Your horse gets sore feet. He is diagnosed with laminitis and founder. You have a good TEAM: Veterinarian, Farrier, and Caretaker, who help you address your horse's underlying metabolic condition and provide rehabilitative care. The horse becomes sound, and returns to his normal personality and, if you're lucky, his pre-laminitic level of performance. You can finally relax and breathe.
Or can you?
When working with glue and composite shoes, there are a variety of factors that impact which shoe you might choose. Some of those factors include the horse's job, the type of support/mechanics/protection/traction the horse needs, and more. When setting yourself up for success, there's also a direct relationship between the experience of the person applying the shoes and the amount of glue surface area the shoe offers. The higher the demands on the foot and shoe the more detailed your application needs to be and more glue surface area the better in many cases for added insurance.
In the horse world there are “ways to do things”. Some of of these things we do because it is grounded in science and based on research and objective information. Other things we do, maybe even most things, we do because “that’s the way it’s always been done”. This even applies to glue-on shoes. If you ask 10 farriers how to prepare the foot and apply a glue-on shoe, you’ll get 20 different answers.
In 2012 I wrote a blog about retracted soles, describing an appearance of the sole with seemingly "good concavity and sole callus" that in reality can be quite dysfunctional, and lead to lameness:
We live in an era where we have options on how we treat the horse's foot. No one option is right or wrong, good or bad. It is up to the horse's TEAM of Owner, Farrier, Veterinarian, Trainer, etc. to determine what is the best solution to help the horse. We have more choices than ever before. Until recently the only Certification opportunities available to the hoof care provider were in metal or barefoot methods.
