Feet. Always Feet.

He is the best at remembering

No foot, no horse.

For want of a nail, the shoe was lost...

And so on.

You know why so much colloquial equine wisdom is lamenting shitty feet?

Because they are the worst thing ever.

Ugh. Courage actually has decent-ish feet. He has heels on all four and the shape isn't terrible. He hasn't lost a lot of shoes and hasn't really presented any soundness issues thus far.

But this summer has been absolute hell on his poor feet. Despite all the other horses in the barn being COMPLETELY FINE, he isn't. His feet cannot handle the wet/dry cycle of (GET THIS) a little bit of dew on the grass in the morning.

Put it on thick

Yeah. That. At his last farrier appointment, his feet were flared and chipped out and all manner of awful above his still-attached shoes and he hadn't even grown very much hoof. I tried moving his turnout time back a little combined with adding bag balm to his hoof walls every single morning to act as a moisture barrier and only turning him out on the field with grass that was quite short to minimize potential dampness.

And yeah, apparently that got us nowhere. Homeboy is trying to completely disintegrate his feet again. Like 4 weeks out from his last shoe job. Sooooooo.

No benefit other than looking shiny.

New plan. Courage spends the first few hours of turnout on a drylot with some hay. When the grass in the fields is well and truly dry, then and only then, he may go out.

It's such a frustrating balance to strike. I really do believe strongly in turnout for horses' brains and bodies, and I cannot spend all of my management energy on making the farrier perfectly happy, BUT I have to take good care of his feet or there's no point in having a horse in the first place.

Maybe I should have gotten a draftie.