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IN THIS EPISODE DORIAN MADEN AND MARK CALDWELL DISCUSS THE USE OF THERAPUETIC INSERTS IN HORSESHOES FOR THE TREATMENT OF SPECIFIC PATHOLOGIES AND EQUALLY IMPORTANTLY FOR IMPROVED SPORTING PERFORMANCE ON ARTIFIAL FOOTINGS
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IN THIS EPISODE DORIAN MADEN AND MARK CALDWELL DISCUSS THE USE OF THERAPUETIC INSERTS IN HORSESHOES FOR THE TREATMENT OF SPECIFIC PATHOLOGIES AND EQUALLY IMPORTANTLY FOR IMPROVED SPORTING PERFORMANCE ON ARTIFIAL FOOTINGS
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IN THIS EPISODE DORIAN MADEN AND MARK CALDWELL DISCUSS THE USE OF THERAPUETIC INSERTS IN HORSESHOES FOR THE TREATMENT OF SPECIFIC PATHOLOGIES AND EQUALLY IMPORTANTLY FOR IMPROVED SPORTING PERFORMANCE ON ARTIFIAL FOOTINGS
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The conversation is about a horse named Mack the Knife and its performance issues. The horse was performing well in the UK but experienced a drop in performance after moving to France. The horse had a neck problem that affected its load on the left front foot. It also had a distortion in the hoof capsule due to excessive load. The owner brought the horse back to the UK for a lameness assessment and then took it to France again, where its performance dropped again. The conversation discusses the use of flotation tubes on the horse's heels to improve its performance. However, the horse's performance did not improve with the flotation tubes and instead worsened. It was later discovered that the sand surface in France was different from the one in the UK, causing the horse's toes to sink in. The horse was then given new shoes with a toe insert to address the issue. Mornin, testin, testin, testin, hello, Dorian, you're here again, you bloody nuisance. Hello, Mark. Why don't you go home? Thank you, bye. Well, I'll do, let's leave it in. Let's leave it going. Oh, well, we'll just... No, we'll keep it going, keep it going. Go on then, go right then, we'll have to chop it off later. We're in the heart, let's leave it in. Go on, what do you want this time then? Well, it just popped up on my memories, and also you've just come back from there, from France. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I thought it might be worth discussing, because it was the first time that I'd really seen these flotation tubes in action with my own eyes, and it kind of blew my mind at the time. So, I still haven't fully got my head round the entirety of how they work, so I thought it'd be a good opportunity to discuss it, really. Yeah, yeah, they're interesting devices, Dorian, you know. I think the problem with them is that a lot of people misinterpret what it is that they do, and how they react in different kinds of surfaces, and how their effect is measured in soft deformable surfaces as opposed to firm, hard surfaces like hacking and stuff like that. And if you remember that one of Louise's, that I've got in fact, years when we used to show him when I was at Maestro, everything was sort of hunky-dory here, and her sources were going reasonably well at the level they were at. And then she moved to France. It was quite a high level, wasn't it? Yeah, about 140, 145, that kind of old. And then she decided that she wanted to do the European tour, and so they moved to France, and there was a noticeable drop-off in performance. And at that point, that was still on the shoes that you sent it over with, wasn't it? That's right, yeah. UK riding or sport, weather or style, feet set up to balance as best as you could. It's got a little bit of an issue with the left front, which needed taking care of. It's got a cervical problem that affects the load on the medial side of the left front. But other than that, it was pretty straightforward. And jumping, performing well over here on the tracks around here. Yeah, it was a reasonable amount of success at that level. It was certainly paying its own way, which was their hope when they took both horses over to France, that if it did nothing else, it paid its own entry fee and allowed it to pay for its safety, so she could have a couple of years doing international show jumping before she faced the inevitable kind of retirement the horse was knocking on a little bit. So that was the plan. Yeah, so where I sort of came in and saw this was it had been, she'd been over there two or three months, six months maybe, and I think they were struggling to find a decent farrier over there to give it what it needed. So she brought it back to the UK. Yeah, there were a couple of instances where I'd been over and I'd reached on them for a couple of times and the cost factor of travelling to France to shoot two horses was ridiculous, you know, and I kept trying to refer her on to people that I knew were competent, but there was still this major drop off in performance from what she was used to here in the UK. So she came, brought it back for a lameness assessment, didn't she, or a lameness workup, or for the best? Yeah, well, what happened was she brought it back, and she brought it back, she was stopping over, because she decided she'd spend the indoor season here at her mother's back in Lancashire, and we were shooting it for here, and the indoor service is here, and that level of performance started to improve again, and then she took it back to France, and it went sour. Not with Mack the Knife, but with the other one. That went really lame, and so I ended up having to go back to France to sort it, but Benson, Mack the Knife, was also losing his performance, and so she decided she was going to bring it back home again and take it off to hers for a lameness assessment, because she was also struggling with the language in France a little bit at that time, and she couldn't really find a vet team and a farrier team that could understand what she was trying to say. And I think that's where you were when we first went there. Yeah, I saw it first, because it hurts, and for all intents and purposes, it looked sound, it was moving well, the only thing I think I felt was that it was slightly overloading that medial heel, which, on the left foot, was it? Yeah, on the left foot. If you remember, the foot looks a bit like it had a medial sidebone, but it didn't. That's right, yeah. It's a distortion that's created by excessive load, because it's got a problem between C3 and C5 in its neck, so when its neck needed doing, it was overloading, and so the hoop capsule was distorting accordingly, because of a postural adaptation for the neck, and so we were having to accommodate for that, but behind, it seemed to be okay, but then when she took it back over to France, again it started to drop off in performance, and she felt that there was a loss of engagement from behind, it was flattening out, but yeah, it had its neck treated, it had its coffin joint treated at the same time, and so we were pretty confident that it wasn't the left foot causing the issue, directly, although there may have been some indirect connection through the myofascia, as people like to refer to it these days. So, then we went over there, and that's... To shoot over there? That's right, yeah. Right, well, go on, she's going to have to bike up all the way, and you go up there, and I came along for the ride, really. So, but we went over with a plan, didn't you, you know, we had this plan in mind that, right, it needed its heels keeping on top of the surface, it was tipping back a little bit. Yeah, so we kind of watched some videos of it, and it looked like it was overloading the heels behind, and the orientation of it approaching into jumps and take-off was wrong, and it was sinking in the ground behind, so we went with this plan to put only the heels on it behind, and try and float them on the top of the surface a little bit, so we got a better orientation of the limb at the point of take-off, or a better posture, if you like. So, we did that, didn't we, we shot it up and made a nice shot of it, in fact. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everything looked good, in fact, I think there's some photos floating about on Facebook, aren't there? Yeah. So, we were like, yeah, patting each other on the back, this looks amazing, come on then, let's show us how it goes. Yeah, and it went like a dog. It was an absolute dog, it was. Yeah, out of the horizon. I remember looking at you, and I thought, yeah, I should pack that up quick, we should be gone, I don't know, on the ferry before she gets off at all. What time's the ferry? We've got time to go now, you know what I mean? And just as we were looking at each other in, like, despondence, she turned towards us, and walked towards us, I don't know whether she was getting ready to put her hand in between us or what, I don't know, but we both saw it, didn't we? Yeah, it was a lightbulb moment. It was unbelievable, and its toes just dropped, she came to a standstill, and its toes just dropped straight down to my surface. I should explain there that the place that she kept it at, which is a really nice place, beautiful indoor, nice compacted sand arena of the type that they use in France. Yeah, that's a big difference, isn't it? Yeah, and the way that they manage those sand arenas, too, makes a big difference, which is why a lot of those show jumping horses like that kind of environment. They keep that sand surface really wet and compacted, and then every 20, 30 rides across it, they re-roller it, re-wet it, so that it stays pretty constant, so you've got a firm beach-like sand in the arena, rather than a soft quarry-type sand that we have sometimes here in sand arenas. But there's very few of those sand arenas anyway, isn't it? It's all sort of rubber-chrome, waxy-type surfaces. Not so much over there. Over here, yeah. So that's a big difference. When you assessed it that day and went over with that plan, the surface that you did that assessment process on... Yeah, it was here. ...was here, and a completely different... Yeah, that's right. And, I mean, for me, as you've not gone over and seen that, you could still be scratching your head to this day. Yeah. But as you say, when she turned it around and she's walking it back towards us, and there's this look of despair on her face, you know, like, is this the end of it? And it's walking towards us, and you can see that its toes behind are sinking straight into this sand surface, almost, well, broken forward to the point of almost giving a clubfoot presentation. They've sunk in that much. Yeah, yeah. And it was just like a lightbulb moment, right? Dory had unpacked the van. Yeah. That's all fair, isn't it? Yeah. And so we brought it back in, took them off it, which was those aluminium onion heels made by Anton Corona. Not that there's anything wrong with the shoes. They were just wrong for that horse on that occasion. And we put another pair of shoes on it and welded in a toe insert. And so we give it a broad toe, a bit like the suspensory type shoe. Yeah. And so we fabricated that in, lined that up so that its width was the same width as the heels, so that the limits of the fabricated insert run in the box, as I like to call it, so from heel to toe. Through that channel? Yeah, through that channel that the bone column passes through. And if you don't understand what I mean by that, if you think about the limb passing over the foot, as the limb is being projected forwards into the anterior or acceleration phase of the stride, the upper limb is passing through the channel created by the heel bulbs, the load is down through P3 in that same channel, then breaking out roughly in between where the toenails are. The toe pillars? You love that bit, don't you? Well, I understand where it comes from, but anatomically they don't exist. Yeah, yeah. Except to say that there has been some work by Bowker and by Pollock that counted the numbers of primary laminal leaves per linear centimetre. Okay. And where there are points of increased expansion, there is a decrease in the amount of primary laminal leaves per linear centimetre. So, for example, at what people would call the toe pillars, instead of there being 25 per centimetre, there's something like 22, and the same at the quarters, where there would be 25 in the toe quarter, at the actual quarter there's 22. So there's a little bit less constraint. So if that's anatomically representative of an anatomical feature that we can call the toe pillars, then that's what that is. So, would I be right in assuming then that this is... So there's two thoughts running through my mind about this less amount of laminal attachment. Is this to allow extra expansion in that point to compensate for concussion? Or is it due to it being overused that it's actually worn them away, sort of thing? Well, I believe, and there are two schools of thought on it, I believe that it's an anatomical variation that allows for easier expansion at points of high stress. Okay, so it's not quite as rigid where it actually needs to move. So that would be generally at mid-stamp weight on the full compression? Yeah, for the quarters. For the quarters? Yeah, for the quarters. But then at the toe, at the point of break-over, if you like, if you imagine, again, imagine this limb passing through this channel of the foot, as the knee passes over the front of the coughing joint, the front of the toe is what's under the most compression, and that's where you see that toe flare and that... Yeah, it's round out four quarters, if you like. Because it's now taking all of that 600 kilo load plus times the speed that it's travelling, it needs to move, yeah. So there's a little less constraint. But interestingly enough, while I said there was work by Pollitt and Bauke that measured these per linear centimetre, Pollitt and Hampson also did a little study on the Brombies, and they didn't notice any difference in the amount of primary laminal leaves on those feral horses. Now that might be because the majority of their time is just walking, so they're not under those increased volumes of stress. I can't really answer it, it's just a hypothesis, but in those instances they never really noticed it. Was that all... I think I have read that study, but that is where the Mustang Roll came from, was it not? No, the Mustang Roll... Oh no, this is Brombies, this is Australia. Yeah, the Mustang Roll thing was from the Americas, and basically what that was was a wear pattern to the basal surface of the foot that was rounded off, that mimicked the way that it was travelling. And that was put down to a friction coefficient of it passing through the ground surface that it was on. Now interestingly enough, when you look at the American studies, whether they be Ovencheck, Jackson, and one or two others, whose names I just can't quite recall, they had variances in what they interpreted as the Mustang Roll. And when you look at the environmental conditions, that, for example, Ovencheck is in Oregon and in a mountainous trail kind of country, and Jackson who did his studies, which were in Arizona in that sandy desert study, it makes sense that there is a different level of friction coefficient in those two entirely different footings. Yeah, but with the same... Same principle, yeah. And if you look at any number of those specimens that you see, that roll is roughly equivalent to making the ground bearing surface parallel with the trajectory of the coronary band. OK, yeah. Yeah, so when we trim it flat for the reception of the shoe, that roll was enough to roll it off so that the projection of that roll, if you carried it up, would be parallel with the coronary trajectory. So almost worn, yeah, so worn in the direction that it's rolling from, basically. Yeah. And if we're talking about that, if you look back at Beaney's thesis on the dorsal wall rounding, he measured there the difference between the thickness of the wall of the coronary band and the thickness of the wall of the basal surface, OK, and in theory it's supposed to be parallel, but because your basal surface is at a different angle to the origin surface, i.e. the coronary band surface, you've actually got like a 13% increase in the surface area of the basal end. Yeah, because it's cut at an angle, it's not perpendicular to its point of origin, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. So you come back to the roll, and we're off subject here a little bit, but you're talking about just rolling off like 13% of the dorsal wall after you've trimmed it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not what some people interpret to be the, quote, Mustang roll, unquote. Yeah, yeah. It's worth mentioning as well that Simon Moore's study, because sometimes we sort of have it in us mind because it's quite a lot thicker at the toe, and the more tubule density is greater and there's more more tubules in there, but actually it isn't as great a... It's not as great a difference as people interpret. Yeah. There is a difference, and the differences relate to primary function and primary roles in those particular zones. Now obviously at the toe, where it's receiving the most stress at the point of acceleration, the most weight at that point of acceleration, and it's the area of the foot that's contacting the debris that's on the ground and the impact that's within the surface that it's in, that it should be denser and stronger. But where it needs to expand, whilst it's going through the foot mechanism element of it, so through the load-bearing stage of that space, then it is thinner in terms of the depth of its horn tubular layers, but that's just to allow it to be able to move. Yeah. And if you look at Riley's study and stuff like that, they did... See you in the morning. See you in the morning, mate. I'll see you now. Yeah. Sorry about that, we just got caught in a bit... No problem. See you in the morning. Yeah. Yeah, sorry about that, we just got caught in a... Bob the Builder's just been leaving. He's on our side in front of the door. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But anyway... Digressing a little bit, but... Yeah, but Riley there showed that there was four zones of tubular density. So the horn tubulars are denser towards the outside where they need to be more compact and stronger, but they become less dense as it gets nearer and nearer and nearer towards the laminal junctions. Yeah, yeah. Where it needs to be able to expand and move because of the load internally. Yeah. And that leverage is less even as well, so it doesn't have to be as dense. Yeah, and that effect works its way around the foot where it's expected to be able to move. And while we're talking about foot mechanism, people kind of imagine that this foot expands and contracts like a pair of flapping wings, and it's very little at all. You know, you're talking about fractions of a centimetre, a millimetre, two millimetres at the most, in a healthy, well-conformed, well-proportioned foot that's under a reasonable conformation. There's very little movement in it. And you can evidence that even with a recent study... Oh, what's his name? You've got my phone number. Yeah, I've got me too. FWCF with honours. Oh, Nigel. Nigel, that's it. He measured movement with various different packings, and you can see that there's very little movement on this medial lateral plane, and most of the movement that he recorded was actually on the dorsal palmar plane. Yeah, I did read that study actually, but I didn't interpret it very well, I understand that. Well, it's for these sort of statistics and... Yeah. I did skip straight to the conclusion, obviously, but even so I struggled to get that out of it. But, just revisit that for a second then. So when you're saying that the majority of the movement that he recorded was dorsal palmar, is this on the same... So, my thoughts on this come about... The cushion and the frog have been driven down towards the ground. That part of the foot is moving more than the heels are moving out from side to side. Yeah, okay, yeah. Yeah? Yeah. So, right. Let's get back to flotation. Yeah, let's. Before we get into a real debate about the foot mechanism. We've gone off on a bit of a tangent there. So, where were we? Yeah. So, we swapped over for the wide toes, traditional suspensory type shoe, and there was an immediate improvement to it. Yeah. Immediately. So, talk us through what was going wrong then, when, as the toes were sinking down through the surface, we were creating a broken body of plastonitis. Right, okay. Okay. And this is where people misunderstand what's commonly called flotation. And they've got an impression that you add an intervention to the front of the shoe, for example, the toe insert, and it sits the foot on top of the surface and makes the heel sink in. And that's not what happens. In order to be able to understand how these things work, you need to understand the various elements of the stance phase. Yeah. Okay, and to keep it simple, I'm going to break it down into three little components. You've got the presentation, impact and deceleration phase. So, the presentation is the foot. The limb is extended, and it's presenting itself towards the floor, and eventually it touches it. That's the impact. When it's touched. Yeah, yeah. And then, as it touches the ground... Ideally, it's like the heel first. Apparently. Yeah, okay. Some heel first, some flat, some maybe even a little bit more towards the toe, but I think that in the main that's conformation led, and I include in that foot conformation, or foot morphology. Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah. Basically, you've got the impact, and as it impacts, to diffuse some of that impact shock, which is vertical, there's what I call a horizontal phase, the deceleration phase. So, it impacts and it slides to a stop. Yeah. Okay, now that sliding to a stop, it diffuses some of that shock, which is why the vast majority of that shock is diffused before it hits the fatlarm joint. Really? Yeah. Okay? So, at that point, the horse is still moving across what's going to be holding it up, the foot. And on a firm surface, that will have come to a standstill. That will have come to a standstill. Yeah. And then from there, the horse passes over it, and for the next phase of the stride, which is about 60% of the time that it's on, that foot is planted firmly on the surface that it's in. Yeah. As the body, the centre of mass of the body starts to pass over the foot. Yeah. In a soft surface, what happens is you get this impact, and because the surface is still forgiving, you don't get as much impact shock. You've still got a horizontal slide movement, but at the same time, you've still got a pitch movement because it's sinking into the surface. So the foot hasn't come to a standstill. Yeah. It's still decelerating. So the horse is starting to pass over itself, but it's still coming to a stop when it should already be at a stop. Yeah. Because it's descending down into the surface. Yeah. Yeah? Yeah. That in itself creates a different orientation of phalanges, tendon alignment, and therefore, dorsal flexion of the fatlock, etc., etc., etc. So if you think about, just simplify it, think about Hickman's when they're talking about the increasing, if you break the hoof capsule forward, you get a greater fatlock descent. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, that's what's happening dynamically inside of these surfaces. Now, there is another sidewinder to that, what the surface is made of and how it's put together again, and how they're categorised, but we won't go too much into that, but depending on the surface, you either get it sinking or you get a rebound or you just get a friction stop. Yeah. Now, most of these surfaces that we're talking about, especially on the continent with this beach sand effect, although you've got rebound, you've still got this sinkage bit. Yeah, so it's still dropping in, so it's going past the point where it should be at a stop and still moving. Yes. So that toe starts to sink in, it's pivoting over the centre of rotation. Yeah. So that's then overloading tendons and ligaments and structures. So it's relieving pressure on the deflexor tendon and overloading... Well, no, it's not relieving pressure on the deflexor tendon. Okay. Because the fatlock is descending down and trying to push the heel down, but the thing is still slipping. It's flying away from it. Yeah, it's like slipping on ice. Yeah. Yeah. It's more that effect. That doesn't... Because you're sliding on ice, it doesn't mean that your tendons aren't all braced. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because they're trying to stop it. I was thinking about creating that broken forward passage. Yeah, but if you... Traditional thought process. Yeah, but you now need to take into account dynamics. Yeah. And if you like, a simple way of thinking about the dynamics of it is that the weight of the horse through the skeletal column is trying to be driven down to the bottom, and the thing that's holding it back up again is the tensile communication between muscles and tendons. They're the resistor at this point. Yeah, so is the force... Is the force, as this is passing down and obviously it's got the mass of the horse pressing on it, is this trying... Is it using its muscles to try to stabilise that? It's trying to stop it from sinking down any further. Yeah, yeah. It's that auto-response. Yeah. Going back to when you're slipping on ice. You've got an auto-response that braces up your legs, your ankles. Yeah, you throw your body weight by. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. There's just a big chain of events actually. Postural adaptation. Yeah. 15, 16 metres per second. So it's all instantaneous. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, what the flotation, the insert does, we'll call it a flotation device because it's easily a recognised statement, but what that does is it creates a bigger surface area. So, the force of the horse, his limb, is transmitted down through the foot and you get X amount of ground pressure, what we call contact ground pressure, per square centimetre around the perimeter of the shoe. Yeah, yeah. Or the perimeter of the foot. Yeah. Now, I won't get into the barefoot's best element of it. No, we're talking about a shoe. Yeah, precisely, because we're talking about shoes. So you've got X amount of ground pressure per square centimetre of contact area with the ground and that's the shoe. Yeah. So by increasing the width of the shoe, you've got the same overall force, but a bigger area, which gives you less pressure per square centimetre. Yeah. Because pressure is force over area. Right, so just a quick question in this point, because obviously your general width of your shoe, your general thickness of the section of your shoe, is no more than three-eighths of an inch. In most cases it's less. Thickness, yeah. Yeah, thickness, yeah. So, at what point, or is this very much foot conformation-led? So let's say, for argument's sake, it's pushing down through this surface with your three-quarter by three-eighths section on it, it's very quickly, its sole's going to come into contact with this deformable surface. Yeah, but the surface doesn't stop deforming just because the foot's going into it. If it was barefoot, for that nanosecond that this surface reaches the solar arch and the frog and all the rest of it, it would be a bit more stable. Remember, this process, at the walk, the entire process, from impact