Mountain Air Trails and Stable

09/21/2025

Excellent explanation!!

09/16/2025

09/14/2025

As we approach the start of fall and the temperatures start to drop, here is some important information to know regarding fall laminitis.

Fall laminitis refers to cases of laminitis or founder that occur in the autumnal months. Although laminitis can happen in any season, anecdotally there seems to be an uptick in the number of cases in the fall.

Why could this be?

• As the days get shorter and colder, grasses have been shown to respond to this stress with higher sugar concentrations. Diets with higher simple sugar concentrations may increase the risk of laminitis.

• Decreases in exercise may cause increases in body condition. Fat or obese horses are at risk of developing laminitis.

• Horses naturally have increased levels of certain hormones in the fall. If you have a horse with PPID (previously referred to as equine Cushing’s), the increase in their cortisol levels could put them at risk for laminitis.

If you have questions concerning fall laminitis or are concerned that your equine companion may be at an increased risk, contact your equine veterinarian so that they can properly evaluate your unique situation.

Thank you to the Horse Owner Education Committee for providing this information.

09/14/2025

09/13/2025

09/12/2025

Load Transfer: The Invisible System That Keeps Horses Sound (Until We Break It)

(This is probably the most significant blog I have written to date...and I am deadly serious.)

1️⃣ Why We Miss the Point

Most riders and owners look at legs, joints, or hooves when a horse goes lame. We obsess over hock injections, tendon scans, or shoeing tweaks.

But here’s the blind spot: horses aren’t Lego sets where you can just swap out a dodgy block and keep stacking. They’re whole systems where forces - rider weight, ground impact, propulsion - have to be absorbed, stabilised, and passed on like the world’s most complicated game of pass-the-parcel. That process is called load transfer.

If load transfer works, the horse moves fluidly, distributes force safely, and stays sound. If it doesn’t, the wrong bit cops the pressure - joints, tendons, ligaments - until it breaks. Cue “mystery lameness” and your savings account crying into a feed bucket.

2️⃣ What Load Transfer Actually Is

Load transfer is the art of sharing forces across the horse’s whole body:
- Hooves = shock absorbers (your horse’s Nike Airs).
- Tendons and ligaments = springs (boing, boing).
- Core and spine = suspension bridge (though honestly, comparing a living, moving horse to a bridge bolted to the ground is a bit crap - sorry Tami, I’ll get to you in a second and anyone else having a fit over my analogies :P ).
- Hindquarters = the engine room.
- Trunk = the bridge deck, carrying weight forward.
- Nervous system = Wi-Fi (sometimes 5G, sometimes “buffering…”).

It’s not one joint or one leg doing the work - it’s a team effort. And when one player drops the ball, the others cover… until they tear something.

3️⃣ How It Gets Compromised in Domestication

Here’s the catch: our horses don’t live or move the way evolution intended. Instead, we’ve gifted them the equine version of late-stage capitalism:
- Sedentary living → Wild horses walk 20 km a day. Ours do laps of a 20 x 60 and then slouch around on the couch bingeing Netflix. Fascia weakens, cores collapse, proprioception clocks off.
- Gut health issues → Ulcers, acidosis, restricted forage. Imagine doing Pilates with chronic indigestion. Goodbye stabilisers, hello bracing.
- Rider influence → Saddles, weight, wobbly balance. A hollow back under a rider = hocks and forelimbs eating all the force. “Congratulations, you’re now a wheelbarrow.”

And then we act shocked when the “bridge” collapses and the legs file for workers’ comp.

4️⃣ Why This Explains Early Breakdowns

A horse with poor load transfer isn’t just inefficient - it’s a ticking time bomb.
- Hock arthritis by six.
- Suspensory tears that never heal.
- Kissing spine in a horse that never learned to lift.

This isn’t bad luck. It’s physics. And yes, physics is painful. But so is paying vet bills the size of your mortgage repayments.

Once you see it, the endless cycle of injections and rehab isn’t fate — it’s the logical result of pretending your horse is four pogo sticks with ears instead of a system that has to share the damn load.

5️⃣ Why Talking About This Will Probably Annoy You

Here’s the thing: people who really understand the sheer magnitude of load transfer will most likely confuse you… or offend you.

My good friend Tami Elkayam is the one responsible for hammering this into my thick skull. And I’ll be honest: it took four clinics and two years of friendship before the penny really dropped. She will read this and her hair will stand on end, because load transfer and how the body works is far more interconnected and complex than I’ve made it here.

Because here’s the reality: there is a reason your six-year-old has the joints of a 27-year-old, or why your horse developed kissing spine. And while I’m pretty good at spotting when dysfunctional load transfer has already chewed through a part of the horse… my bigger mission now is to spread the word before more horses — and bank accounts — get wrecked.😎

It may sound like physics, and physics isn’t sexy. But this is physics that explains your vet bills, your training plateaus, your horse’s “difficult” behaviour, and that nagging sense of “not quite right.”

6️⃣ What We Need to Do About It

Instead of obsessing over the parts, we need to step back and care for the system:
- Movement lifestyle → Turnout, hills, hacking, grazing posture. (Not “arena prison with cardio punishment.”)
- Gut health → Forage first, low starch, fewer ulcers. (Because no one engages their core mid-stomach cramp...and that's not even mentioning how digestion impacts the whole things - that blog is for another day)
- Training for posture → Lift the back, wake up the core, balance the bridge. (“More forward” and "rounder" isn’t a strategy, in fact saying those things can be part of the problem...)
Rider responsibility → Balanced seat, good saddle fit, some self-awareness. (Yes, because we have a massive impact on load transfer and how dysfunctional we make it...but let's get the idea in our heads before we beat ourselves up.)
Preventive care → Conditioning, fascia release, thoughtful management. (“Wait for it to break, then panic” is not a plan.)

