Enlightened Equine

In the first article in this series, I started us down the path to understanding why the proper landing for a horse at the walk has to be flat-footed by describing the anatomical differences between humans and horses, and pointing out the limitations of our ability to perceive fairly significant differences in how the horse lands without using slow-motion video techniques. In this installment, we’ll continue on by examining the orientation of the foot as it travels through the flight arc and prepares to make ground contact.

As you’ll note in the diagram above, the common digital extensor tendon (6) and the deep digital flexor tendon (2) both have insertions (attachments) on the coffin bone – the most distant (distal) bone in the horse’s limb that resides inside the hoof capsule. Like humans, the horse’s foot is stabilized by these tendons as well as ligaments, and, shortly after leaving the ground, its orientation to the rest of the limb immediately above it (long & short pasterns) remains essentially constant throughout most of the flight arc. And like us, horses don’t typically think about where to place the next foot when they walk. So although the tendons stabilize the position of the foot, the attached muscles do not actively pull or relax to reorient it as it prepares to land. In fact, James Rooney’s Biomechanics of Lameness in Horses, which I’ve referenced a number of times before, describes Dr. Rooney’s somewhat counter-intuitive discovery that transecting the extensor and deep flexor tendons in the vicinity of the short pastern really had no significant effect on the orientation of the hoof as it landed. He concluded, therefore, that (like humans) foot placement in “normal” walking is not an active effort. Keep in mind, by the way, that we’re talking only about A/P orientation in the horse; the M/L orientation, as we saw in Part 1, is dictated by the construction of the joint surfaces themselves.

Dr. Rooney’s comments inspired to me look at the center of coffin joint rotation and the center of gravity of a properly-trimmed bare foot, which is fairly easy to do with my CAD system by importing an image of a sagittally-cut foot, visually noting the center of joint rotation, and tracing the foot’s outline so the software can then compute the center of gravity. Check out the images below of one of Brian Hampson’s feral horse feet from Australia/New Zealand. And as an interesting  aside,  also note the bone remodeling evident at the tip of the coffin bone –

The interesting thing about this observation is that it was consistent for all of the feet I looked at in cross-section, regardless of their toe angle. What this means is that the hoof balanced for a proper (flat) landing is quite literally “hung in balance” on the end of the limb! Thus, Dr. Rooney’s experience with the severed tendons makes sense; because the mass of a properly-trimmed bare foot is, by design, evenly distributed in the A/P direction, the tendons are only providing a stabilizing (damping) force rather than actively controlling pastern/foot alignment. This is similar in function to the shock absorbers on an automobile; they don’t determine the position of the car body, but they help the body more quickly return to a neutral position after being displaced.

The point I’m trying to make is that the horse isn’t consciously “aiming” his foot so it hits the ground a particular way based on what’s happening with the bottom of his hoof. Instead, the orientation of the bones of his foot and leg are the consequence of masses, muscle tensions, and joint construction – all under the influence of gravity and other external forces (we’ll get there in a moment!). As designed, the hoof itself is bare, quite short, and (as we saw above) the mass distribution of the foot overall is quite even; therefore, it’s able to quickly accelerate and decelerate to a position of proper alignment with respect to the limb above it, aided by the “neutral” tensions in the tendons/muscles, as it travels through the flight arc. So given a properly-trimmed bare hoof, the net result is that the internal and external structures of the foot will be in proper alignment as the hoof prepares to contact the ground. Check out the following photo, taken from a video of a client, in which the hoof position has been captured as close to the ground as possible just before making contact –

Note, however, that I’ve been using the phrase “properly-trimmed bare hoof.” Within some particular range of variation from “proper,” the internal structures of the foot will still be in the correct orientation with respect to the leg and the ground, but the external structures will not be. You have only to look at the preceding photo to understand that if some part of the hoof is left long with respect to the other parts, the longer part will end up striking the ground first. So a long toe will yield a toe-first landing, and long heels will produce a heel-first landing. As you’ll learn in later articles when I discuss the origins of navicular disease, this is an extremely problematic situation because, by design, the coffin joint is not intended to be rotating at the instant of contact! But if a horse is contacting the ground any way other than flat, the coffin joint will, necessarily, be rotating when the hoof “slaps” the ground as the leg comes under load.

