Barefoot and The Gaited Horse

by Bill and Donna Coon

There has been a question in the minds of some humans that taking the gaited horse barefoot takes too much time, ruins the gait, and the results are, at best, mediocre. “Boots are too hard to put on and it takes time away from the ride!” “One cannot ride the horse in the rocks barefoot!” Well, let’s see if we can separate fact from fiction.

The real question here is “how can humans help with the health of their horses in a very positive manner?”

We have five barefoot Tennessee Walking Horses ranging from 9 to 27 years of age, plus our adult daughter owns two barefoot walkers – one does dressage and the other is entered in open jumping classes. See picture below – practicing online:

Our horses are used primarily as trail horses in the mountains of Utah. Our horse’s shoes were pulled in November of 2005. We started barefoot trimming with help from an AANHCP professional in April of 2006. We learned that one cannot pull shoes and go ripping up through the mountains. When the shoes were pulled we found that the sole is quite sensitive to the ground, thus we started using our collection of hoof boots on a regular basis. We started with the regular EasyBoot. The EasyBoots came in handy for thrown steel shoes. As we all know, they are difficult to get on the hoof and will pull off the hoof for no particular reason. What we learned from studying with Pete Ramey is that the hoof requires from nine months to 12 months to grow a new well connected hoof wall. That’s what we were planning on for the length of time required to properly trim hooves to get to the point of not having to use boots. This is the transition period to go from steel shoes to no steel shoes. We still had not attended, at this point in time, any clinic or seminar on barefoot horses. We read everything we could get our hands on to read to get started.

We found through experimenting with boots that EasyCare Epics worked well for our use in the mountains. Boots are the one requirement during the transition period. We attended a barefoot clinic with Pete Ramey in September of 2006 and another in May of 2007. We continue to read everything that we can get our hands on in respect to barefoot trimming. We trim all five of our horses ourselves. We have an AHA trimmer look over our work to be sure we are doing the best we can do for our horse’s health. We’ve called on our AHA professional trimmer twice in the last 3 years. Boots were no longer necessary in the fall of 2007.

The results are quite striking. The horses seem, to us, to be happier and healthier (this is a subjective observation). The first thing noticed was that all of the horses ceased toe first landings and are all now landing heel first. The second thing that we noticed, especially in one of our horses, is the length of stride. The horse is a stepping pace horse and his over-stride has gone from 18” to 24”. The horse has gained the heel first landing, which adds length to the stride, and his hind quarter reach has increased since the diffusion of heel pain. All of our horses have increased their stride, some more than others. Our horses had the usual oblong shape to their hooves because of steel shoes. By bringing the toe back to a natural position the hooves are more round.

To answer the “can’t ride in rocks” question, we live in Utah, where the entire state is nothing but one big rock pile. The horses have no issue with rocks (see accompanying pictures). As we said before, we took the boots off in the fall of 2007 and have not used them since. One of the best advantages with barefoot trimming is that the human is proactive with the horses conditioning, trimming and nutrition. Nutrition comes along with the barefoot regimen. The human still needs to pay attention to the three essential pieces of going barefoot – trimming, nutrition, and environment. Our environment in Utah is dry and hard packed ground. We feed a mixture of grass and alfalfa. The one thing that seems to take a while to achieve is the natural concavity of the hoof. Exercise is essential to the health of the foot. Our horses are ridden five to seven times a week.

There are those who think that Tennessee Walking Horses need long toes and other unnatural gimmicks to get the horse to gait. We find this kind of thinking to be erroneous. We ride our horses over some of the nastiest ground around, mostly in halters, and occasionally with a snaffle or mild curb bit. The horses gait better if we humans can get them into the most natural conditions possible.

The above picture is an example of a back-country road that we have in our local area. The gravel roads that we may travel on horseback through the state of Utah are very much similar.

These are two of our horses in the above picture– the horse in the background is a seventeen year old TWH mare that was our first of five to successfully go barefoot. The horse in the foreground is a nine year old mare that had about the same amount of time needed to go to a barefoot regime.

The above picture is an example of a trail that we use on a daily basis, weather permitting, and this includes winter. We average about three feet of snow in this area which we ride on to pack the snow into a usable trail for horses. Sometimes an occasional snow mobile will handle the packing job for us.

Another thing I would like to point out that most of the trails we ride are not flat. Most are in the mountains, some, like the above, which undulate, and others are very steep.

This particular trail is above where we live, so it was the trail most often in use during our transition period and we used boots. After we pulled the boots the trail seemed intimidating to both of us, but the horses did very well.

The question may arise of “what happens during the winter?” “Do the hooves soften up so that boots must be used at winters end?” As I write this article we are in the process of riding the above trail for an after winter break-in. We have not had to use boots at all. What winter provides are hooves that can be trimmed easier than in spring, summer, and fall. It has taken about two weeks of dry, warmer (50° degree) weather and the hooves are back to being hard and strong.

Due to our enthusiasm about going barefoot, we have been joined by several other gaited horse owners that opted to go barefoot. Not all of these horses are TWH’s, but the gait did not change. If anything happened, the gaits of the horses improved.