Talbert Farrier Services

08/23/2024

I had to think for a minute how long I've been doing horses for Jack. 18 years. I remember I was at his barn when I returned a call to my wife and found out she was pregnant with my second son who turns 18 tomorrow. Jack managed the care of several horses for Mr Bayer who has also had some health problems recently. With the winds of change shifting, and some uncertainty on the horizon, at our last appointment Jack asked if I wanted to keep doing the horses if someone else took over. I said no sir, I don't want to deal with anyone else, it's been you and me all these years, when you go, I go. Jack was a good friend. RIP

View Jack Edward Smith's obituary, send flowers, find service dates, and sign the guestbook.

08/16/2024

I worked 3 polo seasons for Kevin in Point Clear. Some of the best times and some of the wildest times. He was a mentor, a friend, and a big brother during those years. A great horseman. A pivotal figure in my story. We shared some adventures. RIP

Kevin Thomas Fawcett, of Fairhope, Alabama, passed away unexpectedly on Monday, June 24, just weeks shy of his 60th birthday.

07/26/2024

I'm saddened to learn today of the passing of one of the best to ever play the sport. When it comes to horsemanship I hold very few people in such high esteem. He was a dear friend and mentor to my uncle and I'm sure the lineage of much of what I was taught could be traced back to this man. He was always kind to me and he won't soon be forgotten. My condolences to my good friend Mark Gutierrez. Your pops was the man.

07/13/2024

I lost the original photos of this hoof when my old phone shattered, but it had a medial quarter crack that was through the coronet. You'll have to trust me it was ugly. I think it is pretty much resolved now. I worked on this same horse several years ago for the same issue. This is the second time we've found success with it. Maybe this'll be the last time. Hopefully.

04/26/2024

03/27/2024

In response to a brief exchange I saw on another farrier's post, I have an opinion to share that I'm sure some will disagree with. The anticipation that others may have different views doesn't alter the confidence I have in my own. In 27 years of trimming and shoeing horses I have not once encountered a situation in which I believed the previous farrier "caused" a horse to founder as a consequence of how they trimmed or shod a horse. Not one. I have seen laminitis cases that were mismanaged, and those choices have consequences, but I have not seen an example of phalangeal rotation that can be confidently attributed to the farrier's poor shoeing or trimming alone. Is it possible in theory? Many things are possible in theory, but the cascade of events posited to rationalize certain theories are improbable to the point of statistical irrelevance.
While I'm up on this soap box I may as well say one more thing. Your previous farrier did not cause your horse to have low heels. I've encountered this assertion so many times over the years and if this were possible then we would have discovered the curative answer for the club foot. Your previous farrier could patent his technique and retire. The suspension force of the deep digital flexor tendon dictates characteristic growth of the heels. Farriers sometimes employ supportive and mechanical tactics to attempt to address this force when it is excessive or insufficient, but despite our best efforts the biologic recipe of force that is responsible for hoof conformation is something that we have far less influence over than we care to admit. (unless we start making better breeding choices)
Poor farrier work or neglect can certainly have a deleterious impact on hooves, more so when a disparity of force already exists. Healthy hooves are rather resilient. Hooves owing their low heel height to compression suffer greater imbalance when excess growth compounds this force. Realistically we cannot "fix" low heels to any greater degree than we can cause them. We can encourage improved heel structure when we can identify contributing mismanagement but only by the extent to which that mismanagement has amplified the compressive force already present. Often it (mismanagement) is a lesser factor contributing in a minor capacity to the primary cause which is the deep flexor's inability to maintain a positive PA. Until we discover a way to shorten that mechanical linkage, we cannot address the cause.

