Enlightened Equine

I realize this may seem to some like a radical departure from my usual articles about hoof care, but since the subtitle of the site is, after all, “Better Horse Management through Science,” I thought it appropriate to weigh in on a common situation I see in barns every summer. And that’s the one where people are trying to use fans – usually a lot of them – in what I see as a largely futile attempt to cool the barn. Here’s a photo of a typical fan arrangement in a horse barn. Note not only the box fans on each stall, facing inward, but the large fan on the floor and the blower on farther down the aisle. And yes, that’s my horse Andy wondering what I’m doing!

 So what’s wrong with this setup? Well, several things. Cooling takes place when a body loses heat by transferring it to cooler molecules, either directly to cooler air, or indirectly to perspiration and then to cooler air. Think of it like this: heat always moves from higher temperatures to lower temperatures, which means you don’t (can’t) “add cold” to an environment, but can only “remove heat.” So for cooling to occur, the surrounding air temperature has to be cooler – and ideally, drier – than the horse. The greater the difference in temperatures, the more rapidly heat will move. And it’s also important to note that cooling a horse isn’t like cooling a pie, because a horse’s body is constantly converting food to (heat) energy and we’ve got to stay ahead of that conversion in order to effectively cool him.

When moving air passes by an object, a couple of things happen. First, if the object is warmer than the moving air, the warmer object will give up heat to the cooler air, making that “chunk” of air warmer. That’s why the air needs to move – a new chunk of cooler air must take its place for the heat transfer to continue, or the air and the object will be at the same temperature and no cooling will take place. And second, if the object is wetter than the moving air, some of the moisture will evaporate and heat will once again be transferred to the air. And as in the first situation, a new chunk of drier air must replace the now-wetter air for the process to continue. When a living, perspiring being is the object in this second situation, this cooling effect is perceived as being greater than it actually is because the being’s body is constantly attempting to maintain its surface temperature. This perceived effect is referred to as wind chill.

Blowing air in the general vicinity of a horse, consequently, does very little actual cooling because the air doesn’t really “go” anywhere; it simply wraps around the fan and transfers its heat and moisture to the other air in the vicinity. So, very quickly, you reach a state of equilibrium in which all you’re doing is recirculating high-temperature, moisture-laden air. The vast majority of cooling that seems to be occurring is really only because of wind chill, and not because of any actual significant temperature reduction. That also means the fans not aimed directly at a horse or a person aren’t doing anything at all other than recirculating the same small amount of air over and over again. Check out the following diagram of the barn aisle in the photo above, with the temperatures measured in the seven locations indicated both with and without the fans running –

Notice anything? It would probably shock most barn owners to see that the inside temperatures, at least in these two sets of measurements, were closer to the outside temperatures with the fans off! That means in spite of moving literally tens of thousands of cubic feet of air per minute, not to mention spending money to do it, you’re actually making the situation worse with the fans rather than better.

So is trying to cool a barn really a no-win situation? Not at all. Horse people just seem to go about it the wrong way, and ought to take a cue from many livestock barns. To effectively cool the barn, which, unless you’re willing to invest in some sort of refrigeration system means lowering the barn temperature & humidity to match the outside air temperature & humidity when it’s cooler outside, you have to replace the air in the barn. And it’s a lot easier and less expensive to do than you might think. It’ll also lower your electricity costs, labor costs, and risk of fire.

You begin the process by understanding that in order to really move air, you have to use a fan properly. A fan is, in effect, an air pump, and works by decreasing the pressure on one side of it while increasing the pressure on the other side. When it’s just sitting in space, there isn’t anything separating the lower-pressure side from the higher-pressure one, so the actual air movement any distance from the fan is very small. It’s like trying to fill a balloon with water by aiming a hose at it from several feet away. You might manage to get a little water into it, but it certainly isn’t going to make a big splash! So just as we can make filling the balloon much more efficient by keeping the water pressure confined to only the inside of the balloon, we can greatly increase the efficiency of a fan by separating its inlet from its outlet.

