Dealing with Laminitis, Foundered Horses, and General Hoof Health

Speaker  0:01  
Welcome to Holistic Horseworks talks. Join us with founder April love as we talk about equine care. Learn what you can do to keep your horse happy, healthy, rideable and sound through their 30s have a question you’d like to submit to the podcast, just email april@holistichorseworks.com for a chance to get it featured on the next episode.

April Love  0:30  
This is April with horse talks and we’re gonna get into some current hoof issues with some clients that we’re having. We’re going to be talking about hoof balance, the miracle spray the hoof soak, and what it means to the horse.

Amy  0:45  
April, we have a question from a listener regarding her 30 year old retired show horse. About three or four years ago he had cancer, and the treatment was about six months long. After that he foundered. They put on special shoes to help with the tenderness in his feet. And when they removed the left front shoe, the horse had excruciating pain. They did some X rays, and they weren’t really able to find anything. But he is still very tender footed to this day on the left front. He is being fed strategy and doctor’s choice supplements. He is given hay during the day, and for the most part, he’s stall bound because of his feet. His owner does come and turn him out and spends probably a good four hours every day with him. Do you have any suggestions for situation like this?

April Love  1:52  
My whole program is to start with a detox. So all the vaccinations all the chemical wormers everything add up in their system, and they’re gonna have crappy feet and the cranial sacral and the equine dentistry they’re not going to be able to chew very well. So you have to have some kind of nutrition that’s not high in sugars and proteins like they usually do for the equine senior feeds. They don’t have a lot of teeth to chew with. 

If your feet are if the hooves of the horse are not in good condition now is go back to liver and nutrition and what are they able to assimilate and pull out all the heavy metals from the mercury and all the vaccines, the poisons in all the wormers that stress the liver and kidneys. So that’s what the zeolite detox is about all the past vaccines and wormers that have added up in their system. 

And a farrier can quick a horse or you can have a hot nail and you can also have an abscess come up. So on the worksheet you also see the hoof sock recipe. And that’s the first thing if there’s any pain in the horse’s hoof, it actually detoxes it so that recipe’s like for 32 ounces of warm water, which is you know, like a big shaker drink. Somewhere between two thirds and one cup of epsom salt and two full dropper fulls the dynamite liquid trace minerals for an hour. 

You can have a perfectly clean washed off hoof and you put it in that solution either in an IV bag or soaker boot. I like the UC Davis soaker boots the best they last a long time pretty much indestructible. And an hour later, when you take it off, it’ll smell like dead rotting animal, it pulls that many toxins out of the feet. 

So Epsom salt works on bruising, pain, inflammation, viral bacterial fungal that’s in the hoof. The second day, it doesn’t smell so bad. And the third day there’s no smell. So it’s almost like that ionic foot bath that people do. 

So whenever there’s any hoof problems or pain in the hoof, that’s where we start and it has to have the Epsom salt you don’t want to have a foundered horse that’s in chronic founder right now. Go into water because you can separate the hoof wall and the coffin bone can drop out the bottom so you want to make sure there’s no heat pulse or inflammation in the feet. 

That to me, when the horse goes into laminitic, something is really stressing the system either chemical or environmental. So we go back to the emotion coding and the Nano zeolites. 

I worked on a horse once in a stall in six inches of shavings on banamine and she was foundering so bad she was just standing with four feet going in different directions and couldn’t even pick up a foot and we did the chronic founder acupressure points and put her on the zeolites four times a day. She could walk within 24 hours in the farrier reset her shoes, I think three weeks later, and he said oh my god, I can’t believe this is same horse because last time I tapped on her foot she reared and screamed.

So that’s what really showed me that the detox when the horse is in inflammation in the feet, the detox actually goes everywhere, even in the hoof to pull out all the toxins. So that’s the first thing we do in the hoof soaks the second thing we do, and then we look at the whole rest of the balance in the diet, but that would have been really great when they pulled that shoe and they had that issue on that horse and he had a lot of pain in that hoof and you don’t know if it’s an abscess or a hot nail or what’s going on. 

Just like you being in an Epsom salt bath pulls out all the pain. If there’s an abscess, that’s gonna blow it’ll usually come out in 24 hours, it really draws it out.

Amy  5:40  
So this barn does not have hot water. And if she were to transport water, how much and

April Love  5:47  
the warm water is only to dissolve the Epsom salt we have people bring a thermos of hot water from home

Amy  5:53  
okay, and is the temperature of the hot water from your tap like on high,

April Love  5:58  
right but she can dissolve the Epsom salt at home in the warm water, it’s just to dissolve the Epson salt, it’s not the temperature that goes in the boot. You just don’t want all the Epsom salt sitting there in the bottom not doing anything you want the high concentrate of saltwater, we’re saltwater bodies, so we always want to use saline solution.

Amy  6:16  
So that’s just enough for what’s needed in the soaking boot.

April Love  6:20  
Well, it depends on the size of the boots. So I have a YouTube video where I put Tiki’s front hooves in old IV bags I get from the vet because he was barefoot and then you can do get wrapped around it so it’s really tight and then that recipe will do both front feet. So I’ve had people try to soak in just a rubber feed pan and then they have two gallons of water in there. And I’m like if you’re going to have two gallons of water in there because the water has to be higher than the coronary band to go all the way up in the foot to pull out toxins. Then you need more trace minerals and more Epsom salts. So that recipe is for three to eight ounces of water. If you need more water you have to up the recipe. 

