How To Clean A Horse's Hooves (The Easy Way)

hey guys today I wanted to show you how to pick out your horses hose and before we get started make sure you like this video and subscribe to our channel for more weekly horse videos [Music] all right so when you first go to clean your horses hose the first thing you're going to want to do is secure your horse so they can't walk off when you go to pick up their feet there's a number of ways to do this whether you're just ground tying tie them off as I did here or even just holding the rope in your hand when you pick out their feet just a quick side note if you're working on your horses hose I always recommend tying them to a breakaway strap like this twine here that way if they pull back or something like that they'll be able to break away and keep going backwards instead of jumping forward and run it into you alright so when you go to pick up your horses feet one thing that's very important is that you have the correct position next to your horse so the correct position to pick up your horses foot you're gonna want to stand perpendicular to the leg that you're picking up that means your body and the horse's body should form a right angle and you don't want to be standing behind their leg or in front of their leg you want to be right beside it all right same thing for the back legs you want it to be standing right next to them with your side up against the horse something that's really important is you don't want to be standing like this far away you want to be standing right up next to the horse and God forbid if the horse goes to kick you the closer you are to them the less power they're going to have behind their kick so if I get kicked right here it's going to be a lot less painful compared to if I'm standing right here or you know behind them or something like that alright so once you're in the correct position next to your horse it's tired pick up your horse's legs um one thing I tell people if you're working with the green horse or maybe a horse you don't know I always start by running your hand down their leg that just lets them know you're there and it also lets them anticipate what you're about to ask them to do okay so some horses will just automatically pick up their feet you know they start to anticipate it when you run your hand down their legs but sometimes you're gonna have to apply pressure and actually ask them to pick up their leg there's a few ways you can do this the first way is by kind of tugging at the hairs on their fetlock so this is the horse's fetlock right here and Tiger have some so I just kind of pinch and I pull up with that hairs and he'll just pick up this foot like that all right I'll show you one more time I'm just gonna pull in the fetlock a little bit that he picks his hoof right up and so if your horse isn't picking up your hoof their hoof right away you can just keep applying that pressure until they do a Jeschke another way you can ask your horse to pick up their leg is by gently squeezing the tendons in their back leg so on the lower part of the leg right above the fetlock you have this section right here you can feel there's a bone right here and then there's a bone right here so in between these two bones there's a gap and this is where some tendons are so if you just gently pinch and that can ask your horse to pick up itself so if you have a really stubborn horse that doesn't want to pick up their feet something you can try is when you bend down just kind of lean your shoulder into their shoulder this is gonna make them shift their weight over to the other leg and so it'd be easier for them to pick up this other leg so if you incorporate leaning your shoulder against them and then either pulling on their fetlock or pinching that tendon usually they'll get the hit and they'll pick their foot right up okay so now I'll talk about how to hold the hook so when you first get the hook picked up check your position you still want to make sure you're beside the horse rather than like standing like this where's your foots right under their foot if they put it down or you don't want to be standing like this where if the horse pulls their leg you can get one another point is you want to make sure that you're standing up when you're doing this you don't want to be like crouching or sitting on the ground that's because if something happens in the horse move suddenly you can easily get out of the way if you're still on your feet compared to if you're sitting down on the ground so you want to stay standing stay beside your horse and what I'm gonna do just depends what hand is your strongest here to pick out the feet but either way I'll either hold this with this hey Turner hold it like this and I'll use it's him to pick before we actually pick out a hoof I want to show you what a clean hoof looks like if you know the features of a horse's hoof it will just be easier in general to get it really good and clean all right so here is a horse's clean hoof so to begin with this triangle here it's called the Frog it's why horses jump so high just kidding the Frog is really the support of the hoof and the fact that horses are gonna walk on this so that's kind of like the bottom of your foot this right here is called the sole just like