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Home > Articles > Feedback From The Field
Feedback From The Field
by Bill Cunningham
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I attended Martha Olivo's clinic October 27 and 28 in Sonoita, AZ, sponsored by the good folks at Horsneakers. I have been to two previous clinics, but got much more out of this one. That is probably a combination of being able to grasp and understand more and she has more to offer at each clinic. Martha is really open to feedback, comments and observations.
I have often wondered where some of the parameters given in the hoof have come from. The answer is in dissecting a lot of hooves. I did not ask Martha how many hooves she has dissected, but I saw her dissect one in Feb. 2001 and another in Oct. 2001 at her clinics, my guess would be that she has done over a hundred hooves at clinics. That is enough to verify in my mind that she has seen some of the same things that Dr. Strasser has and that the parameters she gives are correct.ddd
Take the 30° hair line for instance. The hairline is just above the coronary band. When you take the hoof capsule off a foot, you are left with the bone, corium and coronary band. The coronary band is at a 30° angle from the plane of the bottom of the foot. That is not a measurement that was derived by anyone, but what nature puts on the horse's foot and has been observed on many dissected feet. So when you get a 30° hair line, the bottom of the coffin bone is ground parallel or conversely when the coffin bone is ground parallel, there is a 30° hair line.
So when the coffin bone is ground parallel, how high is the heel? There have been several measurements used, all with varying degrees of accuracy and ease of use. One is to measure 3.5 centimeters from the top of the bottom of the lateral cartilage; another uses the periople as a guage; a third suggests measuring 3 centimeters from the hair line as just below the lateral cartilage. Martha suggests making an opening cut between the frog and bars down until you start to see pink, measure up one centimeter and set your heel height to that. She said that she found this to work consistently. She also suggested that once you have accurately found your horse's heel height this way, you should measure from the heel to the hair line at the juncture of the heel and frog to get an accurate measurement for your horse.
So how does a person come up with these ideas? I suspect that if you started with getting the 30 degree hair line and coffin bone ground parallel, then started measuring you would find all of the above measurements to be true. The trick is to find the method that is most accurate and easiest to find. The top of the bottom of the lateral cartilage is pretty hard to find on some horses with pathological feet. The hairline and the periople may have been affected by previous injury. The opening cut is invasive and may not be advisable on horses without contracted feet. I guess that a person needs to figure out what works best for their particular situation.
One concern that I had with getting down to pink on the opening cut was how close did we come to the blood supply? On the foot that was dissected at the clinic, pink was at least 1/4 inch above the corium. We also checked on one of the trimmed cadaver feet and it was at least 1/4 inch above the corium.
Another concern that I have heard expressed about the natural trim done in this manner is that the sole is thinned too much. Martha trimmed a cadaver hoof by starting at the dirt line around the frog and carried that level and angle of concavity out to the walls. When the hoof was dissected, the trimmed sole was found to be consistently about 1/4 inch thick. You could see the trimming had shaped the foot to the underlying structure and that the coffin bone was ground parallel. As I have seen on live feet, this type of trimming allows for plenty of hoof mechanism and tough feet.
I have had friends argue with me about the bars, saying the should be allowed to grow long. When a foot was dissected I saw that the bar laminae ends half way down the frog, so now I know why and where the bars should be trimmed. And when I saw that the bars will press up into the corium below the lateral cartilages when allowed to be actively weight bearing, I understood why my navicular horse was lame for so long and what had pushed the lateral cartilages out of the hoof capsule.
This way of dissecting gives a person a very different idea of how a foot works. In fact it really helps a lot to understand the foot. The more popular way of dissecting (cut the foot down the middle) helps to understand where everything is, but does nothing to promote understanding of how the foot works. In fact, I believe that view has done a lot to develop the misconceptions that are commonly held on how the hoof works. The horse's hoof is a very complicated and amazing mechanism. I used to believe it was very similar to fingernails and that you had to nail pieces of iron to them so they wouldn't wear off too soon. I got too soon old and too late smart.
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