Ahem......Certainly good hoof care is part
of prevention....but it's a LOT more complex than that. No matter HOW
good your hoof care, your horse can have this problem. His living
environment is also contributory. Barefoot horses also have White
Line.....in about the same numbers as shod horses.....and I have seen NO
studies that indicate it is caused by "damaged laminae".
I fought this problem on Sunny for years for
several years. I have an EXCELLLENT farrier with many years experience and
I am "short course" farrier trained. Some horses seem to be more
susceptible than others. EVERYTHING grows on Sunny. He ALWAYS had a little
hole cut out in one or the other of his front feet at EVERY shoeing.
Removing his shoes in front had no impact on the problem, but it does make
easier to treat. You can have several horses in the same pasture and some will
have White Line and some won't....some with shoes, some without. In it's
initial stages, you will see it in the very front of the hoof and it's sometimes
called "Seedy Toe".
First, you MUST resection the infected area back to
clean hoof wall......Ehite Line dies on contact with air. If you don't, it
will simply continue to grow up into the hoof. It can cause laminitis and
coffin bone rotation in extreme cases.
White Line is not a fungus like Thrush,
but appears to be a symbiotic relationship between several types of
bacteria. Treatment that works well on one horse may not
work as well on another.
Hooflex is slightly oily, which makes it cling
to the hoof better than other stuff I tried. At each shoeing, just before
the shoe was put on, we coated the clean, trimmed hoof wall (and any resection
area) with Merthiolate. I then cleaned his feet daily, using my air
compressor to blow out anything between the shoe and hoof. Using a
hypodermic needle, I injected Hooflex as far up between the shoe and the
foot as I could reach and coated the resection area and the outer hoof
wall from the nail holes down. Use a horseshoe nail to pick around in the
resection area to remove any debris accumulation. KEEP IT OPEN!
I still treat with Merthiolate at each shoeing
and with Hooflex a couple of times a week.....no White Line for over a
year. STAY ON THIS STUFF! It will destroy his feet if you don't do
something about it.
