we had a way to ask them. A horse depends on his feet to escape from predators, and feels insecure if he can't feel the ground.
Very old horses have gone barefoot successfully. I knew one with badly damaged feet that wouldn't have lived long enough to come through transition to a more comfortable condition, so the owner decided to leave him shod.
2) If you think about it, "Horses could go barefoot, except for the ambitions of their owner / rider." There are situations where the horse would be better off barefoot, in the long run, but the rider is on an unforgiving performance schedule that allows no "down time" in case the transition is a difficult one; for example, a teenager campaigning on the show circuit where there is a rider age limit.
When a horse goes lame, the schedule is no longer a consideration and the barefoot method would be the fastest route to complete soundness.
Hoof boots, plus the "white line strategy" trim, make it possible for most horses to transition with no difficulty.
There are situations where shoes are used to extend the horse's abilities beyond what nature provides. An example is stadium jumping, where the horse must have shoes with corks in order to get around sharp turns at high speed. The corks give the horse traction, but having enough traction for a tight course overstresses the ligaments and joints in the legs; no-one expects these horses to be sound and rideable to the age of 35 -- or even 15.
(The Swiss Horse Boot was designed for competition, and can be fitted with corks. This allows the hoof itself to remain healthy, though ligament and joint stress would still occur.)
3) Some horses work in situations that require hoof protection. Amish buggy horses are driven 20 miles a day on paved highways -- the abrasive surface wears the feet faster than they can grow. We can use hoof boots to protect the hoof; this is one situation where you would need boots on all four feet. A benefit of boots is that they can be used part of the time, such as three days a week, allowing the feet to self-trim on the other days and the boots to last longer.
4) Some horses are described as having "bad" or "weak" feet that "would not do well barefoot." But horses get "weak feet" in the first place, from reduced circulation in the shod foot; or, looking to their early life, from the foal not getting enough movement on firm footing.
With the help of hoof boots during the transition year, these horses are showing us that they grow new, tough hooves just like any other barefoot horse. If you look at a "weak" hoof several months after pulling the shoes, you'll actually see a line where the new hoof wall at the top is suddenly thicker than the older wall below.
5) We saw a few horses get a thin, soft sole -- squishy to thumb pressure -- due to a very wet year (2003-4) in the northeastern U.S. They were sore and in fact there was danger of breaking the coffin bone should they land hard on a sharp rock. The two that I heard about went sound immediately with shoes and pads. They were able to go barefoot again, successfully, after several months shod, and when the weather dried out.