Eve's Story

My son was initially quite afraid of horses. My daughter had Shadow, and I'd had Arashi drop into my lap, and he seemed content to just pet them and admire them from a distance. For a while...

Pretty soon, though, it wasn't enough. He wanted to try riding. So we started him in lessons. He was a natural. A true velcro butt, just like his sister. With his joy in riding came the yearning for a horse of his own.

We decided to work with the local rescue because it appealed to us on many levels. I figured it would take months to see the right horse come through the rescue, and told my son that when his horse found us, we'd know.

Well... Eve came to the rescue very shortly thereafter. I was quite anxious to see her, having heard wonderful things. My daughter and I went to the rescue, not sure what to expect. When they went out to the pasture to collect her from the many other horses, we saw an absolutely beautiful dark bay with a star, and both of us said "Wow, wouldn't it be AWESOME if that were Eve?" But we figured nah.. she was just too gorgeous. Lo and behold, it was Eve. Right then and there, something clicked, and she was our horse.

Now Eve is a Thoroughbred. And immediately the farrier started filling my head with the rhetoric that the hoof has been bred out of the TB, that if I ever wanted to do any real riding we would have to put shoes on her, etc. I decided to try the wait and see approach. I knew she needed a lot of training, so we'd be going slow. What I didn't know at that time was that she was considerably younger than we'd been told.

We started working with her on the ground and some light riding, and when my daughter wanted to try dressage, she was the perfect mount, what with Shadow being out with all her abscesses. And my son didn't mind, because he loved just getting up on her and trotting around, not working at anything in particular. So now she was working moderately hard. Eve's hooves started to show the wear. I started to believe what the farrier was saying. Her hoof wall was wearing away faster than it could grow out. She started limping on ouchy feet. This coincided with Shadow's quarter blowing off, and my (now regretted) decision to shoe the fronts on both girls.

Shoeing Eve was traumatic at best. The farrier trimmed off her overlaid bars (which I understand now was a mistake in her case), trimmed into the live sole (very common, very typical), and nailed a shoe on. My poor girl nearly dropped to her knees when he was done. She couldn't walk. She was shaking and sweating. I knew right then I'd made a mistake, but didn't know how to undo it. I was miserable.

As I told in Shadow's story, this is when I talked to the woman on the John Lyons' discussion board about natural hoofcare, called Cindy Sullivan, and had her out about two weeks after the horses were shod. Well, by that time Eve was able to move again, but she was still limping. She'd even managed to throw one of the shoes already, because there had been so little hoof wall to which to nail it to begin with.

Eve was a very difficult horse to transition to barefooting. She had flat feet and thin, shelly walls. She had the quintessential, stereotypical thoroughbred hoof. I could tell she was in pain. She would go down in the pasture and not get up. Everything bruised her. She lost chunks of hoof, and I would get tears in my eyes when I watched her try to walk to us for feeding time. I doubted everything - shoes, no shoes, my ability to care for her - my heart hurt for our beautiful Eve. Cindy was a godsend. She reassured me, she encouraged me, she nearly held my hand every step of the way. She assured me that this was sometimes just the way it went, but time was our ally. About four months after taking off the shoes and doing a wild horse trim, our girl was moving freely. Her feet looked freaky. The bars were huge and overlaid, and she had startling bulges of growth on the rear hooves. Cindy taught me that this is how a horse compensates. Weak wall? Something else takes over. That is why she'd nearly gone to her knees when the farrier trimmed off the bars. That is what had been supporting her while the wall was chipping off.

It has now been nearly a year since she's been barefoot. As you can see in the picture, she has NO trouble tearing up the arena now in those feet. She can walk across gravel, bear a rider in the arena for several hours at a time, and never show an ouchy step. Our lovely, intelligent, giving Princess Eve taught me many lessons on her path to being sound and strong barefoot. Not the least of which it is our own impatience that brings us back to shoes, not the horses' need for them. Eve was truly my great experiment, and she has been an unqualified succes by any standards.