Does a horse on your client roster need relief from concussion-induced pain? An Alabama farrier might have an effective solution to incorporate into your hoof-care practice.

Laura Gillespie shoes a client’s horse with a host of pathologies — severe sidebone on the lateral side, bench knees, significantly toed-in conformation and a sprained collateral ligament on the same foot that has sidebone.

“This was a tricky horse to shoe,” says the Athens, Ala., farrier.

Gillespie helped relieve the sidebone with mechanics in the lateral side of the ground surface of the shoe. She also packed the caudal half of the foot with Johnson Hoof Solution Impact pads, which are low-density pads made from compressed foam. The pad, though, has been beneficial with other lame horses, as well.

“What impressed me the most with this pad is that when you drive nails through it, you don’t feel concussion back into your hammer,” Gillespie says. “I have one of my client’s jumpers in this pad that had a fractured coffin bone. No one knew that it had the fracture until we took the pad off and the horse was extremely lame. We put the pad back on and it was sound. It was crazy.”

Learn More

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International Horseshoeing Hall of Fame member Craig Trnka demonstrates how to forge the sidebone shoe.