7️⃣. Closing

Load transfer is the invisible system that keeps horses sound. When it fails, the legs, joints, and tendons take the hit - and horses “mysteriously” break down.

The tragedy isn’t that we can’t prevent it. It’s that we’re too busy staring at hooves or arguing on social media about everything from bits to barefoot to notice the actual system collapsing under our noses.

Once you understand load transfer, you can’t unsee it. And once you can’t unsee it, you’ll never settle for patching symptoms again. You’ll start caring for the whole horse - because that’s the only way to keep the bridge standing, the system working, and your horse sound.

This is Collectable Advice 17/365 of my notebook challenge.

❤Please share this if it made you think. But don’t copy-paste it and slap your name on it - that’s the intellectual equivalent of turning up to an office party with a packet of Tim Tams and calling it “homemade.” This is my work, my study, my sweat, and my own years of training horses (and myself) before figuring this out (well with Tami Elkayam's patience too). Share it, spread it, argue with it - but don’t steal it.

09/10/2025

👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍

We have been saying this for a long time, glad to see some reserch that bears it out!

This is what the barefoot world has been saying for about 15 to 20 years….. but glad it is finally becoming mainstream……..

August 30, 2022
New Research on why Barefoot Horses remain Sounder than Shod Horses
The barefoot movement is growing amongst top professional riders worldwide, and finally a comprehensive Swedish research project is to determine exactly why there are so many benefits from ditching your horse’s iron shoes and going barefoot instead.



By Helle Maigaard Erhardsen



Since the Olympic Gold medallist and World number one in Showjumping Peder Fredricson pulled the shoes of his horses and went barefoot, he has had far fewer issues with lameness, far less injuries to the hooves and lower limbs and not a single hoof abscess. And perhaps needless to say, his horses keep bringing home the gold like never before.



But why is that? For decades hoof rehabilitators and horse owners have experienced extraordinary results with taking previously shod horses barefoot, but there has been very little research done to support these results scientifically.



So far, fragments of larger studies and smaller case studies have proved how iron shoes increase concussion when the horse lands, how iron shoes interrupt the blood supply to the hooves and inhibits the hooves’ ability to contract and expand. And the renowned podiatry researcher Dr. Robert Bowker VMD has even described how shoeing can be the direct cause of caudal heel pain, also referred to as navicular disease.



However, with next to no specific research comparing the performance of a barefoot hoof to a shod hoof, the debate between pro-shoe horse people and anti-shoe horse people have relied mostly on belief, tradition and personal experience. Now, a new comprehensive research project by The Swedish Agricultural University (SLU) and Agria Animal Insurance is well on the way to scientifically determine the difference between the barefoot hoof and the shod horse hoof.

Swedish barefoot study 2022SLU Professor Lars Roepstorff and his team conducting research for the new comprehensive barefoot study with Peder Fredricson performing an empirical riding test in the background.



A Shod Hoof can’t Expand or Contract as much as a Barefoot Hoof



The Swedish research project is led by Professor Lars Roepstorff, who has been collecting data from empirical riding tests and in-depth interviews throughout the past year. The preliminary results from the first phase of data analysis confirms what smaller studies previously have found: Traditional horseshoes do affect the function of the horse’s hooves.

“The iron shoe locks the so-called hoof mechanism especially when landing after obstacles. The shod hoof can’t expand or contract as much as the barefoot hoof because the shoe inhibits lateral movement. It could mean that the blood flow in the shod hooves is inhibited, and this blood flow is important for the hooves to be healthy,” Roepstorff explained to Agria Djurförsäkring.

In this first stage of the study, the researchers have been focussing on measuring the internal movements of the hoof with and without horseshoes. Professor Lars Roepstorff found it particularly interesting to be able to describe the difference in how much the hoof was allowed to contract during the rollover phase:

“When the mechanism of the hoof is described, it’s often said that the hoof expands when it lands on the ground, which is correct. But we also see that the hoof contracts during the rollover phase and that movement is inhibited by horseshoes. That has not been described very well in literature before now,” Lars Roepstorff said.

Further analysis is to be made to draw conclusions on the actual consequences of the hooves moving less with shoes, like how this affects blood circulation, load and shock absorption.

Horseshoe nailsThe new Swedish research has shown that it’s not only the rigid iron shoe itself that inhibits normal, healthy hoof function, but also the way it is fixed to the hoof with nails.



Barefoot Horses are more Cautious where they put their Feet than Shod Horses



One of the advantages that Peder Fredricson has discovered since going barefoot with his top-level showjumping horses, is that the horses now can feel the ground much better and are far more careful with how and where they put their feet. He links this improved ground sensitivity, also known as proprioception, to the less injuries and lameness issues he has had in his horses since he took their shoes off.



“I think that adaptation to the ground conditions is part of keeping the horse’s hooves healthy and strong. Horses don’t see where they put their hooves, they only sense the ground conditions when they have put their hooves in the ground. With shoes, we remove the feeling from the hoof, so they can move unhindered regardless of the ground. Even in those situations where they really should have been a little cautious,” Peder said according to Agria Djurförsäkring.



Moreover, it is Peder’s experience that metal horseshoes can disguise an incipient injury, which makes it difficult to discover a problem before it turns into actual lameness. Differently, a barefoot horse will instantly display any discomfort:



“You can compare it to when we humans walk barefoot across a gravel field. It may look painful before the feet have hardened and adjusted, but when we get to the grass we can walk normally again. You need to learn and understand the difference between what temporary sensitivity is and what is an injury. Horses with shoes can go for a long time with an injury before it is noticed that it is lame,” Peder said.

09/09/2025