That means we need to think about making the barn more of a closed box, with a fan or fans mounted through the wall of the box to pull the warmer inside air out of the barn and, thereby, draw in cooler outside air through openings in our box. We can take advantage of the faster air movement that occurs at the openings by using the stall windows as our air inlets, and adjusting how open or closed they are to both balance the airflow and create a fan-like effect (same thing – a pressure difference) to blow air on our horses and utilize wind chill for additional perceived cooling. It’s also important to turn the fans on only when the inside temperature is higher than the outside; otherwise, you’ll be heating the barn! So you need a thermostat arrangement that will compare inside and outside temperatures in carefully-chosen locations (maybe more than one location inside the barn), and turn on the fans accordingly. Here’s my proposed fan placement for the barn I’ve been describing –

Choosing fan quantity, size, and location is relatively simple. First, look for possible mounting places in the barn that are as equidistant from as many stalls as possible, so with the stall windows open the same amount, the quantity of air moving into and out of each stall is about the same. If what I’m describing isn’t quite clear, it may help to imagine a round barn with stalls placed around the perimeter, with a window in each stall. Placing the fan in the center of the roof would give fairly even airflow throughout the stalls, assuming the windows were all open the same amount. If you were to place the fan directly over one of the stalls, though, most of the air movement would be from that stall unless you started closing windows closer to the fan to pull air from the more distant stalls. You’d like to avoid that scenario as much as possible, because you want all of the horses to experience the same benefit from wind chill. Since warm air rises, try to find locations closer to the ceiling; don’t rule out using roof-mounted fans, either. Many barns, like the one in the example, are long and narrow, so you may end up with two or three sites. You shouldn’t, however, need any more than that in any horse barn I’ve seen, as you’ll soon see from the math.

Next, you’ll have to calculate fan size. For that, you’ll need three pieces of information: the number of fans, the volume of the barn in cubic feet, and the air turnover rate, which is the amount of time in minutes it takes to completely replace the air in the barn. Typical values for air turnover rate range from 10 to 20 minutes. Rather than lead you through the formulas, though, I decided to create a very simple MS Excel spreadsheet to make it easier, since I suspect many of you (like my students) both despise math and/or have forgotten most of what you learned in high school! If you have anything other than a flat, sloped, or peaked roof (like a gambrel roof, for example), you’ll have to do more measuring to calculate an accurate volume. But “guesstimating” the numbers in this application is generally sufficient. Here’s the spreadsheet –

Barn Ventilation Fan Calculator

Once you have the CFM per fan calculated, it’s just a matter of choosing a fan or fans with sufficiently-high airflow to meet or exceed the required value. To completely replace the air in the barn in 10 minutes, my example barn needs two fans, each with a CFM rating of at least 2,500. Looking online at a fan supplier such as this one, I see a number of 16″ shutter-type exhaust fans with ratings over 2,500 CFM. On the other hand, if I’m content to replace the air every 15 minutes, the required CFM drops to 1,667 per fan, and I can use 12″ models instead. I do recommend both shuttered and heavy-duty fans, by the way, to minimize potential problems.

Now, the really interesting thing about all of this is the most common box fans used in barns are 20″ fans with CFM ratings of between 1,700 and 2,200 per fan. That means in my example barn, there’s already a total capacity of over 25,000 CFM – five times what’s necessary, with the ability to replace all of the air in the barn every 2 minutes – but it’s not working because the fans are not being properly used! So instead of fifteen 20″ fans running in my example barn, I can replace all of them with only two 16″ fans, and do a far better job of cooling the horses! Quite a revelation, right?