But the situation gets worse. Once the hoof exceeds this range of variation from “proper” (and I don’t pretend to know precisely what those limits are), the internal foot/limb orientation, and therefore the internal and external foot/ground orientation, will be further mitigated by three factors, particularly at the beginning and end of the flight arc. These are: 1) hoof length, 2) hoof weight (mass), and 3) hoof weight (mass) distribution.

Remember Newton’s First Law of Motion?

Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it.

Because the coffin joint is fairly flexible, departures from this “intended design” of a short, properly-balanced bare hoof can have a significant effect on the motion of that joint during the flight arc, with profound consequences on the form of the landing. Probably nearly every horse owner has handled a horseshoe before, but relatively few have held a cadaver horse foot; I can assure you that most steel shoes are a significant percentage of the weight of a foot! And as we add weight to the end of the limb in the form of excess untrimmed growth and/or (more significantly) a shoe, we start changing the dynamics of the flight arc. In essence, the lower limb of the horse begins to act more and more like a double pendulum – the long & short pasterns forming one pendulum suspended from the fetlock joint, and the foot with whatever extra weight has been left or added suspended from the coffin joint. The resulting motion, and the mathematics describing it, can be quite complicated, but we can make some general statements about the effects of length, mass, and mass distribution:

• As the length of the hoof increases, the time it takes to accelerate from the ground or decelerate for a landing increases. This is because the timing (period) of a pendulum is a function of its length; the longer the pendulum, the longer the period.
• As the mass of the hoof increases, the time it takes to accelerate from the ground or decelerate for a landing increases. This is a consequence of both the center of mass shifting away from the coffin joint, effectively lengthening the pendulum and therefore the period; and the increase in the rotational force (moment of inertia) on the coffin joint, to which the period is also proportional.
• As the mass distribution of the hoof moves away from being symmetrical, there will be increased unilateral A/P torsion forces on the joints, affecting both the effective length of the pendulum and the center of mass.

What does all that mean in practical terms? It means a foot designed to contact the ground in a particular orientation with respect to the limb above it may not be able to do so because whatever has been done (or not done) in the trimming/shoeing process has altered its dynamics. This is why a shod horse with obviously-long heels can have a reasonably-flat, or even toe-first, landing. The shoe, whose weight distribution has shifted the foot’s center of gravity toward the toe, is modifying the flight arc such that it’s keeping the toe from rotating properly right before contact. But when you remove the shoe, the horse immediately starts contacting the ground heel-first! Similarly, horses with any type of bar shoe, where the weight of the shoe is much more A/P symmetrical or even back-heavy (depending on the specific design – think about wedges!) tend to really come down heel-first, because the weight of the shoe is keeping the heel down plus the horse’s heels are already too long. And the added weight also increases stresses on joints and soft tissues, because that extra weight must be accelerated and decelerated with every step.

So we’ve now added yet another variable to the “landing picture.” Not only do horses not walk like humans, and not only can we not reliably observe landings at normal speed, but the landings we do observe can be a far cry from “proper” because of how the aforementioned factors can modify pastern/hoof alignment. But the problem is this: as Dr. Deb Bennett says, “What people come to see every day, they naturally come to consider ‘normal’…But what a culture or a nation comes to expect is usually common instead of normal.”

Please don’t fall into the trap of thinking that just because you observe a lot of heel-first landings, they’re supposed to land that way. Those landings are merely common, they’re not biologically normal! That’s simply not the way the equine limb is designed, and we’ll continue to provide further evidence to support this claim in the near future.

More to come…

I hope Mr. Adams doesn’t mind me sharing “Dilbert” with you, but recent events prompted a return to the topic of experts in the horse world, and these particular cartoons seemed especially appropriate! I’ve commented about this problem before in my article entitled The “Expert Syndrome”, and decided to revisit it after a couple of experiences last week.

First, I was visiting the facilities of a trainer whom I’d never met before, and was listening to her talk with one of her clients. They were discussing how and why horses react in various situations when the trainer said, “Now, unlike human beings, the horse’s adrenal gland doesn’t work unless their head is up. Otherwise, it doesn’t secrete anything.”

