Neal Valk
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Neal Valk
Good morning. Good to be here again at the FOSH Conference. This is my second time in front of a crowd for FOSH and it’s rewarding to say the least. I see a lot of familiar faces, glad to see you again. Sorry I had to dash in this morning and have to dash out again but busy time of year for me.
Today I’d like to talk a little bit about soring in the flat shod horse. I do have a bit of experience in this arena – almost 25 years as a veterinarian, almost 16 years as a self employed practitioner in upper east Tennessee. My experience comes from working the barns, boots on the ground sort of thing, with gaited horses, walking horses and racking horses in my area, primarily racking horses. But I’ve seen a lot of things and learned a lot since I started my practice in Tennessee and enjoy having the opportunity to talk about it openly.
Some of my clients over the years have told me that they originally made the transfer or made the move from riding padded performance horses to riding flat shod horses because they wanted to distance themselves from the stigma of soring. They wanted to get away from that. Moving to more or less a kinder, gentler kind of horse and so they were drawn to flat shod horses for that reason. It didn’t take long for exhibitors, competitors to find out that if you’ve got a flat shod horse that’s doing a little bit more than the other horses in the class, that that horse is more likely to win, competitive nature gets the best of them, and then before we know it we have as big a problem with soring in the flat shod ranks as we had in the padded ranks.
Right now the emphasis seems to be on the pads and the action devices. Obviously the PAST Act is a big thing, it’s getting all the attention. Everybody’s looking at that and of course the idea is not so much that we think that the pads and the chains may cause problems, I believe they can, I believe they do. But rather that we can use these implements to hide soring that is occurring. That we can use them as a method of avoiding detection of soring. And so we’re paying not so much attention to the flat shod horse at this point even though in my experience the problem with soring is as rampant or more in the flat shod horse as it is in the padded performance horse.
If you look at these two horses and compare them, a flat shod racking horse versus a padded racking horse, the gait’s really not that different. They’re pretty much doing the same thing as far as the gait goes. But because of the lack of weight on this horse’s feet, we’re going to have to touch this horse a little bit harder to get it to do the same thing that this horse does.
The pad. Again, the package. This is where the emphasis is. And if there’s an advantage for people that want to sore horses, particularly pressure soring horses, then this seems to be a better way to hide the evidence of that. But inflammation is the key. And that’s what we’re doing when we’re soring horses. We’re creating inflammation whether we’re doing it chemically or we’re doing it traumatically with pressure or another means of actually injuring the hoof. Inflammation is what gets us where we want to be. One of the products of healthy, robust inflammatory reaction is pain and that’s what gives the horse the Big Lick. So anything we can do to create inflammation can sore the horse.
Now conversely, if we’re inspecting horses that’s what we’re looking for as well. Evidence of inflammation. But in order to enforce the HPA, we need more than just evidence of inflammation. We need proof that inflammation has been intentionally caused and that’s the key.
Now I’ve never been in a training barn, a walking or racking training barn, that didn’t have a big jar of GOJO on display. The most common form or method of soring horses. Topically applying irritants to the skin. I used to tell my wife jokingly that if we ever get invited to a barn warming party for a racking or walking horse trainer, I know what to take, a gift here that I know is gonna get used. But other things as well. Mustard oil, croton oil, kerosene is very common. And it always amazes me, the ingenuity of some of the trainers. I have a client who swears by bacon grease and he told me the formula. What he does is he collects the bacon grease, then he puts it in a clear jar, caps it, and then sets it on a shelf in the tack room for 18 months to two years. Apparently during this time period, it will reliquify and it will separate out and on the bottom is this viscous opaque liquid, and at the top is this crystal clear liquid. And he swears that the liquid that comes to the top after a couple of years, if applied to the pastern of a horse, it’ll put it on its knees. And he’s pretty sure that he’s not gonna get swabbed for bacon grease.
Pressure soring. This is a USDA picture obviously, I noticed that it’s in the book here. But pressure soring started to take the place of chemical soring. In my neck of the woods there aren’t so many big shows, there’s not a whole lot of enforcement. We don’t see the USDA very often and so chemical soring is still rampant. But this is becoming more and more popular. This is the use of a bolt to apply pressure. A relatively thin metal plate that’s wedged between the shoe and the sole on this horse. There’s a hold drilled there that’s threaded, it’s tapped, and a bolt’s placed through there. And once you put pressure on the sole and engage the bolt, it’ll hold the whole apparatus in place there. Very, very effective for soring a flat shod horse. It can be left in there for hours or days at a time. The horse can be trained with this in place. The down side for the horse is there’s no escaping this pain. He can stand up, he can lie down, it doesn’t matter. The pressure is there and the trauma that occurs as a result of the use of this is constant.