to unloading, is 0.8 of a second. OK, yeah. OK, at the gallop, which we're talking about, let me show you something. Yeah. You're talking about 0.2 of a second. Right, yeah. So you're talking milliseconds. The deceleration phase that we're talking about is... Milliseconds. ...hardly measurable. Yeah, but it's an important factor because the inertia of the body weight passing over it is changing the effect that it's having on the surface that it's in depending on the speed that it's going. Yeah, the velocity that it's using. So you probably wouldn't notice it if you were just walking around the school, but it can cope with it. Increase that to 25 kilometres an hour and now all of a sudden you've got a different animal. Or trying to propel itself over 140 centimetres. Yeah, you've got an increased volume of force over a decreased time frame of absorbing it. Yeah. And that force is mobile, what they call the point of force trajectory. Yes. Right, so we've got the wide toe in there, so the foot's coming down and instead of the toe of the foot disappearing through the surface and it effectively wedging the heel, what it's doing is putting a wider surface area there. Yeah, which keeps it flatter as it's sinking. Yes, keeps it up the accelerating. It's almost pushing it. It's not pushing it backwards. No. It's stopping it from rotating forwards. Yes. That is the crux of it. Yeah. Which is why they kind of work opposite on firm surfaces. Yeah. Like tarmac. Because they're designed to transfer the force into reduced pressure, but because there's no resistance in the bit that it's impacting, you've got increased ground reaction force. Yeah. And that's at a vector. Yeah, so they're not exactly parallel to each other. They're at a distance. I was struggling to get my head around this earlier on, but actually when you broach it down, it's all shifting speed for me. And you say if you've got one of those that does a lot of hacking, you have a toe callus and you have a thickening of the sole underneath the pedal bone adjacent to where the insert is. So there'll be an element of lack of abrasion there because it's been covered up, but certainly that callus in that thickness of your toe is due to that increased abrasion. Yeah. And if you look at those when they come off, then you've got a lot more friction there in the foot surface of the heels. Yeah, I've not noticed. Which you don't have when they're in a deformable surface. Right. Until they get past their due time. Yes. Yeah, because a lot of that heel wear that we see that we presume is all expansion or contraction, that's also forward migration as well. Absolutely, yeah. It's not just worn a bit down. It's the fourth dimension of all shoeing. Time. Yeah. And once you start messing around with this kind of stuff, the important element of that is to be able to sync your shoeing cycle to home growth and dorsal migration. Yeah. You summed it up early when we were talking about something else. On day one it looks perfect. On day ten it looks something else entirely. Yeah, and if you've not managed to get it to ground zero with day one, by day 30 you're in the shit, aren't you? Yeah, yeah. I'm beat by that. Yeah. So, that's... I hope that that explains how that works. And it works not just from front to back, but from side to side too. Remember that the foot and the liver are three-dimensional objects and their weight, or the force that comes through them, is transmitted across three axes and six coordinates and that's where you get this similarity with aeroplanes in flight. It's pitch, roll and yaw. So, pitch is front to back, roll is from side to side, but yaw is the diagonal effect of pitch and roll. So, would that be classed as a torsion force? Yeah. So... Right, so I have a question regarding collateral ligament injuries and the inserts that they use in order to... the flotation inserts in order to relieve... Ah, right, OK. Well, they're not flotation devices. Right, well... OK. In the sense of the word that we've just described now with the toe insert or the heel insert, whichever, or the one in the heels, they're just not the same. What they do is they transfer that force from one area to another. Yeah? So, theoretically, those collateral ligaments going through this stance phase should take roughly the same amount of strain. It's slightly more medially because of the way the body's formed in a quadruped. Even in a biped like ours, but more so in a quadruped. So, when you have a rupture or a strain to one of those ligaments, what you want to do is reduce that force. The amount of movement in that point? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this roll and or yaw, which creates the stretching of those fibres. Because remember your anatomy, what ligaments are made of. Yeah? Yeah, OK. Tight bands of collagen fibre all right together. That's right. Yeah, and they're being stretched and pulled and bent in sort of different directions and eventually they tear apart and that's your collateral ligament dysmatia. And then they tear apart from the point where they join the bone, not the actual brain now. Mostly, mostly, yeah. Right, let's do a specific scenario then. Let's say we've got a collateral ligament injury. Yeah. I don't care which one. Yeah. So when that, we're talking about rehabbing it on a soft surface. Yeah. So we're going to have to intervene with some sort of insert in there. What we don't want then is that lateral collateral ligament to be, the lateral aspect of the joint to be spread apart. Yeah. So if you think about my first statement with that is that theoretically both sides of that joint should be under approximately the same level of stress. Yeah. Yeah, so the insert in that instance, although it does the same thing, i.e. increases the ground surface area and reduces the ground pressure, what it's designed to do is to transfer that difference to the other side. So if we use numbers, just for example, if you think about a five and a quarter inch front foot, okay, that's got approximately four and a half to five kilos per square centimetre of load around that contact area. Yeah, around the periphery of the shoe. Yeah. Sorry, 11 kilos with a shoe. Right. When you put that insert in, that side that has the insert in is reduced by about half to four or five kilos per square centimetre. Right. But there's still 600 kilos of horse descending down on that limb. Yeah. So that difference, that other five and a half kilos per square centimetre is now transferred to the other side. So in this instance, the medial aspect. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So, but in terms of physical, what you're going to see is the outside of the shoe staying on top of the surface and the inside sinking slightly. Slightly, yeah. Which is opening the joints facing up on the medial aspect but not allowing the joint surface on the lateral aspect to open up. Yeah. So it's allowing that ligament to repair itself. Yeah. And that's why you have to monitor them and monitor their progress and change them as they go. For fear of overlapping. Yeah. And also, importantly, making sure that you actually stick the insert in correctly anatomically. You see a lot of examples on social media where it's the whole half of the shoe and right up to the heel and that's not where that is. Yeah. Well, I mean, that being it's not something to talk about without some sort of visual description. Yes. But that would be something interesting for people because I've not got my head around any of that. Yeah. It's just trying to remember your anatomy, where things are relative to that widest point or the centre of rotation. Remember that all your bony attachments, so including collateral ligaments and all that, soft tissue structure there, is in front of that centre of rotation. Yeah. And all your soft tissue attachments, digital cartilages, et cetera, et cetera, are behind that centre of rotation. Yeah. Now, where do you want your insert? Yeah, OK, yeah. Yeah. Toe, nail to quarter, not toenail to heel. Yeah, OK, yeah. Yeah, because what you're doing then is throwing it too far over. The more you shift it back, the more diagonal it will go. So now you're getting more yaw. I just want to ask one more. Because for me there is a component of torque in collateral ligament injury. Absolutely. And so my question around that would be that if you are creating a... If, in effect, what you're doing is holding the lateral aspect on top of the surface, you are also creating a bit of a break on one half of the foot like... When I say a break, I mean like putting the brakes on that. So you're going to get an amount of torque medially moving forwards, I would imagine. As the foot goes down, everything is coming to a standstill. That bit is sat on top of the surface, so therefore... Highly possible. Theoretically highly possible. Yeah, OK. OK, but remember what I said about focusing your assessment on the recovery. Remember that this thing is a recovery machine. The biggest problem with most of these insert things is people slot them in. It worked. Yeah. And so the horse should work. Let's not take it out. Yeah, yeah. All right, but remember what I