Wow – that one really threw me! I’d never heard of “position-dependent gland secretion” before, and it seemed highly unlikely. But I am well aware that I am neither a biologist nor an endocrinologist, so I didn’t want to rule out the (seemingly-very-remote) possibility that the trainer was correct. So I called my friend Dr. Bruce Nock, who’s a professor of neurobiology in the psychiatry department of Washington University’s School of Medicine, where he conducts research on stress – the effects of which are intimately connected with the operation of the adrenal gland (Bruce also happens to run our Liberated Horsemanship training programs). And (after he finished laughing,) Bruce confirmed that the whole notion of the horse’s adrenal gland only working when his head is up is, indeed, complete nonsense!

On the surface, though, you can see how someone could relatively easily buy into that story because it sounds somewhat plausible based on our experiences with horses: they appear calm when their head is down, and excitable only when their head is up. But the perpetrator of this myth would seem to be confusing causation and correlation. Just because we typically experience events as occurring together does not mean that one causes the other to occur. And this episode ended up jogging my memory about a similar story from nearly 20 years ago…

Back when I was a relatively new horse owner, I was riding my rather-excitable horse in the indoor arena when another rider remarked that horses spook because they perceive objects as being “larger than they actually are,” which tends to frighten them. “For example,” she stated, “when a horse sees a dog, it looks to him to be the size of a pony!”

Frankly, I didn’t even know how to respond to that because it defied not only the most basic principles of optics, but of logic as well! And yet the woman said she’d recently read it in one of the more popular horse magazines. Back in those days, I was inclined to believe she’d simply misunderstood something the author had written, because I couldn’t imagine anyone with even a modicum of common sense writing anything so preposterous. But the next day, the woman brought me the feature article, written by a veterinarian, which “explained” how horses’ vision works and how they perceive the world. It certainly affected my vision – it was an eye-opening example of what I’ve come to recognize as a very real problem in the horse world.

Given the circumstances, I could hardly fault that horseperson for her confusion. Granted, she should have questioned such a patently absurd claim. But how can I blame her for repeating what she’d read in a leading publication that should have had procedures and policies in place to prevent this sort of thing? She had every right to expect accuracy in what she read. Yet, here was an article with not just a relatively minor and understandable mistake: a misplaced decimal point or an incorrectly-labeled drawing. This was an entire feature article whose fundamental premise was dreadfully flawed, written by some presumably well-intentioned person who should’ve stuck to writing about what she knew, instead of presenting illogical speculation as fact at the readers’ expense.

My point is this: real experts aren’t born; they’re created. They’ve had extensive education(formal and informal) and experience, and can always back up their claims with facts about their education, experience, and the subject matter under discussion. They never rely on the following three “credentials” or their variations as evidence of their expertise, as is all too common in the horse world:

1. I love horses
2. I’ve been doing this for many years
3. I’m an expert in this subject, so I must be an expert in that subject

We all have an obligation to not just accept everything at face value, and, especially, to not pass it along without questioning its origins and accuracy. A few days ago, I noticed a Facebook post by my wonderful friend Jessica imploring people to stop sharing information about a particular group of horses because the situation had been resolved and the information was no longer correct. I admire and respect her for that, and wish more horsepeople took that initiative! And while that situation as well as the ones I’ve been sharing are probably relatively harmless in the grand scheme of things, other types of misinformation can lead to much more serious consequences, and not challenging it can very possibly put the safety and welfare of not only yourself and your horse, but of others and their horses, at risk. I’ll close with a much more serious and extreme example to really demonstrate this point…

I once spent a day helping a farrier fine-tune his trimming skills. This gentleman had been a shoer for quite some time, and had an impressive collection of leg and foot bones he carried around with him. As he was showing me his collection, he pulled out a pair of coffin bones with well-defined, nearly horizontal, grooves on their front faces. I’d never seen anything like that before, and asked him where the grooves had come from. He explained that a client had had a horse that foundered – extreme laminitis where the coffin bone has moved out of position – and a friend of the client told him that his horse’s pain was caused by “pressure building up inside the hoof.” So the client promptly pulled out his electric reciprocating saw, and sawed through the front of the horse’s hooves.

I absolutely cringe when I think about the pain that horse had to have experienced; already in the midst of the most painful condition a horse can endure, and someone decided it made sense to saw into his feet all the way into the bones! I can only hope they ended his life quickly and humanely.

What we choose to believe, and what we choose to share, matters, because actions nearly always have consequences, and lives may quite literally rest in your hands.

Please choose wisely…

Yes, I know it’s been far too long since I’ve posted an article, but life seems to have a way of interfering with my writing! The good news is that I now have  several articles well under way, and so will try hard to keep the gaps shorter.