02/20/2024

To shoe or not to shoe?
For what reasons do we tend to shoe horses? Protection. Traction. Support. Mechanics. These are typical answers. A standard horseshoe is essentially an artificial extension of the hoof wall. It mimics the presence of natural wall growth.
Protection- Hooves need protection when their sole depth is insufficient to cope acceptably with the footing they must traverse.
Traction- Hooves may need added traction when our demands pose a hazard.
Support- Support is an overused and generally misused word in describing the principles of an application, but certainly increasing the load borne by one structure decreases the load previously borne by another proportionally. As for a shoe "supporting" the coffin bone, no.
Mechanics- Some shoes may be used to decrease leverage, when leverage is deemed problematic. Is all leverage bad? Certainly not. Levers allow for efficiency in movement. Excessive leverage is bad, especially when coupled with injured tissue that is opposed to that leverage.
So does your horse "need" shoes? The word "needs" is subjective. In other words, it depends on who you ask, because the definition of the word "needs" seems to be up for interpretation. Some people use the word "needs" freely and others reserve the word to apply strictly to what is known as a certainty.
Who knows? That is actually the question. Who does know? If you answered the farrier, I would be inclined to agree. The reason I say the farrier is because the prospect of shoeing a horse involves an inherent risk to benefit analysis. Every time a nail is driven a risk is taken. Who knows more intimately than the farrier who will drive those nails how significant that unique risk is? What may seem advisable in theory, may not be in practice when considerations are taken into account that are almost always ignored by those not individually responsible for the work.
We want to shoe horses that truly need shoes and limit our exposure to risk otherwise. That means when we hear the word "needs", we should pause and explore the rationale behind it. Did the owner's neighbor make the call that this is what the horse needs? Did the owner just read a magazine article about it? If a vet made the statement to the owner, what was the diagnosis, or the logic behind the statement? Did someone make a blanket assertion without seeing the horse? Sometimes a horse may indeed be better off with shoes but the present condition of the hooves pose a greater risk to their safe application than the minor advantage presumed. Other times the advantage of the application is such that it warrants the statistical risk even with very difficult and fragile hooves.
The capacity to distinguish and differentiate between what is a good idea and what is a poor choice comes from experience earned diligently in the laboratory of oops.
Very often I find that when a person says their horse needs shoes, either the person (more than the horse) needs their horse to have shoes, or the actual need more accurately stated is depth. Given the presence of adequate sole depth most horses do not "need" shoes. Shoes may compensate for the insufficient depth, but depth is what is lacking in the moment justifying the need. Ironically when that natural depth is gained it is then often removed to appease those who then view the hoof as being "too long" in its appearance.
What is "too long" is another debate. In my world though I can say most horses go lame from having too little hoof rather than too much.

01/13/2024

Apparently this page will be soon removed permanently by Facebook, I've been sent a notice that it goes against their community standards. I'll lose dozens if not hundreds of case photos and a decade of posts, musings, thoughts, etc. I was given no example of what they supposedly found wrong and was told this is their final decision. To appeal I have to send them a photo of my drivers license, birth certificate, or passport. If there is anything you're interested in on this page you better save it now.

11/19/2023

Some more from the shelf.

Laminitis/ Founder
1)"The severity of laminitis is highly variable and the course of the disease equally unpredictable."
2)On an advanced founder case with severe bone loss, when this loss of bone reaches the nutrient foramen visible on the lateral rad as a dark spot in the bone, it is a point to consider euthanasia. This is the terminal arch of the digital artery and the prognosis at this point is very poor given the extent of advanced bone degradation.
3)"Degrees of rotation" is a dated and meaningless measurement because it can be manipulated with a rasp. Anyone who speaks of degrees of rotation should be questioned further as this is often an indication of a limited or outdated understanding.
4)You cannot externally "support" an internal structure such as the coffin bone to "prevent" rotation.
5)Pain has a purpose in the healing process. Pain is nature's way of saying "be still and do no further harm". Pain is damage control. Pain is to be expected with laminitis.
6)Horses that contract laminitis as a reaction to some toxin or injected stimuli seem to be more difficult cases with comparably poorer prognosis.
7)"Suffering is when they are in pain AND you have run out of options."
8 ) "A wolf has to hunt with the teeth it's got."
9)Dressing the toe back with a rasp may produce an aesthetically improved hoof profile but can be an extremely detrimental action when dealing with coffin bone instability. Rasping through the bulk of the wall at the toe has been shown through force plate studies to negatively impact P3 stability (and consequently comfort). In short it is an effective way to increase rotation and the prospect of euthanasia. The rigidity of the dense toe horn common to chronic founder may serve as a structural support to the hoof compensating for a loss of internal stability. Effectively destroying this bridge between the medial and lateral sides of the hoof can result in collapse of the hoof both internally and externally. The more suspect we are about the extent of laminar damage, the less we should be concerned with normalizing the profile of the hoof. Breakover distance can be addressed with a shoe that negates leverage and rasping through the wall does not in fact alter the trajectory of new wall growth. Podiatry is about changing the hoof from the inside out, not from the outside in.
10) The criteria for an "expert" seems to be a farrier or vet who lives more than 100 miles away who charges for consultations.
11)The so-called "toe pillars" of a hoof are not something that can be appreciated anatomically through dissection, but rather when a toe is squared (or 45'd) as a byproduct of excess wear or from the farrier's rasp, the toe quarters, sometimes then referred to as "pillars" become important preservation points as the structure between these two points has been compromised. The temptation is to round these up but this isn't advisable when doing so may jeopardize soundness.
12)"When a horse has 3 feet in the grave and one on a banana peel, moving forward becomes a science experiment."
13)A reverse shoe (sometimes called a bank robber's shoe) is occasionally and traditionally used for various reasons including founder. When this shoe is used on wider weaker hooves however, the sole may prolapse through the shoe and the hairline will correspondingly dip proximal to the unsupported area. That said, narrower hooves seem more tolerant of this shoe. A consideration worth noting when weighing options.
14)Capsular rotation v phalangeal rotation. Capsular rotation is the result of forward dorsal wall migration. Capsular rotation will have a diverging HL zone without an absurdly high PA. Phalangeal rotation presents with significant flexion of the DIPJ independent of the external hoof capsule. These two classifications are not mutually exclusive. Some degree of both may be present.
15)Horses with considerable rotation will often flip their toe (up) just prior to landing. This is a compensatory response to proprioceptive confusion. There exists a disconnect between the where the horse "feels" his hoof is or should be and where it actually is, (due to the abnormal orientation of P3 within the hoof capsule).
16)Something like 70% of laminitis cases will stabilize and improve significantly on their own regardless of our intervention. This leads many to mistakenly credit their involvement or their shoeing or trimming protocol. It is the 10% of devastating cases however that truly demonstrate the efficacy of competing techniques and theory. Severe cases are much less forgiving.

