Re: RC: Easyboot w/barefoot

[DreamWeaver <dreamweaver@gbis.com>]

At 12:44 PM 10/18/2000 -0600, you wrote:
>I had to cancel our planned first LD ride at the last minute. The easyboots
>I wanted/was required to use on my barefoot horse came up too far in the
>front. Has anyone had any experience with this and barefoot horses.

Hi Cheryl:  Well, looks like you have three options.  1)  Shoe your 
horse.....if the ride required hoof protection (most rides out west do, at 
least all the ones I regularly do require hoof protection) it should have 
said so on the ride entry.  2)  Keep your horse barefoot and use easyboots, 
but trim them down, and/or 3)  wrap the entire hoof with vetwrap before 
applying the easyboot.

>of her coronary band are pretty even, in the front only. Not a good
>situation. Any ideas to make this work?

Did you ride in the boots ahead of time to see how this worked?  (I did 
tell you to try them out ahead of time, didn't I?)

>Also how much conditioning in the easyboots/pads would you recommend? Will
>the thickness of the boot/pad require us to do a lot of our conditioning in
>it, to condition her to the moving in them? Can I do none? some? a lot?
>most? of my conditioning without and then use them at a LD ride?

I would use them on training rides often enough so that you are comfortable 
putting them on and removing them, and know that they will stay on.  You 
also want your horse to become familiar with the boots.  Horses seem to 
adapt to the boots very well in most cases, however, you should always 
abide by the golden rule *never try anything new at a ride*.

>Cheryl, determined to be ready to ride LD next year and hoping ride managers
>will be open to the idea of allowing barefoot horses on their rides.

If the RM tells you that you need shoes or easyboots, I would probably 
follow that advice.  Why risk hurting your horse?  I have done rides with 
barefoot horses before, with easyboots on the front feet -- but it was on 
trail with excellent footing.  Easyboots go a long way towards reducing the 
stress and trauma on our horses during an endurance ride.  That's probably 
why you see so many more people using them these days, especially on 
multidays.

At the bottom of my ridephotos page is the link to my easyboots 
pages:  http://members.nbci.com/ridephotos/      I still need to do some 
updating with clearer photos, and some new things that I've been doing that 
have been working extremely well.

Happy trails,

Karen
in NV
& Weaver
& Rocky, who will each be wearing 4 easyboots on rides from now until they 
arrive in Sacramento next July! <bg>