There’s much more to say, but this should at least get you thinking about more efficient, less expensive, and safer ways to cool your barn. I’ve already put a PDF version of this article in the Printable Article Archive that can be easily printed and shared with your barn-owning friends. More coming…

It’s a constant struggle. The other night I gave a 2-year-old mustang born in a BLM holding facility his first real trim. I say “real” because he surely must’ve been trimmed at least once or twice in the holding facility, but almost certainly either in a squeeze chute, tranquilized, or both. As you can see, he has practically textbook-perfect feet, with smooth, healthy frogs and soles, and thick, uniform hoof walls. The problem was, the owner who’d adopted him had been told by her veterinarian just a couple of days earlier that he had an entire litany of front hoof and leg problems: both feet were clubbed, an extensor tendon was about to bow, he’d had a couple of bouts of laminitis and was currently experiencing another, and he had a bad case of thrush. She was therefore understandably in a state of near-panic when I showed up to trim the horse.

And so I was once again in the too-familiar position of trying to explain to the owner that her horse was not only going to be fine, but that he in reality had none of the problems described by the vet! The closest thing I could find was evidence that he probably previously had a fairly mild bacterial infection (but not thrush) in one frog.

Four nights earlier, I had been asked to look at a draft mare whose owner had been told by a farrier (not hers) that her horse’s lameness was being caused by laminitis. Her vet subsequently performed an exam, including radiographs, and confirmed the laminitis diagnosis, and her regular farrier was then called in to replace the shoes and put on pads. As was the case with the mustang, this mare didn’t have the problem identified by not just one, but by three, professionals! Instead, she had a very obvious and very severe infection of the frog in one of her front feet (see Mistaken Identity for more information on these infections) that was causing her lameness.

And I’ll save a complete description of the instance last month where the horse owner was told, after radiographs and nerve blocks, that his horse had “mild navicular” and desperately needed wedge shoes, when in reality he had sore hips, for my upcoming series on navicular disease.

I’m also not going to mention the amount of money that changed hands between owners and other professionals in these three situations, because it just makes me angry, and should make the horse owners angry as well!

So why do these misdiagnoses happen, you may ask? Simple: because, as I’ve mentioned in previous articles, most veterinarians just aren’t adequately trained in matters of the hoof (see An Interview with The Vet). I remember one young woman a month away from vet school graduation telling me she wished I could come lecture at the school because she’d learned nothing of substance about the equine hoof in the entire time she’d been there. And now, as she said, she was about to graduate, was out riding with a horse vet, and was constantly encountering hoof problems she knew very little about. I have to give her a lot of credit, though, for at least recognizing (and acknowledging) what she didn’t know, given that a lack of recognition is at the root of this problem (see The “Expert Syndrome”) in my opinion.

And the situation with the majority of hoof care providers isn’t much better. Most horse owners probably don’t realize that not only is there no legal or licensing requirement – no measure of competence needed – for calling yourself a hoof care professional in the vast majority of this country, but that what’s studied in the various horseshoeing schools, assuming your farrier even attended one, is metalworking. That means the person you’re entrusting with the primary care of your horse’s hooves may well have never studied the underlying mechanical or medical causes for the numerous pathologies that can occur in the equine foot, or even taken a basic anatomy class. Or understand why it’s important to do so.

At this point, I want to be very clear about two things. First, my goal in writing this is not to be unduly critical of veterinarians and other hoof care providers; on the contrary, I have a lot of respect for many of their considerable talents and knowledge that I don’t happen to possess. I just continue to hold out hope that they’ll recognize and acknowledge the gaps in their training and do something about them, for the sake of horses and their owners! And second, I’m not suggesting that licensing or other government-imposed requirements are the solution to the problem, because I think it’s been repeatedly demonstrated both here and in other countries that such things simply don’t work.

Instead, I’m offering a solution that relies on the horse owners’ help: I’m asking owners to place consumer-imposed “regulations” on their hoof care professionals to ensure they’ve been adequately educated and are up to the task. As I’ve said before, and as the anecdotes at the beginning of this article reinforce: in spite of what owners very much want to believe, most horses aren’t excelling because of receiving good hoof care, but are rather getting by in spite of receiving mediocre hoof care. I’ve already written quite a bit on this subject so I won’t say any more about it in this article, but a good introduction to sorting things out can be found here.

