[DangerRanch]

ohhh popcorn....hungry.....
I mention the aanhcp a lot because it is the method I follow. JB's doing a good job espousing her method. Why would I be suprised at disagreement? I've been up to my ears in the various barefoot trims for years now and been in quite a few discusions. It's part of how I test what I know. I find that if I cant explain something adequatly then I really dont know what I'm talking about.

Depends. Sometimes you ONLY want to lower the heels, sometimes you need to back up the toe, rarely would you lower the toe's vertical height from the bottom, and sometimes you *must* do a combination.

A horse in the wild would never wear only one part of his hoof, the same step they take on the toe is taken by the heel.
What do you mean about rarely lowering the toes vertical height from the bottom? Is the horse not growing wall?

What I'm seeing here, is that the only way to realign the hoof to the 'healing' angle is by altering the length of the heels?

not realign to, MAINTAIN. The hoof has a healing angle. the healing angle is the same as the angle of the coffin bone. you do NOT want to change this with the trimming. If you take toe wall down you must take enough heel to make the angle the same again. If you cannot take toe wall, you cannot take heel. the healing angle is the angle that the horse is trying to grow. you lower this angle and the hoof will respond by trying to grow it again, another steeper angle about the old healing angle that you changed. If you measure the healing angle at 52 degrees when you start and lower it to 45, you're going to see a brand new heeling angle at 52 again at the next trim.

Again, depends. How much you take off the heels, vs the toes, entirely depends on what the foot has been doing vs where it should be.

how do you guage what the horse needs?

How does backing up the toe to the edge of the sole, for example, removing dead lamina and excess leveraging toe length cause WLD and splitting and abcessing?

by weakening the new growth and pulling too much pressure on the sole. I have already argued that leveraging toe length does not happen.
I have made some quick sketches. the top is a scetch of a good wall and a wall with a divergent toe angle (or long toe, stretched white line as you would call it)

Just TRY to pull on ground surface of the toe and make the top good portion of wall bend. Remember that the hoof is not an empty bowl by full of elastic tissue and bone. If you do manage to the toe wall foreward, the quarters will simultaneously squeeze inward and when the pressure is released spring back out pulling the toe in again. All you might mess up is the dammaged old growth if the lamelar wedge has deteriorated. Also have you ever noticed that the lamellar wedge when it hasnt been rotted by fungus is very elastic and moist and pretty darn hard to trim. It is there for a purpose, to keep the wall as attached to the horse as possible during recovery from a laminitis attack and the protect the supercorium. It is NOT however meant to bear weight. By backing up the toe if you go to the outer edge of the wedge you make the horse use it for leverage in breakover. See my second set of drawings. When the stretched wall is intact the breakover pressure is shared by the whole wall and the inner structures of the hoof, however if you take it out of active bearing the wedge does all the work there and probably does a good deal of living up to its name: wedging itself up the lamelar junction where you are trying to grow good wall. If you back it up to the edge of the sole you open the lamelar wedge up to infection and invade too close to the corium which can cause the whole corium and the bone to move back in the foot to avoid the "wound", which then means the breakover point that you just brought back is now too far foreward and just a big mess. If you mearly bevel the wall and wedge slightly passive to the sole it is not quite as bad but still you have the structures in an inverse relationship to how they should be, no suport from the rest of the wall during breakover and more wedgie pressure up the laminae

Why not? There are domesticated horses who live on 100 acres of sparsely vegetated pasture who need a trim once a year because they are very self-maintaining. There are some endurance riders who rarely have to trim their horses' feet because the movement takes care of it. But even if you don't have that acreage or that movement, you still want a foot that is balanced enough to not be out of control by the time 4 weeks comes around. No, you can't always get there, but that should be the goal

Why is it a goal? If I can provide enough stimulated wear by my trimming that the hoof things it works on the toughest teritory on earth so that I can then go take my horses there and ride it, should that not be my goal? Having a horse that grows only enough hoof for his little paddock, while it might be a beautiful I'd better not want to ask him to take on anything mroe abrasive.if your horse lives on the type of ground you ride on self maintaning works fine, otherwise no.

as long as" is the operative statement. That isn't always done.