I had to laugh when I saw the above image as part of an advertisement in one of my technical magazines a couple of months ago, because it seemed as if they knew I was going to be writing this article on heel-first landings and wanted to help illustrate the problem with an easily-understood picture! But that statement will probably make more sense later on…

I want to be absolutely clear right from the start: this notion that horses are “supposed” to land heel-first is, without a doubt, one of the most widely-propagated and dangerous misunderstandings currently in vogue in the horse world. I had intended to start posting my series of articles on navicular disease, but since navicular disease and landings are so closely connected, and because I decided I simply couldn’t bear to listen to one more horse owner or hoof care provider tell me that horses should land heel-first, I decided my priority had to be to weigh in on this very important subject now. In fact, this article could just as correctly be called “Navicular Disease – Part 0.” So although I’ve briefly mentioned in the past that a properly-trimmed horse will land flat at the walk (see, for example, Hoof Angles – Part 4), I haven’t yet discussed the logic behind that assertion at length. By doing so here, I hope to save a lot of horses from a lot of problems on down the road.

To be fair, I also need to tell you that I, too, used to believe horses should land heel-first because years earlier I’d read a passing statement in renowned equine pathologist Dr. James Rooney’s book Biomechanics of Lameness in Horses in which he said that horses land flat to slightly heel-first (emphasis added). He did not, however, mention the conditions, such as gait or speed, under which he believed this to be the case, nor did he state whether or not this was a theory based on physiology, or merely an observation of horses he’d encountered. Interestingly, later parts of the same book strongly contradict the heel-first part of his statement, which he then supports with both theory and observation, and his most recent writings on the subject clearly state that the horse should land flat at the walk. In his webpage discussion of feral hoof form entitled “The Shape of the Equine Hoof,” for example, he says:

At the slow walk, the hoof usually contacts the surface over the whole bearing edge of the hoof wall; that is, the foot impacts flat-footed.

Unfortunately, this fallacy about heel-first landings still persists, largely (I believe) because one particular barefoot clinician has stated it many times in his clinics, and because humans tend to land heel-first. But long before I’d read Dr. Rooney’s most recent work, or even his earlier work more carefully, I’d already come to the conclusion that common sense tells us a properly-trimmed horse – whether by nature or by human – must land flat at the walk. In talking to many people over a number of years about this subject, I’ve found that non-horse people, especially technical types, tend to immediately understand why, while many horse people seem to struggle with it. But I’ll do my best to make it clear!

In this installment, we’ll take a look at two things we need to understand before really discussing the landing problem at length: first, the differences between biped and quadruped limb construction and movement, and second, the issues surrounding how humans perceive landings.

As you’ll see in this image from Dr. Deb Bennett’s Principles of Equine Orthopedics Part 1 comparing the equine and human forelimb, they’re very different in both structure and function –

So in the forelimb, what we generally refer to as the horse’s “knee” is in fact his wrist, or carpus. The horse actually walks on a hoof attached to what would be the last joint of our middle finger. In the rear limb, the horse’s ankle is the hock joint, and not the fetlock as may seem intuitive. The image below shows their comparative anatomy; the hock image is from Principles of Equine Orthopedics Part 1, and the ankle image is from www.kidport.com –

As we consider differences in the way we move, it’s important to note the consequences of these anatomical distinctions. The human ankle consists of an inverted cup of bone perched on top of a ball, stabilized by ligaments. It’s quite compliant by design, and although it flexes fairly readily in both the front-to-back (A-P) and side-to-side (M-L) directions, it’s less stiff and has a far greater range of motion in the A-P direction. In contrast, the forelimb diagram above shows the lowest joint in the equine limb to consist of much broader surfaces designed to articulate only in the A-P direction. With good reason, I might add; if you’ve ever rolled your foot to the inside in a misstep, you can imagine the “train wreck” that would occur if a horse were able to do that at 40 MPH! That complete lack of lateral flexibility, incidentally, is also the reason so-called “corrective” trimming & shoeing is such a long-term disaster, as I pointed out in What Makes it “Natural Hoof Care?”.