11/17/2023

This past year we have had several veterinary students pass through the clinic where I'm at 2 days a week. Some were brief visitors while others stayed for a couple weeks. Some of them showed interest in learning about the hoof and we had some conversations that addressed some of their questions. Time never really allowed me to go into the depth I felt some subjects deserved. I would drive home knowing what issues awaited these young professionals and what all I would have liked to tell them if I had them for a day. So, I thought, let me write a few things down. Just to clear my mind and maybe one day I'll organize it and print out something to give a young vet or farrier that may help them as they embark on their journey. Well, those "few things" turned into about a thousand things, Then I went back and began to organize these thousand things into subject based categories. Compiling 26 years of thoughts is exhausting and you have to set it aside and pick it back up occasionally as the mood strikes. I may or may not ever finish this little assignment. Who knows. But for now, as it's doing no good aging on the shelf, I thought I'd post some bits here for the few in this small audience who actually read the stuff I've written about in the past. The first little bit here relates to people skills. I think the majority of young adults (with a few notable exceptions) have to hone their communication skills on the job and it is probably the most valuable and least discussed aspect of our business. You will be judged on your ability to communicate to a greater extent than you will any other metric. An owner's estimation of your ability is largely a measure of your likeability. If an owner likes you, they will see the good and overlook almost anything that contradicts their established opinion of you. If an owner dislikes you, they will consciously or subconsciously find discontent with your efforts in order to validate their dislike of you. In short, people inevitably will see what they want to see. The "best" does not always translate to the most successful. There are many highly skilled and knowledgeable professionals who struggle in business due to their off-putting personas. For this reason, developing excellent people skills is crucial. This is an art that can be practiced and improved upon daily as we navigate differing circumstances and personalities.