Let me say one more thing about that too. When we’re transitioning horses from shod the Barefoot I always recommend that they do that three days first, because it will really toughen the foot you go to pull off the shoes and then the horse doesn’t even want to walk. They’re just not ready to hit the ground. We pulled off shoes on this one mare that they were going to put down couldn’t walk put her in a solution for an hour and she walked out sound. Yeah, so you want to do that three days in a row.

Amy  7:29  
And so you’re saying with the horse shoe on its foot. So do this soak and then take the shoe off the next day?

April Love  7:38  
It really toughens up the soul and tightens the white line the hoof you know separation to be able to support the horse again on the ground.

Amy  7:47  
Is there anything else for the hope soak or anything like that for this particular question?

April Love  7:52  
Well, just that I tell people to squat down behind your horse and you should not see any cracks in the frog going up to the hairline, the coronary band. That’s how deep the bacteria and thrush is into the hoof and that can actually affect your coffin bone and create pain and actually give you the symptoms of individual a navicular horse. 

You know, and so if their heel hurts, you know, if the frog hurts the frog supposed to come down to the ground and be the heart pump and if it has a lot of pain in the frog from the deep bacteria, your heels are going to contract. So the farrier can leave the shoe on to try and get the heels to spread down. But until the horse owners are treating that deep crack everyday and it grows out, the bars in the heels aren’t going to spread. 

So that’s what that’s about for the first three days in a row and then we use the miracle spray recipe that I have on my website to do the frog and you can spray it in a spray bottle under the shoe and it’ll get to the white line area and then you put it on your hand 360 degrees on the coronary band. So while it treats the soul of the hoof, it’s actually also balancing all the energy meridians 

So you’ve got 12 Ting points and the hooves and the front hooves are all about heart wind and digesting nutrition. And the hind feet is all about processing and eliminating toxins. So if you want a hunter jumper horse your front meridians better be balanced for wind stamina and power you have heart lung, large intestine, small intestine, triple heater pericardium balancing their regulation and their body temperature. Your hind liver kidney stomach spleen gallbladder fighting infection processing toxins. So we’ve put the spray on all four coronary bands. 

And you can keep that up spraying it deep into the frog and the frog will finally start to come down when I first made this recipe and I started putting it on Tiki and Chester, my two horses, they were barefoot their feet got bigger and rounder and more concave like a barefoot horse is supposed to be and my trimmer that would come every five weeks. He’s like, what are you doing to your horses hooves all of a sudden they’re different and they’re bigger and hoof wall is stronger and they outgrew their size one easy boot gloves as like going oh, great now I gotta go buy new ones are really expensive. I gotta wait, see what’s happening with my horses feet. How they’re changing. 

But what actually happened with using that is I could now actually go out and ride barefoot, I was giving them a tougher soul. So I didn’t, I went from having to always use easy boot gloves on the front to go ride to having a bigger, rounder hoof on a 19 year old horse and a 12 year old horse that no longer needed easy boot gloves. 

So that hoof soak and that miracle spray is just amazing. And it’ll save you so much money in the long run.

Amy  10:47  
April, somebody at the barn was asking about their horse that has a laminitic hoof. Do you have any advice any suggestions for this person?

April Love  11:00  
It’s usually in both fronts and it’s usually some kind of over toxic overload either mentally environmentally or chemically and we always start with the Nano zeolites. Detoxing the horse 15 drops four times a day in the mouth or to a carrot or Apple piece or non sugary type treat not in the feed. You’ll notice they can have an improvement in walking and just 24 hours unless heat in the hoof. You can look up in your equine acupressure book points that you can stimulate to help with lamintic courses. 

You don’t want to you do want to get the heat out and you might want to bute the horse but you do not want to have cold fresh water on the hoof because the laminae can separate. So if you want to get the heat and throbbing down right away, you need to use a dry ice pack frozen bag of peas, something or the horse wouldn’t be standing in fresh water soaking. 

So you can wrap up ice cubes you can do frozen peas or those blue frozen packs to get the heat and inflammation down right away. Your vet might advise if it was my horse, I’d be giving them two to three grams of bute just to get that inflammation out of the hoof so the coffin bone doesn’t rotate. You really want to cut down on any sugar and sweet feeds you definitely do not want to worm or vaccinate during that time which is just going to throw ’em over the edge. 

So those are good things to start my horse 102 book on Amazon holistic alternatives goes into that a little bit on Amazon you can find the ACZ Nanos zeolites and it’s a people detox that we use on the horses has great results. So those are some things to start if you have a laminitic hourse. 

Amy  12:49  
Thank you. 

April Love  12:50  
And if you have any more questions about any of this, please email me april@horseworks.com Looking forward to talking with you.

Speaker 1  12:58  
Thank you for tuning in to another episode of Holistic Horseworks talks with April love. Remember to check the show notes for links to all the resources mentioned in this episode. Have a question you’d like to submit to the podcast? Email april@holistichorseworks.com For a chance to get it featured on the next episode. Loved this information, share it with your horse friends, they’ll find it helpful to to learn more, visit holistic horseworks.com And before you go, make sure you have a copy of our free ebook, horse 101 everything you wish you had known before you got your first horse at horseacademy101.com