Heather O’Brien, an AFA certified farrier in Port Coquitlam, B.C., said the cause of white line disease was elusive for many years, until studies pointed toward fungi as the culprit.
“Burney Chapman, a farrier turned scientist, took biopsies of affected feet and looked at them in the lab. He found more than 50 different bacteria and fungi in these biopsies, but there were three types of fungal spores that were always present. He made the logical assumption that these three were what were breaking down the hoof,” she said.
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It’s been hard to determine what makes a horse susceptible—especially the individuals that have repeated infections. “You might have five horses of the same breeding, living in the same field, eating the same food, and one might have white line disease and the others won’t. So people started looking at the hoof wall itself and its integrity. A scientist in Scotland, Susan Kellen, did research on nutritional aspects, and in her view this disease is caused by nutritional imbalance that leads to poor quality hooves,” said O’Brien.
Even if horses are eating the same feeds, one might utilize or metabolize the nutrients a bit differently.
“If hoof quality is poor, there may be intracellular spaces that bacteria can get into. They create even bigger spaces that fungal spores can get into. Thus horses in any environment, any age or occupation, shod or barefoot, could get white line disease,” she said.
O’Brien believes proper nutrition is important to repair the quality of the hoof horn, balancing the diet for that individual so the horse can grow a stronger hoof.
Kellen pointed out that too much vitamin A is just as bad as too little for hoof health, and this is true of other essentials of diet such as selenium, iron iodine, etc. Biotin, protein, zinc and methionine are also important ingredients.
Structural integrity of the hoof can be helped with proper, well-balanced nutrition along with keeping the feet clean, trimmed and balanced so there is no additional stress on the hoof wall that might cause excessive leverage and prying forces that lead to separation—and access by fungi.
