First, let me tell you a little about my farrier. Earlier this summer I found out that my neighbor, Val is a farrier and an awesome one at that! She’s extremely patient and always talks to the horse she’s working on. For example, she doesn’t just pick up a horse’s foot.. she asks for it! And she’ll rub the horse’s foot until it the horse realizes what’s being asked of him and lifts it’s foot.
Val has also been kind enough to show me how to trim my minis. She was as patient with me as she was with the horses! She’s owned horses for many years and I certainly consider her a horse expert. She may not know it but she’s on my emergency contact list… our vet is about an hour away (we use the same vet, Dr. Maben Thompson from Upper Cumberland Veterinary Hospital in Crossville).
The day after Bogart & Blondie arrived I called her and arranged to have her come and take care of their first trim. I emailed her some links from Janell Jensens website. I wanted Val to have an idea of what needed to be done.
When Val saw my cuties I think she was taken back by their small stature and the strange way their hooves were growing. Dr Thompson was here at the same time to evaluate my little ones & he also agreed that Bogart needed some heavy duty trimming to slowly correct the direction of the hoof growth. Val and I agreed that she’d do a bit more research before putting a knife to their hooves.
However, she just couldn’t resist and after doing an awesome job on Blondie, she got to work on Bogart. She just filed and “sanded” but did a great job. The horses resisted a little to start with but when they realized that Val wasn’t about to give up, they gave in!
My husband who just recently got a Droid cell phone (has tons of awesome features), shot some video with it that streamed directly while he was shooting.
The quality of these videos is pretty good considering these videos were taken with a cell phone and were streamed live.. meaning that while the farrier was working on Blondie, anyone could have logged on to Scott’s Qik site and watched while Val was working! I’d say these videos are pretty awesome! I’ll try to get Scott to do some more when Bogart & Blondie are walking on pavement so you can see their little feet in action.
The video below will turn… you don’t have to adjust your monitor! 🙂
Dr. Thompson was amazed when he saw my little ones! An avid horseman and farm veterinarian, he’d never seen Dwarfs before. He gave them a thorough check up… all is well. Their lungs sound fine, teeth are good, eyes bright & shiny.. the only thing that bothered him was their feet and because he had no experience with Dwarfs he was at a loss to help me. He and Val agreed to a line of action and Val will look into the option of fitting little magic shoes. He gave them both their 5-way shot and gave me their Potomac Horse Fever shots to administer next week.
They also had quite a bit of debris deep within their fur. Doc thought it was rain rot. My donkeys had rain rot on a few areas last year & their fur had fallen out. These little ones are pretty furry.. no loss of fur there but it just feels like chunks of crud well attached to the fur here & there. He also suggested that if they stay furry into next summer, I should consider clipping them.
Of course, wouldn’t you know it, the doc hadn’t been gone 30 minutes and all of a sudden Blondie started to have green snot drip from one of her nostrils! After speaking to him today he instructed me to give them 2cc of Penicillin once a day for 3 days. He wasn’t really concerned about it unless she stopped eating. If the vet isn’t worried, then I’m not!
Here are a few shots I took after all was said and done! I’m glad to report that both my babies behaved very well considering they’d never had their feet even lifted off the ground.
By the way, you’ll notice that we used my goat stand to work on them! It still was a little low but Val managed to make it work. I’m sure I’ll be seeing Val quite a bit in the next few months!