My horses Shoes?

Question

My horse loses her shoes allllll the time at horse shows! Its almost like she does it on purpose. At home her shoes stay where they are, but as soon as we do a couple courses in the ring her shoes fall off?

So we decided to warm her up with her bell boots, but it didnt help at all.

Sometimes she loses one or two.. At first I thought it was the farrier, but he does all the horses at my barn and they stay on.. so i dont know what to do.

?

Answer 1

is keeping her barefoot an option? if so i would try that

Answer 2

My husband is a farrier and he runs into this kind of issue sometimes. He either tries using hot shoes on the horse, clips (to help hold the shoe on), or he uses an adhesive to hold the shoe on better. Not sure what it is called but it works well. Your farrier should be able to find out. Hope this helps!

Answer 3

her feet my not be right for shoes. they could be too soft. if possible try letting ger go barefoot. if this isn't an option, try glue on shoes. these are made for horses that need shoes but have a hard time keeping them these might work. they don't use nails to keep them on only glue. some of the horses at my old barn used them and they worked really good.

Answer 4

Maybe its the different sand or ground that your riding her in. Maybe its uncomfortable or shes just not quite used to it? Ask your farrier for a light weight shoe. They will be more but also more comfy. Alluminum I think!

Hope I helped!

Answer 5

It's likely her hoof wall is just especially brittle.  Hot shoeing your horse can help a lot with this- it's the only way my mare holds a shoe.  It can be hard nowadays to find a farrier who hot shoes, and it will cost more, but it's worth it!  I would also recommend trying this product: http://www.doversaddlery.com/product.asp...  It's a disinfectant for hooves.  It sounds odd, but it really helped with my mares soft, brittle hoof walls after a few months.  My farrier used my horse to try it out because she had the worst hooves he had encountered.  He had seen an article that said that brittle and soft hoof walls can be caused by a bacteria living in the hoof wall.  He had me clean and dry her hoof and apply this product with a toothbrush, scrubbing it into her whole hoof, twice a day for about a month, then once a day for about 3 months, then we cut back to 2 or 3 times a week.  It's worth a shot!  It's not cheap, but after a few months it really reduced my shoeing costs as I didn't have to have him out so often to deal with thrown shoes, chipping, and cracking.  I still have her hot shod, because it provides a better contact between shoe and hoof, and gets rid of any tiny 'rocking' of the shoe, which can be a common cause of a thrown shoe or hoof wall cracks.

Answer 6

Have you tried double knotting?

Answer 7

Let me guess.  Front shoes?   She is stepping on them with her back feet when she reaches a little farther or gets excited.  Had a few horses that would do this when they think they are going riding.  Once one mare had all her shoes on in the field and both back shoes were gone when we got to the trail ride.  They were not in the trailer so she had lost them walking across the yard to the trailer.  That was the first time she lost them but she lost one or two every other time we rode.  Always before we got there.  

It turned out she was barely catching the heel of the shoe on front with the toe of the back.  It didn't make much noise so you didn't notice it often.  I finally stopped it by getting her a little shorter shoe so that it didn't catch when she did that.

Another horse we had would deliberately go over to the fence and stick her leg through and cause them to catch and then she would pull them off.  Hard on fences that one was.  Again I stopped that by going to a size smaller and making sure there was nothing sticking out to catch in the wire.  This mare would pull off both front (not unusual) but would also turn around and get her back ones (that is unusual and she is to date the only horse I know of that did that deliberately).  After a few shoeings where she couldn't get them off she gave up.

Answer 8

ask your farrier otherwise i would try barefoot as an option

Answer 9

Hello,

I don't know for certain, but it seems like maybe it has a couple of things to do with your horse:

Her confirmation can make her over reach....which causes her to step on and pull off the shoes.

Her hoof structure may not be very sound....which causes the hoof to be more brittle than usual and the nails on the shoe simply cannot hold onto it.

What does your farrier think the problem is?

Without knowing exactly what kind of showing your doing and what it involves I could only make these guesses.