Gather together 75 of the world’s leading experts on equine locomotion and biomechanics and you’re bound to come up with many new and interesting theories on footcare.

That’s what happened in mid-May during the fifth International Conference on Equine Locomotion held at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Mich.

“In the tradition of the previous meetings that started in 1991 in the Netherlands, this was a friendly forum for research presentations and discussions related to equine locomotion and biomechanics,” says conference organizer Hilary Clayton of the McPhail Equine Performance Center at Michigan State University. About 100 researchers, farriers and equine veterinarians attended the event that featured more than 65 in-depth presentations on the equine leg and hoof.

Attending research conferences such as this one can give you a better understanding of equine biomechanics and demonstrate the benefits of combining the latest ideas into trimming and shoeing packages.“The information in these research studies may all be simple points and interesting by themselves, but it can give you a tremendous impact when you start adding all of the different ideas together,” says Pat Reilly, the resident farrier at the Rochester Equine Clinic in Chester, N.H. “It is interesting to see how many research findings can be overlaid and the result is that you see many new ways of combining research data on the hoof to achieve things.”

Reilly says one European researcher at the conference pointed out that you don’t want to trim the outside of a foot — even though many…