The following image from R. C. Schafer’s book entitled Clinical Biomechanics: Musculoskeletal Actions and Reactions (2nd ed.) is very helpful in understanding biped locomotion. Pay particular attention to where the torso is with respect to the leading and supporting limbs –

And here’s what the author has to say about the mechanics of walking:

Biomechanically, walking can be considered as a series of continuous losses and recoveries of balance in which the rhythmic play of muscles narrowly averts toppling. Steindler refers to the basic sequence of movements in walking as a “series of catastrophes narrowly averted.”

In other words, walking in a particular direction involves shifting your center of mass in the direction you wish to go, and then “catching yourself” with the leading leg as your mass comes over that leg. In essence, you fall forward to move forward. And if your foot is in a neutral position – basically perpendicular to the axis of your leg – it strikes the ground more and more heel-first as your stride length increases.

The quadruped, on the other hand, doesn’t walk like that because their center of mass is never ahead of the leading limb while it’s loaded. The cat in the following (bad!) photos walked through my video setup while I was recording a horse. As you can clearly see, he’s stable on 3 legs and his center of mass is behind the leading leg. Like your horse, he doesn’t have to “fall” onto the leading leg like you and I must do to move forward. You’ll also note he’s definitely not landing heel-first, and I didn’t even have to trim him! –

The other part of this background information has to do with how humans perceive things. Back in 2008 when I began to seriously question this notion of a heel-first landing being “correct,” I became convinced that humans probably aren’t able to see differences in timing between heel contact and toe contact. So I wrote to a number of researchers in the field of visual perception, and posed the following question (since I couldn’t assume they knew anything about horses!):

An observer watches (but does not hear) someone slap both hands down on a tabletop in a brightly-lit kitchen. At what interval between slaps will the hands striking the tabletop appear to be a simultaneity?

The responses I received were all nearly identical, but Dr. Ken Norwich, Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto’s Institute of Biomedical Engineering provided the following answer with some qualifiers:

How bright is the light used to make the observation? The interval you seek will depend on the illumination. What is the background to the images of the hands? Let us assume that it is a black background, but contrast will also affect the measured interval. Probably the interval is very close to the reciprocal of the flicker fusion frequency i.e. the frequency of flicker where an observer sees a steady image rather than a flickering light. This frequency is about 55 seconds (-1), so the interval you are looking for is at least as great as 0.02 seconds, or 1/50th of a second, and that is for a very bright image.

So in brightly-lit conditions against a high-contrast background, the limit of a human’s perception is in the neighborhood of 20 milliseconds. Any timing difference between heel and toe contact shorter than that will be seen as a flat landing. And just how many barns have you been in where you find “brightly-lit conditions against a high-contrast background?” Darned few, if any, in my experience!

To help put things into more meaningful terms, observe the first set of hoof images in this post. This heel-first landing, from heel contact to toe contact, was quite obvious to me at normal speed, and measures approximately 80 milliseconds.

And now take a look at the following two landings –

In both of these cases, the heel-first landing wasn’t particularly apparent at normal speed, and only became obvious when I slowed down the video. Although the background isn’t very high-contrast, the lighting was reasonably bright. They both also measure approximately 20 milliseconds from heel down to toe down. In fact, of the 6 heel-first landings I happen to have slow-motion video of as I write this, the average heel-to-toe contact time was only 32 milliseconds – alarmingly close to the limits of human perception under ideal laboratory conditions.

Therein lies the rub: if you can see an obvious heel-first landing, the landing must be very heel-first in order for you to perceive it as such! And soon I’ll explain why that’s a serious problem for your horse.

So those are the first two hurdles to overcome in this discussion of landings in horses: regardless of what you may observe about human movement, you cannot apply it to equine movement because horses and humans are fundamentally different; and, the timing of a heel-first landing strains the limits of human perception, so you can’t be absolutely certain of anything without using additional tools such as slow-motion video.

More soon…

There’s a company called Farriers’ Greeting Cards that sells all manner of practical paper products – business cards, billing forms, greeting cards, etc. – for hoof care professionals. They also have a number of less practical ones featuring “things not to say to a hot, tired farrier” sayings that no doubt everyone in the hoof care world can relate to, like “Now that you’re done, could you hold that check till next week?” and “I’ve been planning to work with this yearling – just haven’t found the time to get him halter trained yet.” This product line came to mind the other night when a long-time client asked me if she was a “good client.”

