Please remember!

The information presented on this blog represents "learning in progress" on my part, a horse owner, who was not satisfied with professional farriers and took matters in my own hands. As far as I am aware at the time of the post, the information presented is correct, but may change with me understanding more about hooves, in which case I will edit or remove the post. In order to follow my learning and understand everything about Molly's hoof, you need to start reading at the bottom.

Thursday, September 25, 2014

the growth direction of bar

This is the third part of the post on bars, whether or not they can and do smear all over sole and encircle the frog.

Shown in the picture below is another cadaver hoof that was exposed to the dermestid beetles. The only difference between this hoof and the one in the first post is that this time the hoof is pigmented and not white.




On the left side of the picture I show the corium of a hoof. The black arrow points to the bar corium, i.e. the cells from which the bar grows. One can clearly see the directions of the tubules. They face outwards, in the direction of the quarters of the hoof. The blue lines therefor project where the bar will be growing towards. On the right side of the picture, we can see that this is exactly what the bar wall has done, grow out towards the quarter of the hoof. The bars of this hoof have probably not been trimmed in a while. At least the one on the right side of the hoof. Often times, the consequence of a bar that grows high towards the quarters is a flare on the quarter wall. And this is what seems to have happened to this hoof too. The right side of this hoof in the picture seems much more flared than the left. Most likely the horse, due to its conformation, wore the left side well by itself, and the right side not so well. 

In the next slide I have placed the pigmented and unpigmented cadaver hoof on the same slide.




To recall, Cheryl Henderson is using the left cadaver hoof as proof that bar can smear around the frog (the parts that is pointed to by the red arrows). However, as one can see on the pigmented hoof, the same material that she claims is smeared inner bar wall (zona alba) on the white hoof is pigmented on the black hoof. The zona alba however is white on both white and black hooves and thus on the black hoof, this material that finds itself left over by the beetles and located next to the frog is not zona alba, but very likely ordinary (calloused) pigmented sole. At least the color of it does not provide any evidence for it being bar. If it would be bar, it would now need to be the outer pigmented wall of the bar that smears around the frog.

We can also see again, as in the pigmented hoof, the unpigmented hoof has one bar that wears down by itself nicely (right side of hoof) and one that obviously was trimmed recently (left side of picture) and had grown quite high up towards the quarters.


Taken together this post the patterns observed suggest that the bar does not grow forward on the hoof (i.e. towards the tip of the frog) but outwards, in the direction of the bar corium tubules, towards the quarters and not the tip of the frog.



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