Description

Most lower-limb lameness in the horse is mechanical in origin. Mechanical problems can be measured, calculated and corrected — but only by a practitioner who can say what a shoe will do before it goes on, and check afterwards whether it did.

The Pivot Point builds that capability in three layers. Measurement: nine things to take off a foot with a gauge and a straight edge, none of them anything a farrier is not already looking at. Calculation: turning those measurements into the loading the foot actually carries, at the gait and on the ground the horse works on. Prescription: twelve geometric formulas that change that loading by a stated amount.

Built on the biomechanics literature of the past thirty years and the proportional hoof-balance data of Caldwell’s 2017 PhD at the University of Liverpool, the book runs from forces and force couples, through pathology as a consequence of loading state, to a fully worked clinical case followed to the third review visit — and on to what happens to the prescription as the foot grows through the shoeing cycle.

Not farrier versus veterinary surgeon: both, together, working from the same physics. For practising farriers, farriery students and equine veterinary surgeons.

184 pages · 43 illustrations · twelve prescription formulas · glossary and index.