Shadow's Story

Shadow came to us completely by accident. I was actually looking to adopt another dog when I ran into a woman who owned a small stable. I talked to her about my daughter (who was 14 at the time) wanting to take riding lessons, and how I was looking for a horse to lease. She mentioned she had a horse, and we went to take a look.

My last experience with horses had been 20 years prior, and things had changed a LOT since then. But we took one look at Shadow, and knew we had to have her in our lives. I signed the papers, and there we were, the proud lessors of a 6 year old Appendix mare. Little did we know...

I started learning more and more about horse ownership. There was a farrier who came regularly to trim the horses, and Shadow had always been barefoot. Something I noticed even in my ignorance, was that her feet were huge, spread out, plate like things. Something about that just kind of bugged me... they just didn't look 'right.'

The day I made my final payment on Shadow to buy her outright was the day - literally - things started to fall apart. We'd had problems with Shadow abscessing before, but this time, it was with a vengeance. She had abscesses going in all four feet at the same time. Two hooves had two abscesses. It got so bad that she lost nearly an entire quarter on one of her front hooves. Our poor girl could barely walk. In desperation, I did what most everyone else does at this point - I put shoes on her fronts. I look back now and shake my head, but just like most other people, I didn't know any better.

At the same time, Eve (our TB), was having major issues with her hooves, too. On the John Lyons' discussion board, a woman I'd gotten to know well was facing having to put her horse down because he'd been diagnosed as navicular, and was steadily getting worse and worse. She'd gone the route of shoes, pads, and everything else she could think of. Until she tried an AANHCP trimmer. Her excitement over the nearly immediate relief Heart felt after being trimmed spurred me to search my area for a natural hoofcare specialist as well. I called on Cindy Sullivan.

She came out and took off the shoes, trimmed Shadow's feet, and warned me that these things take time. As the months went by, the abscesses stopped. Shadow had the misfortune to badly injure a suspensory ligament, and was put on pasture rest indefinitely. Shadow had a myriad of problems. Her back was out of alignment, her shoulders were uneven, she suffered from arthritis in her hocks, and she'd suffered a bad injury to a fetlock when she was less than a year old which probably predisposed her to the suspensory ligament being strained.

But over the year that she has been trimmed with the wild hoof as a model, the change in her has been remarkable. Because of the ligament, I'm not sure if she'll ever be ridable, but I do know that her feet no longer hurt, and they're so SMALL compared to what they were!! Her feet being so huge had thrown her whole body out of whack. Her shoulders are even now, her back is solid and well developed, her hocks no longer hurt.

And regardless of how wet it is, she hasn't had one abscess since then. Not one. She'll have a forever home with us, our Queen of Shadows.