Was jumping today for the first time in our new indoor arena. Whoohoo, such fun. It's so easy to jump on Lucky even after a week of time off for both of us. Lucky was a bit spooky to start with, but then settled and did great. I still have to learn to maintain steady rythm and speen -- tend to get a bit scared and crawl insteand of cantering nicely. Oh well, today was my first time jumping anythin more than 2 jumps in a row.
Same arguments, over and over -- "my horse can't go barefoot, because we compete". Of course he can! There's plenty of examples on the web, just take a moment to look for them. Here's a few:
- Success stories of barefoot horses in competition and in general.
- A story of an endurance ride wit ha barefoot horse.
- Barefoot eventing horse - another story abot successfully competing barefoot horse.
- A few stories from the owners of barefoot horses in competition and not.
Do you still have doubts?
Many peeople say that barefoot is all good and nice but not for activelly competing horses. I think that is another instance of not really understanding, how horse's hoof works and how resistant and strong it is if left to its own devices. Here you can read one of the many stories that I found on-line of activelly competing (and eventing at that) barefoot horses.
Just had an urge to write some random stuff pertaining to horses today. Maybe it will develop into something more frequent maybe it will silently die as some other sections of my webpage, who knows...
Recently I was looking at a few photos of horses and more precisely horse hooves. A few of those pictures looked outright unnatural and the only reason for that was shoes! I find shod horses less beautifull and natural than unshod.
Lucky seems to be very happy running around barefoot and not at all sore. He also seems to be happy enough with me trimming him.
Unfortunatelly he cannot be outside 24/7 anymore, because other horses are all brought in for the night and even if it rains. Hopefully it will keep not much colder for a little while at least because otherwise Lucky's turnout hours will decrease even more.