A week or so later, just days before the first in a series of blizzards was to hit, I found her down in the pasture. It was a stroke or luck as up until that day she hadn't let me lay a hand on her, running past full tilt, running me down if I tried to block her. Now, I was able to get hold of her, drag her into the barn and close her in just in time. It turned out it was an abscess. It blew, I found it, cleaned it, packed it in ichthammol, bandaged it with a diaper and duct tape. Everything healed up fine. Around April or May, the dead tissue started to slough off, leaving half her sole like a syrian pocket. And then all traces were gone.
But this post isn't really about the abscess. The thing is, when you rescue a horse or any other critter, you never know what you are getting until it's there. There is a lot of luck involved. Aside from the warning about lameness, what I noticed first about Maizie's feet was the rough texture of the hoof wall. It had been a dozen or so years since I studied hoof care and trimming, so a long time since I'd seen or worked on any horse's feet other than my own. So it was a few days before I realized that I was looking at feet that were covered with stress rings from top to bottom.
Stress rings are protrusions in the hoof wall that circle the hoof horizontally. Like fingernails and toenails, hoofs develop stress rings for a number of reasons, from fungus to nutritional deficiencies. I didn't know what the cause was in Maizie's case, whether she just had not great genes for hoof proteins or if it was something else.
I trimmed her feet as best I could during the abscess period. The first thing I found on trimming was that her left front foot was a full inch longer than the right, abscessed front. The left rear was also longer than the right, although not as long as the left front. This was likely due to the pain from the abscess. Pressure on the hoof stimulates growth. She had probably been putting most of her wait on her left front and rear to relieve the pain in her right front, and this had probably been going on for some time. I evened her feet up, as well as re-balancing them.
A month later, the same thing. The month after that they weren't as uneven as before, maybe 3/4s inch off. And then, as the abscess healed, her hoof growth increasingly was even. By midsummer, the wear and growth on all four was even, indicating even loading on all four feet, and has remained so ever since.
By then, I also noticed that the new hoof coming down from the coronet band was smooth. The top ring was more prominent on the right front than the others. It takes about a year for new hoof to grow from the coronet band where it emerges to the ground. When I trimmed her feet at the beginning of August, the top ring was about halfway down her hoof so probably developed about 6 months earlier, consistent with when the abscess blew. I took a picture of the right front to document the change.
A couple weeks ago when I trimmed her feet, the last stress ring finally was trimmed out. Her hoofs have grown in smooth and strong. Once again, I lucked out!
I'm guessing that in Maizie's case, the stress rings were caused by nutritional deficiencies, and specifically mineral deficiencies On the other hand, the abscess may have been recurring and not really healing. But from the day she arrived I found her repeatedly eating dirt. I had put out a dish of "minamix," which is a free choice, flavored mineral powder for horses living on pasture or hay alone. Dahli had tried a mouthful once and never touched it again. Maizie didn't seem to notice it in the corner feeder. So I tried putting some in the floor pan feeder that held their 25 pound mineral salt block. Next thing you know, Maizie was eating it by the mouthful. Every day I'd put in a 6 ounce cupful. The next day, it would be gone. Dahli noticed Maizie eating it, and investigated. The two of them were at it. After a couple months their hunger for the powder died down. Over the summer and into the fall, I could count on Maizie to eat a cupful each time she worked up a sweat, but other than that barely touched it. In the meantime, the dirt-eating had finally stopped. The minimix hunger ended over the winter, so it seems like her body has finally caught up to its needs!
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