Q: What suggestions do you have for applying various types of hoof packing materials?

—Nevada farrier

A: About 80 percent of the time, I use Sole Pack with foot felt. It’s a synthetic fabric that doesn’t absorb water, but it will absorb oil. I’ve read that fire departments use big pads of this material for chemical spills.

Before I put a pad on, I’ll pack the commisures of the frog with Sole Pack, then fold a wedge-shaped piece of foot felt and place that over the frog. I’ll apply my pad to that. I usually use a leather pad because it allows the foot to breathe.

In the winter, a lot of my clients want full snowball pads, and I put Sole Pack into those.

When the clients stretch the shoeing jobs out to every couple of months, the integrity of the packing materials is still there. You can clean out the Sole Pack and the foot felt is still holding together; you can still smell the materials.

And the hoof integrity is there, too. There’s no thrush or fungus.

Sometimes I use Equi-Pak. With that, you can just clean the foot, make it good and dry, get the shoe package ready and just squirt the material into it.

Ken Norman

The Equi-Pak is fairly expensive, so I don’t use it all the time. I like to use it in really wet conditions. I’ve also used it as pad material by itself, without a covering pad, and that’s helped very…