just said about shifting load and force to the other side. It's a big danger. Whilst it's able to cope with it temporarily, the reason the other side went is it couldn't cope with it in long term. Yeah, yeah. And also in the rehab stages of it, nothing is under as much stress and strain as it is when it started to... Yeah, I mean... Yeah, so it's understanding the functionality as well as the anatomical and physiological aspects of what it is that you're trying to do. Would you say that that still pertains the same to your typical suspensory type shoe? If you've got a horse that is prone to wanting to stick its toes down through the surface for I don't know what reasons they could be, you're looking at more of a permanent appliance there, aren't you? Yeah, so we'll go back to MacGyver. Yeah. So in that instance, because of the way that it's conformed, it's more susceptible to that happening in that kind of surface. Yeah. Okay, so in the summer, while it's doing outdoor in that particular surface, I've got them in there. Yeah. Because they're a performance enhancing device and a preventative device. You can use this stuff as preventative as well as curative. Or therapeutic, you know? Yeah, yeah. Providing that you're switched on to it. But when it comes out of that environment, I have to take them out. So now it's indoors, I have to take them out. Because the surface is different and its reaction is different. So what are the indoor surfaces like over there? Pretty much like ours. Okay, right. Yeah, so then you've got a little bit more, you've got the multi-layers, you've got a little bit more rebound, not quite as much sinkage. Yeah. And a bit more traction. Yeah. So you're getting a steadier come to a stop. Yeah. And it's still in a horizontal plane. Yeah. Although it's dropped into the surface a little bit, it's still in a horizontal plane because it's not... Well, that's not actually being quicker, the acceleration, than if it's carried on pushing. No, no, no, no, no. Because... Remember, we're gauging this against what is the mean average normal physiological thing of it just going on a particular surface. It's not quicker, slower. It's the effect that it's having on the orientation of the... The effect that the surface is having on the orientation of the foot as the body weight passes over it. Yeah. Yeah, OK, yeah, yeah. The deceleration phase, again, as I said before, it's in nanoseconds. But if our foot isn't orientated in the right place, the different structures run at different levels of strain at a different time. They're increased in magnitude and duration because the foot isn't in the right proportions to take it. Yeah. If you think about what you learn in nursing school, it's there to take a certain amount of load for a certain amount of time, and that is proportionate irrespective of speed. Yeah? Yeah, OK, yeah. Which is why they can cope with it at a walk and at a gallop. Yeah, OK. Yeah, but the minute you change the orientation of that foot, you change the position of the point of force. So now a different structure is under stress. You mustn't think about the foot just as the hoof. Yeah. It's all the structures inside it, and if you think about the anatomy, if you change the orientation, they're in a different location, but force falls in straight lines through the centre of mass. Yeah, so what you've got then is structures being overloaded at the wrong point in time. Precisely. Yeah. Right. That leads me on to a bit of a question, because I've got a little dress-eyed pony. Well, I say a little pony, it's a big pony, a little dress-eyed George. And that has been diagnosed with proximal suspensory desmatitis. However, I have been constantly battling trying to keep a positive plantar angle to that heel bone for a long time. You don't really have to show that, do you? Sorry, sorry. Have you got a solid spot? Yeah, yeah, I have, yeah. No, I haven't, but it's got all the positive symptoms of something that's in reverse rotation. He's got a bit of a bullnose to it, he's got that thickening of the sole underneath the pedal bone, and his coronary band trajectory aims to his elbow as opposed to his neck. So, using external reference points, in my own experience, it has got either flat or... I'd go along with that, yeah. And the feedback that I got from the owners and the jockeys who were bringing it on to them, he's moving up the levels now, it's a decent pony. With nothing but positive, it feels a lot better, everything's going right. And then, it's not gone all right. Everything's gone left. Yeah. So, it's been off, it's had its suspensory scanned, it's got proximal suspensory desmitis, those parts need to come out of it, they're probably making it worse. So, the difficulty that I've got with getting all this lot around my head is there is such a high instance of proximal suspensory... Right, anecdotally, there is such a high instance of proximal suspensory desmitis and negative plantar angle. Yeah. So, when that shoe has been prescribed as the suspensory shoe, take the pads out, it needs a suspensory shoe in it. Yeah. So, everything that we've discussed already now flies in the face of that advice because this horse does a bit of hacking to keep his brain something like right. Obviously, he's working in the surface, so it is stopping that foot from sinking down through the surface, but then we've got to start overloading the heels again, now we've got the pads out and we've got the suspensory shoe on the hard ground. And also, what I caught it doing in the stable when I was stood there scratching my head, having a little cry about it all, was it was backed up to the banks in its bed and it was stood with its heels elevated on the banks of the bed and its fetlocks not in what you would describe as an ideal HPF. Yeah. So, my question is, how much of an influence is that postural adaptation that this horse is doing in its stable, how much of that is being an influence over this degeneration of the suspensory ligament, as opposed to that... Right, I'm going to stop you right there. Right, OK. Because you just used the word degeneration. OK, so my next question is, was the diagnosis degenerative proximal suspensory desmitis? OK, I wasn't... I'm not that clued up on that one. OK, well... What we described it to be would be chronic, a chronic desmitis. Right. So, how old is this pony? I would say it's about 10 years old. OK. So, it would appear, without the evidence of seeing the scans or the rest of the diagnostic workup, that the lesions that they've seen are quite extensive. Yeah. OK, and that's... Again, it's like you need a visual for it, really, but when you get long blackened shadows in the scan of the suspensory, that's the whole fibre chain pulling apart. Right. Yeah, and they tend to be called degenerative. And so, they've been going on a long time, and it's getting worse. And that's what proximum would assume. Yeah, but degenerative, because there's not a way of, quote, stopping it, unquote. You know, it's like you're degeneratively getting older, mate. Which is why your hair goes grey there. I'd rather have three teenage daughters, to be fair. Yeah, well, it might be. Which is why mine's white, but... So... That's the issue there. What the exciting causes are that you can alleviate, I wouldn't know because I can't see the pony, so I'm not looking at its conformation and all the rest of it. But, if you go back to your description of how it stood in the stable, and think about, again, think about your anatomy lessons and the reciprocal apparatus, and the way that that works, what it's doing is resting its Achilles apparatus. Yeah. Yeah, so it's resting its muscles. It's resting its muscles to take the strain off the back of the hock, and those muscles and tendons that go from the staple down to the hock, and so forth. So it's trying to rest the entire reciprocal apparatus. It's hamstrings, it's glutes... Yeah, yeah, that's it, hamstrings, that's the word I was looking for. Yeah. So, as a... It's limped. Yeah, so as an unintended consequence of nothing to do with any sugar coated coals or anything along those lines, this degeneration of these could be a long term effect of it stood in... Given that the positive feedback that you got from the application of... Right, right, OK. Again, you're asking me a leading question that you want an answer for. I don't... Right, let me finish, let me answer this. Go on. OK, because it's important. You're asking me to pinpoint an answer, OK, when it's difficult because the whole mechanism is interlinked. Yeah. Particularly behind. Yeah. And it's that linkage that is compensating for some inadequacies of whatever. Yeah. And it's a remarkably resilient structure until all of a sudden one element of it breaks down. Yeah. So then what you're seeing is other parts then taking up the strain. Go back to the collateral ligament thing that we were saying. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So other parts are taking up the strain and then they break down. Yeah. And then the danger is that you inflict the primary thing that you were looking at that you never noticed. Yeah. Which was the suspensory. Oh, it might be due to that when it was the other way around. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so it's... I'm not trying to avoid giving you an answer. But there's a lot more complexity to that question. Well, let's ask it in a different way then. Do we underestimate the amount of effect that that kind of postural adaptation has on the treatment plans and the treatment processes that are given to these situations? Absolutely. We underestimate, I hate to say this, we underestimate totally the amount of interconnectivity that there is between hind feet and the rest of the muscular skeletal structure. Yeah. This myofascial thing is particularly relevant for its relationship from the hind end to the rest of the skeleton because the hind end is the engine room, is the driver. And all of that power is transmitted through that spine, through the sacroiliac beat. Yes. So if the posture is wrong, then the power transmission takes more effort which puts the primary structures that are transferring it, all those muscles pushing it forward are on an increased strain in the wrong places at the wrong time. Yeah. And also then you start getting them adapting the front end and trying to pull themselves a little bit more. That's right. It's a chain of events. And then all of a sudden it's laying in front. Yeah. But it's not. No. It's actually laying behind. But it's using itself differently. Yeah. Which is then put something under strain that shouldn't be and it's exposed to weakness there. Which is often the danger of like looking at the people that have studied this and the people that expound trying to focus on posture in relationship to these kind of issues are right. But at the same time it puts an awful lot of focus on diagnostic technologies without looking at the practical aspects of reconfiguring the posture. Yeah. And I mean all of it. And I don't just mean slapping the 3D pad underneath it. I mean the whole thing. I think a decent scenario is you get a bit of pain up in say for in the ab region. I mean the amount of horses that I've come to that you take his back foot behind it and you can't nail it on. But you can take his back foot forwards into the plenty position and you can hit that as hard as you want and it never batters and nails it. And every one of those horses you can go up to that lumbosacral region palpate him and he'll fall on the floor. So I can foresee a chain of events starting up there and then the horse is uncomfortable up there so then it shifts its foot posture. Well I would submit that it's probably the other way around. So it started at the foot and worked its way up. The posture was adapted from the foot to the hock and then that put strain on the muscles that lead up there. That put strain on it then adapted the posture of its rear end and so on and so on and so on. I struggle with that concept because you've got to ride in the middle. Let me finish. You've got to ride in the middle of the back. Yeah well Dorian we can't help that. We don't give them riding lessons and all that kind of stuff. But what I'm trying to say is that the link between posture and musculoskeletal higher end issues is underestimated by us all. Yes. And primarily if we focus more on assessing the posture and adapting our shoeing protocols to accommodate that posture whether that be the result of a conformational defect or not to align better with the lines of force you know those silly line diagrams that we see for ideal conformational. If we could try and make that work we might get less strain on wherever it comes from. I'm not the person to ask about muscular injuries. I'm not I'm not a jockey you know those are issues for physios and chiropractors and stuff like that. But I do know that adapting that posture and keeping that lower limb from the hock as vertical as you can in relationship to it has a more effective long term prognosis than allowing it to creep forward. Now that's not something that I'm disputing but where I was going with all this is that if actually the chain of events is the opposite way round all we're doing is putting a plaster on the bottom of the foot and until the other aspects and the other elements of it have been dealt with you're always going to find this this postural adaptation. You know how many how many cobs that are fiddled ornaments well you'll not see many of them but I see plenty of them. How many fiddled ornament cobs are there out there that suffer with negative plantar angle? Very few. They don't get risen, they've got upright conformation all the rest of it. When you've got something that's doing that amount of work the common denominator about that is that person that's sat in the middle of the back and the type of exercises that they do. So for my, the argument that I'm trying to offer up here is that it's fitness and strength it's fitness and strength and no matter we all agree and I've heard you say it so many times that the feet are a representation of the forces that's placed upon it so why would a foot suddenly decide that it's going to go sideways? It isn't. It's going to be, that is led by the forces placed upon it and it makes complete sense to me that if something is suffering up in it's back and it's adapting it's posture further forward to relieve that tension all of a sudden now you're loaning over the back half of the foot. So as a horse shearer what do you want me to do? You want me to either deal with this end as best as I can and try and accommodate this foot and realign it's conformation as best as I can for a cycle that I can determine that you're going to follow or do you want me to drag you off the saddle give you the right good telling on You're being obtuse now There are things that are out of our control ok and unless you've got an effective team management for like your dress arse pony ok and this is where this conversation starts you and I can sit and debate this all night long but if that person is not prepared to change their management their fitness regime and their training regime to increase it's strength and durability then it doesn't matter what we do. That's exactly my point. It still doesn't make you which is chicken and egg I don't know no no no. Ok but that's what you're asking me to answer you I don't know. I'm offering up an alternative that if it doesn't get discussed then all that keeps happening is the farrier just keeps getting thrown under the bus all the time because he's not putting in these extra interventions to cope with the dysfunction of the Let's go back to interventions because you can only an intervention that you create from a horse perspective can only match the clinical symptoms that you can physically see ok now the guide that we use is a set of standardised proportional values and to date whilst there's not sufficient enough research to actually say that they are perfect although some people will tell you that they should be it is the only model that we seem to be able to justify that when it's when it's there there's a lower incidence of some of these injuries and I'm being very careful about the way that I say this because there's lots of theoretical links to foot morphology for certain things but those same studies produce links to hairs on it's left ear it's dietary conditions and so on and so on and so forth a holistic system so from a physiological point of view all we can do in any event is to set it up to as near to these proportional values that we think currently are correct in the hope that it functions more biomechanically efficiently in line with that then people people that own these things have got to get away from this idea that keeping them fit and strength involves a 20 minute ride a day on which 15 a night is packing it up and then once a month taking it for a swim it doesn't work what gave horses strength and durability in the past was a fitness regime that got them fit to be able to cope with it the same as long distance runners long distance cyclists they get physically fit and strong before they start training for the particular activity that they are doing a great example of that is boxers, you know their first 8 weeks of a 12 week isolation training camp is jogging up and down the roads twice a day for 3 hours strengthening up all of those structures to be able to cope with the rigours of talk cheer load and also conversely to that the downtime post a big competition is extremely important to human athletes which is something that is not afforded and the reason that I argue with you about it and I know that you're passionate about it but it's not something that's in our control no no no how can you create awareness to it but it's not us that need to talk about it it's other people that need to involve us in the solutions to their problems instead of using us as the scapegoat that's where I was going with it I've got another horse that's asymmetric I don't want to talk about every single horse but this is a perfect example of it it's eye low in front and I was watching it eat off the floor the other day and it's got one foot in front of it another foot behind it and it's head directly and it's a mature big horse and it's a constant