In keeping with that solution, I’m especially pleased to announce that the second offering of Liberated Horsemanship’s Kick Start Clinic will take place at The Ohio State University ATI in Wooster, Ohio (where I teach) this coming October 11th – 13th. This intensive 3-day program is aimed squarely at the hoof care professional interested in filling in some of those knowledge gaps with respect to hoof care theory & practice, in an effort to help the already-experienced professional onto the fast track to becoming a Certified Hoof Care Professional through Liberated Horsemanship. And that means something. Being certified through our program indicates that the hoof care provider has not only spent many hours trimming hooves of all types, but has also successfully completed a whole-horse-centric education and examination on hoof care theory & practice, anatomy, and booting, as well as other management issues such as nutrition and stress management. And those are the minimum requirements for certification; advanced clinic topics currently include the veterinarian/trimmer relationship, physical therapy, custom boot fitting, advanced anatomy, biomechanics & movement, dentistry, and managing hoof pathologies.

Equally as exciting is that Dr. Nock has agreed to open up the lecture portions (but not the trimming portions) of this clinic to auditors, which means any interested party can receive over 10 hours of education in hoof care – the same education taught to hoof care professionals from all over the world – for only $400! This is a great opportunity to learn from four highly-educated and eminently-qualified acknowledged experts in the field of hoof care.

So please consider joining us for three highly-informative and entertaining days in October. I promise you an educational experience that will put you in a position to better assess – and appreciate – the abilities and knowledge of your veterinarian and hoof care provider. Invite your veterinarian, hoof care provider, and fellow horse owners to attend as well. Even consider joining forces with other horse owners in your barn and offering to help defray the expense for your farrier to attend. He or she won’t regret it, and you and your horses will be much better off for it!

Hope to see you in October…

(And a special note of thanks to my assistant “Faith” for cleaning the mustang’s hooves for their photo session!)

 

This youngster looks really upset, doesn’t he? But his contentment with me is only part of the hoof-care story, which brings me to the subject of this post: the following email I received from a brand-new client the other day –

 Steve, I just wanted to take a minute and thank you for the work you did on _______ on Sunday. By Monday I saw a difference. This evening (Wednesday) I had my horse back. She has not moved this fluidly in 5 years.

This horse owner had been unhappy with her farrier for quite a while because it seemed to her that her horse’s hooves weren’t properly balanced. And she was right: besides the usual too-long heels, her horse’s rear hooves had been out of medial/lateral (side-to-side) balance for a long time, as evidenced by the asymmetrical flares in the heel quarters. But, as she explained to me, although she’d been observing my work at her barn for a year and was impressed with how well the horses were doing, she just couldn’t figure out how to tell her farrier “goodbye.”

This is certainly not the first time I’ve heard this story. I remember one owner in particular who called me in to look at a horse with an undiagnosed and absolutely crippling frog infection neither her farrier nor her vet had managed to recognize. That horse’s hooves, along with her other 3 horses’ hooves, were also quite out of balance. And yet, in spite of the realization that her horse was suffering at the hands of her current farrier because of his apparent lack of knowledge, as well as the other problems with his work, she was extremely reluctant to dismiss him. “He’s such a nice guy!” she kept exclaiming.

“Niceness” is a wonderful quality, of course, but my horse doesn’t really care a fig about that. He cares about the hoof care provider’s competence, horse-handling abilities, and overall demeanor. Those are the characteristics of any equine professional that ultimately matter to the horse. If my horse’s care providers possess those characteristics, I may (or may not) elect to overlook some of the other things I hear about them, like chronic lateness, unreturned phone calls, unwillingness to answer questions, arrogance, and just plain rudeness. Frankly, I don’t see why I shouldn’t expect to “have it all” from anyone calling himself or herself a professional, but everyone has a different tolerance for what they consider to be “too much.” On the other hand, if I thought for one moment that my horse’s care providers weren’t adequately trained and doing the absolute best possible for him, they’d be gone in half a heartbeat, nice or not!

