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Hello, my name is Christine Betz with Christine Betz Dressage and this is Catus, my Grand
Prix horse and today we are going to teach you how to pick out a hoof.
After we get started today we are making a couple of assumptions the first one is that
your horse knows how to lead, how to halter, and how to stand tied. the second of which
is that he's comfortable having his feet handled. if not, you want to address that prior to
join in to attempt to pick out his feet. You want to start at the shoulder.Try to keep
the same pattern with your horse, that will help him to relax and get really used to the
process. *** you go to lift the hoof, you want to start at his shoulder, run your hand
down his foreleg to his cannon. if he doesn't automatically lift his foot, like Catus did
here, then you can tickle the chestnut, or you can also kind of tickle the fetlock here
with you hoof pick or with your hand, to get them to pick up the foot. there are tow ways
to hold the hoof, the first one is what I'm doing here,you want to cup the left hoof with
your left hand. you always want to pick going away from yourself, never toward. If you feel
like you're getting into a lot of debris in the foot and you need to support it better,
you can always do a farrier hold, which is to step around the horse's leg and to pinch
it with your knees. this will help you if you have a lot of debris in the foot, get
a little more leverage, and to dig it out. As you can see cats' foot is pretty clean,
so we are going to go back to our hoof cleaning hold, and then we are also going to go through
now that we ve used the pick we are going to use the brush
end of the hoof pick to clean all of this out. Checking the cleft, making sure the sole
is clean, making sure there is nothing poking around or underneath the nails, and also looking
for any kind of problem. When you pick your horse's feet out, you want to look, you want
to feel, and you want to smell. You want to look for a problem, you want to
feel for heat, the horse's hoof should be the coldest part of his body. And you want
to look for problems, feel for heat and smell for any kind of infection or fungus, particularly
thrush. Then once you've picked out, you can go through
with the brush, make sure all of the debris is out of the foot, make sure the clefts are
good, the bulb of the heel is clean, and that he's not developing shear heels which would
be a split through here. When you're done. you want to easily let your
horse set his foot down, don't drop it.