battle trying to keep these feet right and I said to it the trouble with that horse is it's not leg length disparity, it's not any of the rest of it it's neck is too short for it's body and it can't reach the floor in a sensible way and she said, you know it's funny you said that because I was riding it the other day and I sat on it and it's a good hand higher than the other horse and it's neck is no longer than the other horse and I'm like, it does not matter what I do to the bottom of those horse's feet, I am constantly going to be fighting the fact that it's neck is too short for it's legs I don't have an 11 stop but I do have an answer stop putting it's head on the floor do you know what I mean absolutely and that's all well and good when it's stable you can't do anything about it when it's grazing it's feet that is it's posture again there so now you're talking about interaction in surfaces and all that kind of stuff, again there it's out in the field, it's in a different footing so there's a certain amount of compensation and or support within that footing that will compensate for it to a certain extent will compensate for it for a certain extent but those are the limitations that we have to deal with, that's a conformational thing and we can't do nothing about it except to try and compensate for it as best we can and keep it as equal as we can interestingly enough the time where that comes in from a burry perspective is that this more upright foot that you're on about, where you've got this disparity of foot shape and size is the foot that's trying to reach the ground the flatter one is the one that's already on the ground and the other one is trying to reach it yeah so what do you do? Jack up the flatter one? or jack up the more upright one? well that would say that you jack up the more upright one and support the flatter one yeah, assuming that you've assessed that it hasn't got leg length disparity, and not very many of them do I'm not saying that the shoulders aren't but that's muscular yeah that's muscular, from that adapted position yeah that's muscular usage, and that's why you look down the back of them and look at the shoulder muscles it brings you to a moment about saddles not fitting yeah, well it can't do can it? shoulders are only completely in place I've got one at the minute, one of James that is actually a natural club footed thing that should have been operated on years ago you might have seen it, that Billy Goldback and that all of a sudden, which does really really well, but all of a sudden has started to tail off performance-wise and having a job keeping saddle fitting and that's the same you know we did it on the weekend I haven't actually had a chance to post it but we ended up jacking up the club foot to realign its shoulders do you mean a flat just as flat increasing height in vertical depth so that when it's stood square both feet are loaded because the upright one can reach the floor which means that the musculature in the scapula is not having to compensate for it and overwork and do you think that that will bounce back out then that disparity of the shoulder height only if they do the physiotherapy to develop the musculature on that side, because the problem is not the fact that it's got a club foot, it's got that but the fact now that everything else is moving around it the saddle won't fit it won't so there's more weight on take-off and stuff like that to try to offload landing on that one yeah it does a bit you know but those are observational things but many of them outside of our control without the input from others that's the point that I'm trying to make but I kind of I know that I'm not a smart-ass when it comes to muscular skeletal anatomy and physiology particularly higher up the horse just a little bit more of input into what would be a therapeutic regime to deal with that might help me be able to give better advice to my clients from a horseshoe perspective but what I don't want and this is the point you were driving at is for somebody to go oh well look it's got two odd feet, I know it's got two freaking odd feet I want to know what I can do about this bit to help you sort that out so I can then get to my bit because until I've sorted that out or you've sorted that out I can't do nothing about this that's exactly what I was saying about the hind end as well the two have got to work together yeah and they have but what I'm saying is that I'm not skilled and knowledgeable enough about that particular field to be able to offer you a factual based opinion yeah fair enough but I've got, I can make assumptions and I can try and do my best under the circumstances and I can have a discussion with you but really let's have the rest of you in here and can I not have your response to my discussion on the back of a cigarette packet yeah yeah or sideways through the end you know these things here are a wonderful thing now you know we can all actually see each other laying to each other on whatsapp video chat back do you know what I mean passing blame to each other not my fault which if you're not careful it can very much become that and we have historically become scapegoats now a lot of that I think is our own downfall, we've done it to ourselves to a certain extent it took me years and years to gain the confidence to point out something that I felt unsure of in the officer's feed for fear of me looking incompetent at my job so rather than actually addressing right I think we're going to have an issue with this later down the line and we need a way of intervening with it I can very well understand I just dealt with it the best way I could without actually enlightening the owner in that and like I say it took me a good 10-12 years of being qualified before I had that level of confidence to be able to approach that subject with the owner from my own personal perspective I've done an element of that to the L and historically we've not been the best communicators as an industry have we? because it's such a craft a craft type job a lot of it's done off of feel you know there's some extremely good horse shewers out there that perhaps don't have the depth of knowledge that you're imparting here but can still shew horse perfectly adequately but not be able to explain why they're doing it yeah yeah yeah it's quite common in the job you know but it's also it's also communication between owners, farriers owners have other people to farriers too and quite often you know you don't get communication from your owner until all of a sudden it's broken I don't know dare I say it you know some of these people ask ask for what they get they don't involve the environment I think I told you the other day and I'm going to tell you now because it's a it's a really good example of where I'm getting at you know my limited shewing round you know that in the majority of it it's behind electric gates in the in the dairy pastures of Old Monty Cheshire and one or two other places across and so I'm able most of the time to do the things that I think are the right thing and to your philosophy without too much hassle you know you get some of it every now and then without too much fuss but if I come to your neck of the woods which is on the hills of Derbyshire and it's a one in four decline your box is running off running off downhill I said I'll go out and fetch it will you I'm in a different I'm out of my comfort zone because I'm in a different environment and so we have to find solutions based around some of the things that we've talked about but that also match the environment that we're working in and bearing in mind that we have a number of responsibilities health and safety of the horse primarily secondly health and safety of the rider because you're not going to get paid by some poor woman that's broken her neck when she fell off it no and then you've got the commercial aspects of trying to run a service business where you're trying to do the right thing and replace faulty components with what you believe to be a better manufactured component but you're getting obscure parts breakdowns you know they just fall off oh you've been talking about shoe retention you haven't been guessing so you're having to adapt what you're trying to achieve to the environment that you're in and that adaptation is not just in the form of shoeing style but it's also in the adaptation of the fourth dimension, time you know, mine down here in Cheshire you know that has shown to a particular ethos mine don't go more than five weeks I'll be honest with you I've found it so much easier in the last decade to be able to bring people down from a six week shoeing cycle to a five they want to steal a bit more through winter and I don't mind too much really because feet do swell up a bit that mindset's altered quite a bit within owners I think certainly the owners I've got you know, because at one time of the day, you know, unless they were going six weeks in summer and eight weeks in winter you've got the sack, you know you dare tell them you want to do it in four or five weeks they haven't asked but you know, at the same time going back to that service element of it you know, these