May 2008
Over the last five months Morris has been busy hacking out and about with Sarah’s older horse. He has learned to travel in the trailer to a local sand school and has been getting to grips with having a bit in his mouth and working in straight lines. The picture shows him at Hadley Farm, near Whitchurch, where he watched Fari jumping the cross country jumps and had lots of canters.
His feet are developing beautifully and it is a joy to ride him over the roughest of surfaces. You can feel how sure he is when placing his feet on all surfaces from tarmac to our rough welsh tracks. His digital cushion gets a great work out each time he trots or canters on the roads. Most interesting is the development of his lateral cartilages which when he arrived at three were small and weak looking, now like the rest of his body they are developing strength as he grows older and they are flexed each time his hoof takes a step.
June 2008
Well......... it had to happen! Morris has been shod!
Why did we do it? Well ..... we were so fascinated by the change in Foxy’s gait when we removed his shoes that we thought it would be an excellent idea to do it in reverse with a very sound and capable barefoot horse. So here are the videos! We would love to here your comments so do email us if you would like to tell us what affect you think rim shoes had on Morris. Of course Morris only had the shoes on for a mattter of hours while we experimented! Now he is back in his bare feet happily cantering and trotting round our North Wales lanes. If you click on each video you can run them almost simultaneously and observe the way the shoes affected his normal gait.
And! It’s not just about movement too! The thermal images, below, were taken of the left front bare and the left front shod. The weather conditions were slightly different with each shot with the bare image being taken when the sun was behind a cloud and the shod shot being taken when the sun was shining. This makes the images all the more interesting though because the ambient temperature in the shod shot is warmer yet the leg and hoof are colder.
We plan to repeat the images later in the summer, with a greater range of horses, in a controlled environment.
