We shared with you a few months ago the story of Andromeda’s new wooden shoes. She needed these shoes because she had foundered before she came to Hanaeleh, which was likely one of the reasons she ended up with a killer buyer.
Thankfully we were able to rescue Andromeda and she was doing well just with boots, but she had another founder event that was so severe that she required a special wooden shoe in order to recover.
The wooden shoes were made for her by Greg Perez, a local farrier who, in addition to his regular farrier services, helps horses like Andromeda with custom wooden shoes. The shoes help to increase the sole depth and can actually help to rotate the coffin bone back to a more normalized position!
In Andromeda’s case, her coffin bone had rotated 18 degrees, and without the shoes we probably would have had to make the extremely difficult decision to end her life. After less than six months in the shoes, however, her coffin bone rotated back to 9 degrees, which meant that she was able to transition to regular shoes. These shoes still help to compensate for the rotation, but now she is able to run around and have a proper turnout in the round pen and arena!
And does she ever enjoy trotting and running around now! She enjoys trotting back and forth in the arena, or running around and blowing out and letting everyone know just how beautiful she is!
We are very thankful to Greg Perez for all that he has done for Andromeda, and also to the vets at OCEVS who took her radiographs and identified the degree of rotation. We are thankful that they all helped to allow Andromeda to run around freely again!
