Good little hooves

I was on Lola when the shoes showed up, his fault not mine since he was 20 minutes early. So I threw her saddle on the round pen fence, and she got her feet trimmed. Not much to do really since she had sort of naturally been wearing them down in pasture. He evened them out, and got them a bit more balanced. There was one little side crack starting along the outside, she had some flare along the inside of that hoof, so it just was a bit out of balance. It’s evened out now and he’s put in a notch there which should keep the crack from progressing. She was very well behaved about all of it, which is good since my poor shoer had his arm almost ripped off by a nasty stallion just before New Year’s! Over all he said she’s got nice feet and has worn them down pretty evenly which says good things about her legs and how she moves, and considering it has probably been a year since she’s had them trimmed by anyone she was extremely well behaved.

So I left her tied to the round pen fence while I ran to grab my checkbook. I asked my mom to keep the old mare with in sight since she was riding around a bit (once I convince her to get on her horse its hard to get her off!), and my dad stuck around to supervise. I got talking and suddenly hear my dad say, “Well, what are you doing there?” to Lola. I peaked around the garage to see her with her hoof up over the bar of the round pen panel that is about level with her chest! Just high enough that her pasturn is resting on the bar and the hoof gets caught on the other side. Yikes! I have seen so many disasters like that! She just stood there and looked at it like, “Well, now what do I do?” So my dad walked up, picked the hoof up and shoved her foot back inside. No big deal! What a great personality test! Bad test if she failed since it would have probably greated problems with pulling back when tied, possibly injury, and worst case, pulling the round pen panels down on top of her! She didn’t though, and it shows how she’s likely to react in other situations where some horses panic. She not only thought about it instead of reacting, she trusted the human present to get her out of her predicament.

Good girl Lola! And thanks dad for supervising as asked!