Cutting Edge Research on the Equine Foot: The Role of the Sole

The overwhelming resistance to the idea of barefoot hoofcare is discouraging, but not surprising. After a thousand years of shoeing horses, people want science. After several decades of less scientific barefoot ideas, including the four-point trim (which continues to invade the sole plane at the toe) and the Strasser technique (which literally carves the sole into the desired shape) I don't blame the general horse-owning public for being wary. It still strikes me as ironic that they did not, and still don't, demand science to support horseshoeing in the first place. But, hey, a thousand years* can't be wrong, can it???

Guess what kids...research is gaining on the farrier industry. Ponder this one for a bit: studies by Dr. Robert Bowker at the Equine Foot Lab at Michigan State University AND Dr. David M. Hood at the Hoof Project at Texas A & M conclude that the sole of the foot, and NOT the wall, is the primary loading surface of the equine foot.

With that single piece of information, you shouldn't find it difficult to embrace the idea that nailing a shoe to the wall, lifting the sole out of reach of the ground, and peripherally loading (forcing the wall to bear the load) the hoof is NOT healthy for the horse.

Pete Ramey provides an excellent overview of the importance and care of the sole in his article, "UNDERSTANDING THE HORSE’S SOLES"

A recent teaser from the publication Hoofcare & Lameness: The Journal of Equine Foot Science:

"DR. DAVID HOOD of “The Hoof Project” at Texas A&M University hardly seemed to take a breath as he recounted his most recent research on weightbearing and an experiment he had performed on a group of horses kept both on sand and on concrete, and how the weightbearing changed. Agreeing with Dr. Bowker, Hood discounted three main tenets of traditional hoof study: 1) that the wall is the primary loading surface; 2) that the frog should or should not touch the ground; and 3) that P3 is “suspended” within the hoof capsule. He exhaled more thoughts in 20 minutes that I could absorb; most of his findings were applicable to “natural hoof” material published in issue #69 of Hoofcare & Lameness"

* "While the inventors of the first nailed shoe may always remain a mystery, horseshoeing became a mainstream practice in Europe around 1000 AD. Cast from bronze, these early shoes were lightweight and had a scalloped outer rim with six nail holes."
"The History of Horseshoes,"R. Cohen, Dressage Today Magazine, Feb 1996