Sadly, that’s the case in the hoof care world – at least, in the U.S., where there aren’t any licensing or certification requirements for hoof care providers (which, I might add, absolutely shocked a horse owner from the U.K. when I told her that the other day). So the burden is on the owner to try to determine whether or not a person under consideration is adequately prepared to take on the job. And how do you determine that? Well, I’d begin by reading these 5 articles –

• What Makes It “Natural Hoof Care?”
• Natural Hoof Care Revisited (or “Promises, Promises”)
• A Matter of Conscience
• Half a Trim?
• How Do You Know?

The information presented in them will help you figure out if your hoof care provider, or one under consideration, is actually up to the task from a knowledge perspective. And while I realize they’re written with the barefoot horse in mind, I want to emphasize that everything in them is equally relevant to a horse who wears shoes. That’s because physics is physics, and the laws of nature don’t change just because I might wish they could! So what’s important in trimming a horse to be barefoot is equally important when trimming a horse about to be shod.

Once the hoof care provider has cleared the knowledge hurdle, move on to the others. Watch him or her trim a horse or two, and observe how he/she interacts with the animals. Do the horses seem reasonably happy, or can’t wait to get away? Does the handling seem unnecessarily rough? Would you want him or her performing a professional service on you? At that point, the rest is pretty easy; you can decide readily enough whether the people and business skills are adequate, and probably gain some useful insight by talking to some existing customers (which he/she should be happy to have you do).

So if your hoof care professional isn’t measuring up, whether because of a lack of knowledge, a lack of horse or people skills, or both, think hard about making a change. And if it’s the right thing for your horse, politely tell your current hoof care provider “thanks” and move on. Use the card below if you like; clicking on it will take you to a printable version –

As hard as I know this can be, it’s very important. And, ultimately, your horse will thank you for it. He’ll reward your difficult decision with a happier attitude, better movement, and more years of sound service, which also means more riding time with fewer vet bills. And you’ll reward your decision with less worry, less drama, and a happier attitude about every trip to the barn, which means less overall stress in your life.

Life is, indeed, short. You’re worth it. And so is your horse.

A few weeks ago, I was lamenting to a friend about the decided lack of representations of the shoeless horse in the horse world. I mean, every piece of jewelry, sign, and T-shirt uses the horseshoe as a symbol of the horse. But for those of us who don’t believe horseshoes are in the best interest of our animals, we’d rather not use that particular image to symbolize the significance of the horse in our lives. “Why don’t you design a sticker?” she said. “Everyone likes stickers!” And since I had to start somewhere, I decided that was a great idea.

The result is a 3-1/2″ square sticker featuring an image I took of a feral horse’s beautiful hoof whose trim is provided courtesy of extreme movement over abrasive terrain – a true “natural trim.” The removable backing directs the sticker holder to this website, in case you want to hand them out as a means of promoting natural hoof care and/or hoof care education in general.

The silk-screened vinyl sticker is coated for UV protection and is rated for 5 years of outdoor use, so you can put them on tack boxes, trailers, bumpers…anywhere you want to display your support for our barefoot friends.

Order your stickers here, and help spread the word!

 

P.S. I’ve also added a Products section to the sidebar on the right. Stay tuned for more items…

Hello Steve,

Hope you can help me out. I own a thoroughbred racehorse, and want to know that he is being properly shod. I read parts 1,2 and 3 of Hoof Angles, but I’m still not sure how I should proceed to make sure my horse is properly shod. Do I need to measure before I give instructions to my farrier? If so, what should I measure? Then what instructions do I need to convey to the farrier? I guess I’m a little confused, because other reading I’ve done gave straightforward instructions, but after reading your Hoof Angles I’m not so sure about what they said. I hope you can unconfuse me.

