Renegade boots and laminitis thoughts
| April 3, 2009 | Posted by Melinda under Uncategorized |
The “winds of March” have been here (and gone????). According to the weather.com, today is the last day of wind – thank goodness! I don’t do well in wind. I have longer hair right now and I can’t stand how it blows around. The wind makes me feel claustrophobic, irritable, and bad-tempered. And did I mention results in ZERO patience? So what am I trying to say? I have had the renegade boots almost a week and have done ZERO trail miles. 🙁 However, I have done some outrageous roundpen sessions with them (the wind will do that) and they stayed on perfectly.
Here are some pictures of the renegades on Minx’s feet. I haven’t adjusted the cable length yet because I’m still deciding how much tension I want on the toe straps. I was having trouble with the captivators falling lower than I thought they should. I sent these pictures to Karen Chaton (see her blog on the left) and she said other than the cables needing to be shortened, the boots seemed to fit well.
I was concerned because the captivators fall so that the bottom edge is level with the bottom of the boot after Minx moves around, no matter how loose or tight the captivator strap is. 
It looks much worse in “real life” than in the pictures! However, after viewing the pictures and talking to Karen, I think the bottom line is that they stay on, Minx moves well in them, and so this is probably how they are suppose to fit. I love that these boots are so easy to use. I’ve never booted my horses before, yet the learning curve has been extremely easy. If someone is comfortable with their horses feet and has a minimum level of mechanical ability (to adjust cables), I would highly recommend these boots.
Below is a picture of Minx’s bare hoof (right front). Do you notice anything about it?
Since I have started trimming, I’ve started looking at her feet much closer than before. At first I thought that the bump halfway up the hoof (shows up as the black stripe in this picture) was due to flaring, because it is most pronounced on the sides, above the quarters. I let her feet get really long last winter. However, I was puzzled by the uniformity of it. There’s a dip (brown line above toe in the picture) that goes all the around the hoof. It’s the dip that makes it look like there’s a bulge…..My next thought was nutrition. Last June I changed her feed from 100% alfalfa to 1/2 grass and 1/2 alfalfa, and added platinum performance (which I have discontinued). Could that have done it? Lamitinis did cross my mind, but Minx is an unlikely candidate (no grain, hard keeper, etc). However, today I heard the term “stress induced laminitis” for the the first time. Is it possible that she had a bout of stress induced laminitis due to the travelling, competing, and conditioning last spring? Does anyone have any information about this? I search thehorse.com, but wasn’t able to get a lot of information. Definitely something I’ll be running by my vet when I do west nile in May.
Talking about stress levels – the more I think about it, the more I think Minx really wants to be a cart/driving horse. The difference in her stress level between the cart and under saddle is remarkable. I’ll still ride her, but I think once I get the harness and cart home, I’ll do much of her mileage sitting BEHIND her. Maybe I’ll use her for LD’s and an occasionally 50, but I have a feeling her future is as my pleasure driving horse.
The boots look good! The captivators will fall to their most natural position — Mimi’s migrate to a low position. As long as they stay on, that’s the critical part. If the bottom of the captivator is low to the ground, it helps give additional heel bulb protection from what I’ve found.
Great – thanks for the feedback. I can’t wait to get these boots on the trail. If they stayed on through the freaky wind-induced antics of the roundpen work, I’m really curious what it would take on the trail to rip them off….
I’ve had two come off on trail. The first time, the cable freakishly snapped on a hind boot. To this day, I still do not know what caused it to snap. In the literally dozens of pairs of Renegades my father and I have used, this is the only cable that has ever snapped. The only thing I can think of was we went into a 90-degree turn off a dirt road onto a more rocky, mogul-filled track way too fast (which is what happens when you almost miss a ribbon and ride a pony that knows how to run barrels…) and maybe a rock hit the cable or something. ?!?! Very weird.
The second time was a front boot that was just a bit too big for Mimi. It filled with sand, then we slogged through a knee-deep mud puddle that mimi had to stand in the middle of and drink for about five minutes. We came out of the puddle, took off trotting, went through some mogul-like things on the trail, and the boot came off. I think it was a combination of an overreach – front feet not getting out of the way fast enough when the back feet came down – and the sand/dirt turning to mud from the water and weighing it down, and the overreach was the final straw.
But those have been the only two issues I’ve ever had with them, and I’ve been using them for two and a half years now. Dad has never had one come off, and he’s been using them for over three years, on two different horses, one of them being a Missouri Foxtrotter who was very prone to interfering.