Well, then you wont have a barefoot performance horse then. If your not willing to do what it takes you have to live with the consequences. I wouldnt expect someone with a herd of broodmares to want their feet done every 4 weeks but no one is expecting that broodmare to have immaculate feet. Sound is good enough, like the barrier island horses. But if you want a good barefoot riding horse you have trim often enough to prevent the little things. No little tricks of trimming will make up for negligence.

But if you have the breakover of a toe 1" in front of where the angle of the new/healing growth lines up with the ground, then absolutely that point of the wall IS going to leverage things. It will keep the foot on the ground longer than is healthy, putting strain on the flexor tendons and suspensories and "pinch" the navicular bone,

How on earth does a too long toe keep the foot on the ground longer????
If the toe is long, the horse cannot extend his leg as far back while it is onthe he ground because the toe leverages it up. of course if you FORCE them to extend you can cause trouble. the long toe is a problem but it will gradually correct itself. Each month as new growth moves down the toe will be shorter, allowing the horse to gradually addapt his movement and without suddenly forcing it. A horse needs grip as much as breakover. If a horses toe area is flat, nothing but sole, the horse does not have enough purchase and will waste a lot of energy and strain just pushing himself foreward. Haveing the rim of wall, no matter if it is displaced foreward gives the grip the horse needs to proppel foreward motion easily.

The wall at the quarters is and should be thinner than at the toe, as the thinner wall exists/should exist where there is the most flexibility in the hoof, and be thicker where there is the most leverage.

Where does this thinking come from? As far as I know all the wild horses of the most rugged terrain have even thick wall. Squeeze any well decontracted bare hoof at the heels and tell me where it flexes the most. the whole hoof flexes. you can even flex each heel up and down independantly. Also how is a thicker part of the wall meant to deal with higher leverage forces? As I pointed out the wall is a unit, not separate pieces labeled 'toe" "quarter" etc. IF the toe wall was being levered away from the rest of the hoof would not thin quarters be a weak point that would make that EASIER?? And the thicker toe creat mroe purchase that levers MORE?

Laminitis - can't stop the foundering if you don't stop laminitis.

I presume you are meaning laminitis in the sense of inflamation of the laminae. I use "founder" to describe the whole condition. From the reactions in the gut down to the separated wall.

You can have a stretched white line, at least for a while, or even indefinitely if it's minor enough, without ever having founder, which is a change in position of the coffin bone relative to the hoof capsule.

Bone don't move (unless you mess with the healing angle).
The bone is held in place by the tendons and ligaments, the hoof capsule grows around it. In the simplest terms laminitis is when the laminae loose their hold on each other and the capsule begins to fall off the bone. you have to grow a new capsule around the bone. Laminitis is not confined solely to the toe wall so it can indeed apear the the bone has moved if you are using the capsule as the reference point. You should be looking at where the HORSE is in realation to the bone and capsule though. The bone is still attached to the horse. The wall and sometimes the sole are separating from it.

So, if this foundered (we'll say he is, with high heels and a tipped coffin bone) horse also has a long, dished toe with a very stretched, spongy white line, then if he were suddenly cured of whatever caused the laminitis (so we take out any continued metabolic insult on his feet) were put out in Wyoming, what do you think would happen? It seems you are saying that all that walking around on that hard ground would only ever bevel (nicely ) the outer wall. How long would it take, if ever, for that long toe to become a thing of the past?

If all the causes of the founder are removed as you say and the horse is getting a natural trim (by walking): one to two full growth cycles depending on the severity. As soon as he begins to maintain the healing angle all new growth will follow that. It will only do a mustang roll ont he end of the wall because the water line is the hardest point of the hoof and is allways active. The only reason it would break off is the same as my horse, if the wall was thinned and WLD had got ahold during the unatural care and demolished the lemelar wedge. The is not desirable. That is an injury. What you want is a good thickness of wall with firm lamelar material packing the space so that the wall will NOT break off but rather continue to suport the horse untill it and the wedge grow out.