Due to my location, land is at a premium and hence about 95% of horses in my area are kept in stalls. It was really amazing I could even find "pasture" boarding at all. However, people in other parts of the US and even the world are probably laughing at my idea of a pasture which is really just a small corral. However, it's better than a stall so we will take what we can get.
What most people think of when they hear pasture vs. where Calvin actually is
Anyway, because he's living in a small dirt pen with three other horses, his hooves aren't getting the work that the would in the wild. They're turning soft, both due to his diet, inactivity, and soft dirt footing. Without further ado, here are his feet after our "winter"
RF: Not growing as much sole, frogs softer, more white line
LH: The white stuff is for treating/preventing the bacteria growth in his hoof, I forgot to take pics before I treated his feet.
RH: Better than fronts but still not enough growth
RF: his fronts are definitely worse than the hinds in terms of white line spacing. While his feet may not be what they once were, they're still looking pretty great.
My trimmer said that the best hooves are ones that are "in work" meaning, ones that are ridden or worked more frequently. I'm hitting the trails more now to get him back on the rocks/gravel to toughen them up again. My trimmer is very concerned about him being sensitive on gravel, so I'm wary that this is possible and am paying attention to times he may be acting tender on his feet. However, so far he crunches gravel just like he used to without acting tender in the slightest. We don't have the rocks that my last boarding place had, which helped his feet even more, but thanks to our dry terrain there is still enough hard footing to build his feet back up. If he does show tenderness though, I do have boots I can use :)
How do people combat this with the barefoot horse? Well, they either put horse shoes on (to hide the issue, still doesn't fix the hoof), change the feed or environment, or they create what's called a paddock paradise. One day when I actually have land, this is what I'm going to create. It mimics what horses do in the wild. Instead of having one big pen, you create "roads" which the horses travel on. The idea behind the roads is a number of reasons: 1) to limit how much green grass a horse can eat--limited amounts is okay, but too much high sugar grass leads to founder 2) horses travel in "roads" in the wild, using frequently traveled paths and sticking together. Ideally these roads would involve multiple terrain types: hills, ditches, water, rocks, etc. We can artificially create this by using gravel/rocks in certain parts, logs, or creating hills. Then you spread the food out throughout the pasture, forcing them to move around and eat, not just eat in one location. All the different terrain types creates a fit horse and fit feet, hence why it's the ideal setting. But people are afraid of this: my horse will turn up lame, they'll hurt themselves on obstacles/rocks, etc. People forget that horses have grown up this way for millennia, just because humans are hell-bent on destroying good feet doesn't mean that their feet are ruined in this short amount of time we have been domesticating them. Anyway, as I talked about before, any horse can go barefoot...but it is a lifestyle change and people don't like change.
Here are different examples of paddock paradise:
Cordoning off parts of the pasture, gives a good example of the roads created
Rocky terrain, similar to how the mustangs live in the wild
Natural obstacles keeping them active
Oh and let's not forget the beautiful feet created by living on this terrain:
This horse is 6 months without shoes (the paint horse from the above photo feat. rocky terrain)
