PrintThere’s no doubt about it, having a horse with sheared heels can be stressful. If you’re the owner, that stress may show up when you worry about your horse not feeling 100 percent—or not being able to make it to his next show. But for the horse, that stress shows up in his heels and needs to be closely monitored.
If a horse has good hoof and leg conformation, his feet hit the ground evenly, without one side suffering extra stress. But a horse with crooked legs or poor joint angles will have unbalanced feet that wear crookedly, and one side of the hoof will have a different shape than the other.
If the frog is off center, for instance, there’s often a flare in the hoof wall on one side. Sometimes poor trimming and shoeing (leaving the sides or heels of the foot uneven and out of balance) or neglect (bare feet growing too long), combined with one side of the long foot breaking off, will create an imbalance that can lead to sheared heels.
This unbalanced hoof puts uneven stresses on the rear part of the foot, resulting in jamming forces on one side and a tearing of the tissues as one heel bulb becomes higher than the other—that’s sheared heels.
The side that gets the most impact becomes steeper because the rate of hoof growth on that side speeds up, due to increased blood circulation. The side receiving less impact will flare outward.
Going barefoot is one option in correcting sheared heels, allowing the frog, bars and sole to contact the ground and help take weight.
“This unloads the wall and allows it to relax a little,” said Scott Morrison of Rood and Riddle Equine Hospital (Ky.). “One cause of sheared heels and quarter cracks is
too much loading of the perimeter of the foot—the hoof wall—and not using the other structures of the foot for weight bearing. Thus going barefoot can be another option for horses who don’t have to compete with shoes on.”
If the horse can have time off from work and adjust to going barefoot, this can
work well.
“If you can control the environment and the footing (having the horse in a large enough area, with dry footing instead of wet and boggy) going barefoot
If one side of the foot continually hits the ground first (and harder than the other), the heel bulb on the side receiving the most concussion may eventually be driven upward, creating sheared heels. If not corrected, the condition becomes more extreme, and the horse will go lame. The side that lands first bears the brunt of impact and is prone to injury (bruising, quarter cracks and/or sheared heels).
If the tissues between the heel bulbs start to tear (as the bulbs become more and more out of line and distanced from each other) the horse feels discomfort each time the foot takes weight.
Scott Morrison, DVM, of Rood and Riddle Equine Hospital, Lexington, Ky., most commonly finds this problem in horses that toe in or out, putting more stress on one side of the hoof wall (and heel) than the other.
“The conformation that can lead to sheared heels is usually feet that turn out a little bit (splay footed). In other
instances, horses don’t have the hoof and pastern in a straight line,” he said. “If you look at them from the front, it looks like the hoof is offset to the outside, like the foot is put onto the pastern too much toward the outside. The pastern comes into the hoof capsule from the medial side (a little to the inside). Those feet tend to develop really bad sheared heels.”