The answer to such a question is obviously a matter of opinion, because everyone has his or her own idea of what is and isn’t acceptable behavior for both horse and human. But given the “things not to say” phrases, I’m guessing all hoof care providers have similar issues, and only our tolerance to the severity of the infractions varies with the individual. For me, I think it all boils down to the following six statements. And please note that although abundant, I’m avoiding any specific anecdotes in this article! So, here are my expectations –

Have your horse ready. When I arrive, I expect you to already be present and prepared for me, which means the horse is immediately available – not out in a pasture somewhere – and reasonably clean and dry. Please don’t wash the horse right before I arrive, because working on a soaking-wet animal, especially in cold weather, is not my idea of a good time! If the horse is muddy, it’s far better to brush and/or wipe off the mud, and the rest will quickly dry. If it’s fly season, please let me use my herbal-based fly spray on your horse rather than have to be in direct contact with pyrethrin-based products. Pyrethrin – derived from chrysanthemums – is a neurotoxin, and I’d rather not be rubbing it into my skin all day!

Provide a reasonable work environment. To do the best possible work for you and your horse, I need to be able to both see what I’m doing and not have potentially dangerous items in the work area. The light in most barns usually isn’t the best because it’s directly overhead, which means that my own shadow and/or the horse’s shadow prevents a good view of the hoof. Ideally, the light should come from above and behind the horse. And make certain there’s adequate clear space around the horse, which includes not being in a major traffic spot. Constantly stopping to move myself, my tools, and the horse makes for a very long appointment.

Keep me safe. My preference is nearly always for you to hold your horse while I work, because it allows the horse some latitude in movement. Prompt handler correction for inappropriate behavior (the horse’s!) is important but needs to be coordinated with me, since I’m usually the one at risk when the horse jumps or dances away. And much as I might like your dog or chicken (yes, chickens like hoof trimmings!), your horse may not have the same warm feelings. And my constantly worrying about falling over one of your animals only increases the odds of one of us getting hurt.

Pay me promptly. If you’re not able to hand me cash, a good check, or a credit card as payment for my services at the conclusion of the appointment, please reschedule before I get there. We did, after all, agree on this date and time probably well in advance of the actual appointment, so it’s not a surprise – you knew you needed to pay me! I do realize things happen, of course, but if you get caught short, please be courteous enough to tell me before I begin so I have the option of not doing the work at that time. I, too, have bills!

Respect my time. I love horses, or I wouldn’t be doing this work, and I truly enjoy talking with my clients. Nevertheless, I’m not there to play with your horse, watch you train your horse, or always spend a lot of extra time in conversation, because I owe my next client the same prompt and efficient service I just gave you. If your horse requires time for training or energy release before trimming, please have it done before I get there. Otherwise, tell me in advance and expect to pay for the extended appointment.

Acknowledge your role. Even if I spend an entire hour with you and your horse every 6 weeks, it still amounts to less than one-tenth of one percent (<0.1%) of any given year that I’m actively caring for his feet and providing advice. You are responsible for the other 99.9% of the time. His diet, the amount of time he spends moving (not standing), and the terrain over which he travels all directly contribute to the quality of material his foot produces, and therefore factor greatly into the potential for owning a healthy and pain-free barefoot horse, which is always my objective. But I don’t have control over those things – you do!

And now for the other side of the coin…

You, the client, naturally have certain expectations of me as well, which I always strive to meet or exceed. But at a bare minimum, you can always expect me to –

Return your phone calls, emails, and/or messages as promptly as possible, including requests for appointments and answering whatever questions you may have. I’m always amazed when people tell me horror stories about hoof care providers’ bad attitudes and poor business practices, and I don’t ever want to be perceived in that way!

Show up on time and prepared to work. I generally have a good idea of how long it takes to trim a particular horse, and don’t schedule appointments so close together that I’m late for the next appointment. Sure, things can and do happen. But if I’m more than 5 minutes late for an appointment, which is extremely unusual, something has happened and I’ll do my best to let you know I’m running behind.

Give you and your horse the full benefit of my hoof knowledge, trimming skills, and horse-handling abilities. That includes answering questions and being patient with both of you, and not taking out whatever frustrations I may have on your horse no matter what happens. Horses have good and bad days, as do owners. And trimmers. Nevertheless, you’ll still get my best work.