Thanks for any advice you can give.

Joe

Hi Joe –

I’ll try, but there are no guarantees because it’s a subject fraught with misinformation and confusion!

There are a lot of folks out there who attempt to quantify the “correctness” of hoof trimming or shoeing using particular measurements – most often toe angle, and occasionally, toe length.  That’s understandable, because many texts and training programs teach hoof care professionals to trim “to the numbers” instead of imparting a clear understanding of proper hoof form (which, I believe, most people lack).

Unfortunately, trimming a horse to a specific toe angle and/or length is not in the horse’s best interest, because: 1) horses vary widely in terms of what constitutes an optimal hoof length and angle, and 2) horses vary widely in their sensitivity to deviations from that optimal length and angle. For example, one horse may have an optimal hoof angle of 53 degrees and length of 3-3/8 inches, while another may have an optimal hoof angle of 48 degrees and length of 3-7/8 inches. But although either or both of those horses may appear to do fine (at least in the short term) with, say, a hoof angle of 50 degrees and length of 3-1/2 inches, it’s just as likely that one or both will be lame with that much deviation from optimal. And that’s the problem: we can’t predict which ones will and which ones won’t. We can only see the extent of the effects of less-than-optimal trimming after the damage has already occurred – often quite far into the future.

Number 2 above is also the reason many horses give every appearance of doing fine in spite of their hooves being grossly out of balance; for whatever reason, they’re not particularly sensitive to angle and length variations. That makes it difficult for people to see and understand the short- and long-term advantages of proper hoof care. I’ll often look at a horse with significant chronic imbalances, evidenced by deviations from straight hoof capsule growth such as flare, thickening, and bent horn tubules, and hear “My horse has been trimmed/shod by the same guy for the last 10 years, and he goes just fine!” Of course, those same people will often be the ones whose horses eventually start experiencing a shortened stride, heel pain, or “mysterious” lamenesses.

In the short term, it’s often a matter of being in a position to appreciate the distinction between “just fine” and “optimal.” And if you’ve only experienced “just fine,” how would you even know there was something better? The woman who always runs races wearing her high heels, for example, would never deny that it’s possible to run in them. But if she were to exchange them for flat shoes, she’d quickly discover that the flat shoes allow her to run much more efficiently. Perhaps more importantly, if she were able to look into the future, she’d also see that the high heels were actually causing long-term damage to the tendons in her feet in the form of premature arthritis.

As with this woman in her high heels, this distinction is lost on most horse people because the horse isn’t immediately lame in the vast majority of cases. And this situation is very similar to several others we’re familiar with. For example, look at the old cigarette advertisement at the beginning of this post. People used to think smoking was ok because the effects aren’t apparent in the here and now, but only at some future date and time. There’s no visible health issue after the first or tenth or one hundredth cigarette. In nearly every case, it happens very gradually, just as heavy-metal poisoning and hearing loss do. But science undeniably tells us that damage does, indeed, occur, whether we’re aware of it at the time or not.

So how do you know if a horse is trimmed correctly? As I’ve tried to explain above, there’s no set of measurements you can take or numbers you can use that will make that determination. But there is a set of characteristics that properly-trimmed hooves have, as we’ve learned from the feral horses of the U.S. Great Basin as well as other abrasive, arid environments where horses must travel long distances to find adequate food and water. I’ve attempted to compile these characteristics onto the following single page. Note that these are not trimming instructions, but may be useful in helping you assess whether or not your hoof care provider is properly trimming your horse –

I’ve also created a PDF file of this document for easy printing and reference –

Characteristics of Optimal Hoof Form

Again, I want to caution you that while many trim styles have some of these characteristics, only proper hoof care will result in all of these characteristics. So if you’re not seeing hooves that have 100% of these attributes, you’re either not seeing hooves that have been trimmed in accordance with natural hoof care practices for any length of time, and/or you’re seeing the consequences of other management problems such as environment or stress.

I hope that helps!

Steve