Improve Communication Skills
1) Take a genuine interest in the interests of others. People enjoy talking about themselves,,,, let them.
2) Find something positive about each horse to comment on.
3) There is no such thing as the perfect hoof or perfect conformation. There is a window of normality that includes the imperfect. Before raising an owner's concern regarding what we see, we must consider if doing so is necessary and productive.
4) You will see the same problems and be asked the same questions throughout your career; therefore, you should develop good explanations. and analogies that owners can appreciate. When you are asked a question that you do not know the answer to, be transparent and say simply "That is a very good question, I am not sure what the answer is, but I will find the answer and get back to you with it." Then follow through. Find the answer. Because you will be asked the question again by another owner in the future.
5) Never tell an owner that their horse will "always" need shoes. In this statement it is implied that the horse's hooves will never substantially improve which is generally a bold and usually baseless prediction. "Always" is a long time. We generally don't want to crush hope, demoralize, and frustrate our clientele. We should sparingly use absolute statements such as "always" and "never". Such certainty begs to be proven wrong and often is.
6) "Needs" and "has to haves" are subjective assertions. You'll find assorted opinions professing different absolute statements as to what any horse "needs" or what any particular horse "has to have". Most perceived "needs" are debatable. Most "has to haves" are too.
7) Most sane owners appreciate practicality and blunt honesty when necessary.
8)If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough
9)People have a reflexively positive response to hearing their own name. By making an effort to call a client by their name it builds rapport. Some of us are terrible with names and may have to habitually rely on notes prior to an appointment. This effort however is well worth the return.
10)You cannot reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.
11)When tempted to debate someone who is emotionally invested in their POV, ask yourself is it more important to be right or be happy? Pick and choose your battles.
12)The ability to convincingly feign empathy is the hallmark of one who comprehends modern societal expectations in a culture that increasingly views livestock as "fur babies".
13)When ego obstructs reason people often double down in the precise direction that led them to where they are.
14)One of the best ways to learn a subject is to teach it. Present. Discuss. Field questions. Repeat the process. Each day we have an opportunity to do this with our clients. Arranging evening or weekend workshops to focus on client education through giving presentations on a specific topic is even better.
15)"Interesting" is a good word to say when you feel compelled to say "bu****it"
16)Shake hands. Human touch has a subconsciously calming effect which eases situational anxiety. People who routinely smile and shake hands when greeting others are viewed as more friendly and likeable. Initiating the handshake is a dominant gesture which we'll discuss more of momentarily.
17)Young vets and farriers must acknowledge their youthful appearance means many owners may initially question your knowledge and experience. We all eventually age out of this problem, but how you present yourself can quickly dispel any concerns on the owner's part if you are self aware. Younger practitioners have less margin for error and are scrutinized more harshly in general while an older colleague is extended the presumption of greater competency. We all must "earn our stripes". This compels us to develop and learn methods of winning people over that will benefit you throughout your career. Be calmly comfortable with yourself, who you are, and what you know. Be okay with what you don't know. Imposter syndrome is when you're so shook by insecurity that you attempt to overcompensate to prove you belong. Owners see through this charade. Being confident doesn't mean you have to know everything about everything. Humility ingratiates you towards those who would test your character.
18)The one who controls the framing of a situation generally controls the outcome.
19)Spread credit. Accept blame.
20)It's not what you say, it's what they hear.
21)Brevity is the soul of wit. Read the room and know when to stop talking. Allison Krauss said "you say it best, when you say nothing at all"
22)An irritable person can often be disarmed by friendliness. We subconsciously mirror the other person. We see this with yawning, with the crossing of arms, with tone, etc. But rather than allow someone to infect you with their bad attitude instead just flip the script. See how committed they truly are to their grumpy front. They'll usually crack.

11/16/2023

A moment away from shoeing today to pull a tooth.

10/25/2023

My cell phone broke last week, I received a new phone in the mail from Verizon but unfortunately they are telling me there is no way to get my contacts (or photos) transferred to the new phone. So, I no longer have anyone's number. On top of that I haven't been able to download facebook onto the new phone (I forgot my password and Facebook wants to e-mail me a new password that I cannot receive because I had to make up a fake e-mail address when I started Facebook because it wouldn't recognize my real email address). Sooooooo, I have no way to contact anyone other than the few people who have recently texted. I have no way to let anyone know if I'm running behind, no way to check if we are still on, no way to confirm a time, etc etc etc. It's not the end of the world but it is causing some minor difficulties. In the mean while, if you text me, let me know who you are because I have no idea with no caller ID and no text history to figure out the mystery.

10/03/2023

This is a simple setup for chronic founder cases with pr*****ed soles. This horse cannot stand on it's hoof without this shoe but is 100% sound over gravel with it on.

09/27/2023

09/27/2023

https://www.quia.com/files/quia/users/medicinehawk/2407-Vet/Laminitis-Protocol-Redden.pdf

09/09/2023

I got a demo of some of the things in the works down in Lumber City today with Brandi Varnadoe.

07/19/2023

07/14/2023

The late head bob.
The easiest fundamental observation when evaluating a forelimb lameness is the head bob. It is common knowledge that the horse head goes up when the lame (fore) limb is loaded or loading. There is however a distinction worthy of some consideration (I believe) that can sometimes be recognized. That is, does the head bob initiate early or late? Does the head bob begin as the hoof is loading or does it begin as the moment arm of the pastern moves forward over the DIPJ? Either case lends context implicating those specific structures under the greatest duress in this divided moment from heel strike to heel lift. Observation and pattern recognition are two invaluable tools when we're attempting to employ deductive reasoning. An early or late head bob in itself is not definitive but it is informative. If you know to look for it, you may see it when otherwise you might not have. It can often point you towards probability and what may warrant further investigation.