Act as your advocate to other horse owners, barn owners, veterinarians, and other equine professionals. The decision to have your horse’s feet properly trimmed in accordance with what nature and logic tell us to be true can be difficult enough; other people, usually with good intentions but bad information, can make your decision seem like the most challenging thing you’ve ever taken on. I’m always happy to discuss the merits of proper hoof care with them, as well as provide other opportunities for educating them. You’re never alone!

Those are my specific promises to you, and I believe every hoof care professional should have the same, or certainly a very similar, set of criteria for their behavior and the care they provide to their clients. So…is your hoof care provider a good hoof care provider?

And are you a “good client?”

For me, this has definitely been a record year for losses of loved ones, which, of course, all of us go through at various times in our lives. Most recently, I received word that less than a week after I last saw him, my very dear long-time friend Gerald Bremseth unexpectedly passed away. And so I decided the best thing I could do was to pay tribute to this truly remarkable man by sharing a bit about him with my readers.

I first met Gerald in 1982 when I moved to Oklahoma City to work as an engineer for Altec Lansing, a manufacturer of high-end industrial/professional audio equipment. This was not, I hasten to say, the Altec now known to most of the public as a supplier of inexpensive computer loudspeakers; this was the Altec who was a pioneer in the fields of sound reproduction and acoustics, and manufactured massive loudspeaker systems found in every major recording studio, and in movie theaters, churches, and large sound-system installations, all over the world. But it’s also the company, through its University Sound division, that made many less-publicly-visible products: ceiling loudspeakers for schools, hospitals, and airports; outdoor loudspeakers for ball fields, race tracks, and amusement parks; and specialty loudspeakers for things like swimming pools, mines, and oil rigs.

As Chief Engineer, Gerald was responsible for the design and/or redesign of many of the company’s hundreds of products, and since I was hired to develop new production test methods for those products, we ended up spending a great deal of time together and becoming fast friends. For many months, evenings and weekends often consisted of intense work sessions as we designed and implemented computer-controlled test systems for several of our production lines. And as I shared meals and off-time with him and his family, I began to understand what an exceptional man he was. To give you some sense of the scope of his expertise: after leaving Altec, he worked on the design of what was later considered the most advanced production line in the world for AT&T’s brand-new line of personal computers – an accomplishment acknowledged by a visit from President Reagan; he then moved to Colorado, where he initially helped develop an automated switching system for power companies to monitor and respond to changing power requirements, and later wrote the software for a National Weather Service raincloud-study project to acquire and measure ice crystals in clouds at jet airplane speeds. Not bad for a guy with a degree in chemical engineering, right? But he was also an award-winning photographer, and was extremely well-versed in physics, mechanics, and optics.

In spite of all of this, Gerald, like most engineers, remained largely unknown to the general public even though his efforts touched (and still touch) the lives of many hundreds of thousands of people. Nevertheless, there was one area of his life where his expertise was acknowledged at the very highest levels: Gerald was a competitive rifle shooter, and won many, many awards for his exceptional skill in shooting. In fact, he won the Individual Rifle Match at the Camp Perry National Matches in 1958, for which he received the Medal of Honor – the highest award issued by the U.S. Congress, and the only non-combat circumstance for which it’s given. Winning this, by the way, requires an amazing bit of shooting – at its extreme, hitting a plate-sized target at 600 yards! And yet, as fate would have it, his college newspaper reported the event but misspelled his name, giving credit to “George Brumworth” instead. Regardless, he was very proud of his shooting accomplishments, and could talk at great length about the design and use of all types of firearms.

We remained close friends until the very end, and continued to work together on a number of projects for various companies around the country – some extremely serious, and some pretty far-out. There was the automatic fish counter. The golf swing analyzer. The underwater whale teaching system. The cardiac monitor. And many, many more. Each of us relied on the other as both a sounding board for ideas, and as a source of information the other didn’t possess. In that respect I had the advantage, as I’m sure I learned far more from him than he from me.

And, finally, Gerald had a great sense of humor, and we spent a lot of time laughing together. He was always very proud of his Norwegian heritage, and often talked of wanting to visit the little town in Norway where his father’s family had come from. In fact, he had a favorite silly little poem he used to frequently recite, and so I’ll close this tribute with it –

Ten thousand Swedes,
Ran through the weeds,
Chased by one Norwegian.

You truly chased a lot of dreams for success in your life, Gerald, and certainly caught far more of them than most do. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of that, and chase many of them beside you – a debt which I cannot repay.

So chase on, my dear friend.

Chase on…