What’s frustrating for me as a veterinarian is if I were to examine a horse like this after this had been removed, whether it had been removed minutes or hours ago, the inflammation caused by that device is gonna persist, the soreness is gonna persist. I can look at this horse and clinically say yes, there’s evidence of inflammation here. I’ve got a bounding digital pulse and in my opinion the horse is more sensitive, more response to hoof testers over this area than he maybe ought to be. But if I don’t see this device, I can’t prove any wrongdoing because I can give you six or seven examples of conditions that naturally occur to horses that could cause those identical clinical findings.
Another method that I see in upper east Tennessee is called stacking. This is not a horse that’s been stacked but I don’t have a picture of that. But what the trainers will commonly do is take some of the pad material, this hard plastic padding from the package and they’ll cut it out with the convex side up and put a flat surface on the bottom and they’ll create a block. It’s called blocking. They’ll actually stand the horses on those. The block only contacts the frog and the sole of the foot and then they’ll tape those in place, usually just duct tape them into place, and make the horse stand on the blocks again for days. And if you tie the horse, the horse can’t lie down, the horse can’t escape the pain of that. I’ve even seen some trainers in east Tennessee that will actually work the horse when they’re blocked like that. And again, it’s the same sort of thing with the bolt. Once that’s removed, if I were to inspect the horse or anybody were to inspect the horse, we can find clinical evidence of inflammation but we don’t see any proof of wrongdoing.
A couple of things with this picture. Something I don’t see much anymore, much more common 15, 16 years ago. You take this band that holds the shoe onto the foot and you undo it here, you unfasten it and move the band out of the way and then drive a nail through the dorsal hoof wall underneath where the band would lie just until the tip of the nail engages the sensitive tissue and then cut the nail off flush with the hoof wall, put the band back on and tighten to effect. It’s a technique called spiking. Very, very effective but can result in some pretty nasty abscesses a lot of the time. Fortunately I don’t see that very often. Could be detected on radiographs or with fluoroscopy probably but again, many of my clients are not showing it at shows where that’s going to be an issue. Another thing about this foot too that Dr. Turner alluded to is any equine veterinarian, any farrier, almost any horse person would look at that foot and go there’s something terribly wrong with this. It’s not a normal looking foot. To me it’s an extremely pathologic foot and I look at a hoof like this from across the room and go______horse is a founder, we some got rotation. You got to have rotation because the hoof wall growing out of the coronet here is following the face of the coffin bone and this angle is much steeper than this angle. The only way that can happen is for the hoof wall to be pulled away from the coffin bone or the coffin bone to rotate away from the hoof wall. This is a founder horse. In any other discipline, you would treat this as an emergency situation. But in this case, laminitis, if it’s an active laminitis, is actually beneficial because it’s that much more inflammation that’s causing the horse to step the way you want him to step.
Fuzzy picture of a horse with a founder’s stance. It’s the only discipline I know where people actually use pathology as a performance enhancer. You’ve got a founder horse, you’re scot free because it’s sore, it’s gonna hit a Big Lick, and there’s absolutely no proof that you’ve done anything to it. They can swab it, they can do whatever. Now Dr. Turner and Dr. Haffner and I can look at this horse clinically and say there’s evidence of inflammation, based on this picture laminitis, but we can’t prove any wrongdoing. So what happens in a situation like this. Is the horse intentionally sored and we can’t find a reason for it? Or is the owner ignorant and they’re showing a horse that ought to be at home on stall rest and medication? For me it’s kind of a dilemma.
Which leads me to that. Proof of intent. If you pull this package off of a horse after a show and half a golf ball falls out of there, that’s pretty good evidence of intent. But if I look at a flat shod horse that’s got bounding digital pulses and sensitive to hoof testers, how can I prove intent? Can I prove intent? I can convince myself that the horse is sore or the horse is experiencing inflammation in its feet but whether or not I can prove intent is I think very hard to do. Which kind of leads me to something Dr. Turner said as well. Maybe we should consider looking at this a little differently and going along with what some of the other breeds do and instead of always having to rely on proof that the horse has been sored, maybe we should say hey, this horse is fit to show, this horse is not fit to show. Because what we have to do is try to get some objective information to be able to say yes or no. It can’t always be about trying to catch somebody in the act of soring, it’s gotta be about looking at the horse and saying I’m sorry this horse is not fit to show. I’m not accusing you of anything. Or surprise, half a golf ball falls out, we know what’s going on. But there needs to be a way, I think, in my opinion, to deal with this situation. That’s all I have.
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