how we have a sole a foot sole horses do too this is called the collateral groove there's two of them right here this is where you really want to check for dirt and debris and small rocks cuz stuff can easily get stuck down in this and usually there's something right here that kind of sticks out and this would be called a bar there's a bar here and a bar here you can see kind of this ring going around the hoof this is the hoof wall and so this is the outside of the hoof coming in to the bottom of the hoof and then there's gonna be you can kind of see it right here it's just gonna be this white line and that's kind of the inner huff wall so where the hoof wall meets the sole is just the white line so when you're picking out your horse's hoof you really want to be careful of the Frog if you're not really familiar with the hoof some people may think that this is a chunk of dirt but in reality it's part of the horse's hoof so when you're cleaning I would just say clean your horse's hoof to the point where you can clearly see the sole like this where you have clearly cleaned out the collateral groove so you can see where the Frog and the groove connect and also run your hoof pick along here so you can see the hoof wall and the white line because dirt can actually get stuck in here and it's kind of a part of the hoof that many horse owners ignore and then the dirt can actually start growing up into the horse's foot so you want to keep that clean alright so when you go to clean your horse's hose I usually use my hoof pick and my body brush and that's just because I don't have a hoof pick that has the bristles on it alright so when we go to clean our dirty hoof knowing that the Frog is right here the easiest way to get this dirt out especially if your horses shoes on because if your horse is wearing shoes the dirt can get packed a lot thicker into their hoof as you're gonna start basically by digging into the collateral groove so there's that groove right here is gonna go down through the groove and clear that out and I'm getting a good grip on everything that's in there you can see he was walking on poop and you can use a good amount of moderate pressure here you're not gonna hurt your horse a lot of people are they're too gentle and they can't get the dirt out because they're afraid they're gonna hurt the anal boat but you can use a lot of pressure on the hose if your horse tries to pull their hoof back there's a few things you can do if you tip their hoof up like that it kind of keeps them from pulling back or if you just keep holding on to the hoof that'll usually tell the horse that look this is not gonna work out for you so and then they'll usually give up at that point so Tucker does have some thrush that I've been treating so y'all will see that I'm gonna just run the blade of my hoof tech along the white line like I was telling you guys I just want to make sure I'm getting the dirt out of there really clean out these grooves because that's where he's been having thrush issues and then since yes throughout she's kind of developed this crack down into his frog so I'm just going to clean that out but your horse doesn't have thrush they shouldn't have this crack and I've just been treating that alright now I'm gonna take myself fish it's gonna brush away all the excess dirt there you go after you've cleaned your horse's foot you want to gently put their hoof back down on the ground this will just keep their hubs from getting bruised it it will also teach them that you're the one who has to put their hoof back down on the ground not them so if your horse gets in there mind that there are the ones who can put the hook back down then it can be a lot more difficult trying to keep their feet up when you're working with them because then the horse's mind they can just put it down whenever they want ideally a horse's hose will be cleaned every day the reason you want to clean your horse's hose regularly is to help keep those hose free from debris or rocks or sticks or anything that may cause your horse discomfort to be walking on another reason you want to clean out your horse's hose is because when mud and poo and dirt gets packed up into those hooves bacteria and fungus can easily take root and start to spread throughout your horse's hooves and eat away at the sole that's what thrush is basically another reason you want to clean your horse's hooves is just so you can do a physical check on your horse when you clean the horse's hooves you check out the legs you see how the hoof is doing that way you can notice anything that's out of the ordinary like maybe your horses hooves do have thrush or maybe you notice that they're really tender and their feet and they may have an abscess so when you regularly clean out your horse's hooves you'll be able to notice things like that and catch these things before it gets any worse if this video was helpful please do me a favor give us a thumbs up go subscribe to our Channel and keep watching because we have the horseman used every week I

Channel: Equine Helper

Views: 130,546

Rating: 4.9340224 out of 5

Keywords: Cleaning A Horse's Hooves, Horse Hoof Care, Horse Care

Id: ASPqDHTQD3Y

Length: 10min 56sec (656 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 16 2019