people, they want you to be able to have the time to stand there and talk to them about their issues and their feelings for their also, for you to take that relevant amount of interest that it is to treating it as an individual, the things that we would expound as what would be good practice but economically the viability of that doesn't always allow us to do it no, certainly not especially in an area like yours where you're constantly travelling between job to job and individual owners very little yard work yeah, you know, and so that comes into it and then there's the environment that you work in I'd love I'd love to see your face go on it's a hands up confession time this guys because some of you will be under the misapprehension that I'm a smart ass and that I try and do everything absolutely properly and I do, but I'm also subjected to the same issues that some of you face occasionally, not very often but occasionally, and yesterday I went a client of ours moved her horses from a local yard to a place that's nearer to where she lives over in Lancashire so we agreed to go and do them and we turned up at this place in East Lancs and it was the dark hole of Calcutta if not the dungeons of the Moors in the siege of the Knights of Malta or something and they had this fluorescent lightbulb that reached a maximum of 4 candle watts it's got an accumulation of 8 years worth of dust on it yeah, yeah, yeah, you got it and then this half barn that had been converted into this kind of indoor arena that took up an entire half of the barn lengthwise and the horses were down one side of it, so they got out one of these horses and tied it up very nice for us and the girl groom there had brushed it off and wiped its face and stuff, but it was stood in a puddle this hole in the concrete was like a foot deep and it had one foot in this puddle and one out, but the horse couldn't move out of the puddle because the gate to the half indoor school was wedged across its side so we were in the dark corner of this half barn with this 4 candle watt fluorescent lightbulb stood in a puddle and I just my mind flipped and I just took them off caught them down, put them on and banged them back on, I couldn't wait to get out of there and I was horrified I got back in the van on the way out, it was like I was sulking all the way home because I just allowed myself to be completely overwhelmed by the environment that most of you face every frigging day how on earth do these people, and let's take your dressage pony for example I don't know the environment that that's in, but how on earth do these people expect you to be able to attain the best quality work that you can provide that takes account of all the things that we've talked about this webinar sorry this podcast Neil Madden and expect you to be able to achieve the level of biomechanical efficiency that they need to get the performance out of these things but they can't provide you with the right environment to do it in a flat level piece of concrete that's well lit and well ventilated well that would be nice, I know it's winter time and all the rest of it but at least a very bare minimum so that you can give them what it is that they expect but if they don't provide that what gives them the right to expect anymore because you can't provide them anymore as much as I would have liked to try to have done this thing better, I don't think I could because I couldn't see what the frigging hell I was doing, what I should have done was walked away the trouble is you've got bills to pay you've got mouths to feed, you've got mortgages you know it's all well and good saying oh walk away walk away but somebody's still got to provide that horse with hoop care because it's a legal requirement and I mean to be fair there's some places that no educated parrots would have to go to it doesn't happen to me very often which is why I was like oh god I was so traumatised guys that I actually had to knock one door in which is a rarity for me because I know that if I do that I'm going to be stuck on the phone for an hour and a half and I just said welcome to my world no sympathy whatsoever but it did make me giggle but it certainly wasn't getting any flotation inserts or any of that so it could do with the depth of the portal because no one would swear me to a concrete deck I mean the thing is we laugh about it but if you're fortunate enough to be in a situation where you've got almost nothing but that kind of work the danger happens is that what you do the most of becomes normal and what you end up seeing becomes normal and unwittingly your standards slip just as an ethos because you get so browbeaten by working in those situations that you have really like you said you've almost no option but to shoo them blind because you can't see what you're doing but then over time that becomes imprinted into you as a normal way of doing it I can imagine that the thing that galls me the most is that I can imagine that the scenario that X peer down the line working in that same condition of course it goes lame or the performance is off and so we trot along and centre the vet the vet comes out but because the vet is quote a professional unquote they've got it in on time, it's clean, it's dry it's in a slightly different environment, their appointment is during daylight hours and now I'm being thrown under the boss but he wasn't there in the situation that I was facing. Well worse still he gets dragged up to one of these hospitals in a completely different environment just talking of which I had a funny episode the other day and it's quite renowned around us, this isn't the first instance of it and only happened to me but I have a customer that, we took his shoes off through the winter, it's a big young Irish draft toes in quite a bit towards the end of the previous summer his feet were starting to fall through the shoes so I gave an option, I said look we've got a pair of frog support pads on underneath there or alternatively it wouldn't hurt it, it's a big immature horse give it winter off, we'll pull it's shoes off, let nature do it's thing so she's like oh yeah I'm not going to be riding it that much, took the cheap option, took the shoes off it so it's due for trimming about 7 or 8 weeks and you can imagine it toes in quite a lot actually so you can imagine the state of the morphology on a barefooted big horse like that that's probably 9 weeks into it's trimming cycle it cuts itself in the feet, she whisks it to one of these vet hospitals to have it's legs stitched up and while you're there madam it's feet look atrocious, we'd best have some therapeutic shoes on that so it went down for it's leg being stitched back together and come back she come back with a three and a half hundred quid shoeing bill, she's like what's gone off here daddy I'm not being funny right but from that moment forward that trust bond between me and that owner is broken, no matter what I say to her it's a justification as to why it's in this situation, not from an educational point of view shall we play a game, go on, named that practice, no let's not let's not go there ultimately I sacked it because I thought you know that trust bond has been broken and in this situation there was absolutely no need to take that approach to it that horse was ready for it's feet trimming and that was the end of it or alternatively let's have some x-rays of it, I'll send you back with these x-rays for you Barry, let's see what he does for it, oh no we have to go through this bank job you know it's extremely frustrating when that happens, yeah it is and it you're not the only one you'll be pleased to know that it happens to me and it's happened to me a lot more since I became doctor, yeah because now it's like one of them and shit yeah, it's a piece but that's the way of the world it is unfortunately a bit cynical of me but it's I was only talking to a customer the other day and there's very few personalised reasonable services that face to face reasonable services that's left in the world isn't there you know everything's nameless, faceless, corporate that's just profit driven and I mean I know there's always talk about pricing in our job but I take satisfaction that I believe I offer a decent value for money service I'm not poor out of it the owner's not getting stung out of it and I enjoy that aspect of it it gives me satisfaction and pride that to be fair I've had a gun you know I'm my back told me I wasn't going to be a millionaire out of this job about 20 years ago so you know I've altered my mindset around it all and I get job satisfaction from providing a good value service well me when I grow up I'm going to get a proper job ice cream man yeah that's it you got it an Italian ice cream man my own little Italian ice cream man parked outside come on in I won't tell you where I'm parking or customer services at ASDA I can see you in that position yeah I'll be good at that right we're in danger of waffling let's yeah and we'll try and think of something else to discuss at another point in time alright brilliant hope you all enjoyed it see you again bye
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