Trying to Solve Problems ... Looking for Recipes Inside the Box
Ask the right questions, rather than seeking the right answers.
.......Michael Garrett
Problems with horses are fairly common. If you're having a problem with your horse and are searching for information about what to do about that problem, please take the time to read this article. Whether it be a general health problem, a behaviorial or training problem, or a hoof problem, you can't deal with horses very long without something popping up which is seen as a problem. When a problem pops up, we want to get rid of it. And to do that, we usually look for some kind of "recipe" for getting rid of the problem. If our horse won't cross a bridge, we want a step-by-step training method to follow, so that we can overcome the bridge crossing problem. If our horse develops hoof cracks, we want a method, or a recipe -- shoes, supplements, topical treatments, or whatever -- to make the cracks go away. "My horse has the following problem -- what can I do to get rid of it?"
The demand is there for recipes to solve problems, and the market has responded. Does your horse have a health problem? Well, there are all sorts of veterinary methods, medications, wormers, and treatments to choose from. Those within the conventional alternative fields have responded, too, with their own recipes, ranging from massage to herbal therapies to supplements to acupuncture. Those within the horse training world have responded to behavioral problems with their recipes, and you have a variety of different training methods and philosophies to choose from, many of which are targeted at specific problems. The hoof care world has responded to hoof problems with its own recipes. The market is flooded not only with a confusing assortment of shoes, pads, supplements, and topical preparations, but also with a variety of hoof care philosophies, ranging from traditional farriery, to farriery with a more updated outlook, to competing barefoot philosophies -- and all of it is basically designed to solve whatever hoof problems you might be having. Those who are regular readers of horse magazines, of any discipline, are exposed to a variety of advertisements from the makers and providers of these recipes. A whole industry of recipe providers has sprung up in the horse care world, and in a real sense, this industry of recipe providers has become the horse care world. Most of it is definitely mainstram with unquestioned trust among most horse owners, like the veterinary world and world of pharmaceuticals, wormers, and nutritional supplements. Another part of it exists on the periphery, like the conventional alternative providers such as barefoot trimmers, herbalists, equine chiropractors, massage therapists, etc.
The very presence of this horse care industry of recipe providers tends to make it seem as if looking for recipes to solve problems is the right thing to do. It's so solidly mainstream that it might seem wierd to even think about something different. But I think we really need to question the fundamental assumption that using recipes to solve problems is the proper approach to horse care. One of the reasons I don't like recipes is that they tend to magnify the problem, separate it, and pull it out and look at it isolated from the whole. A hoof crack is seen as a problem with the hoof. A horse not wanting to cross a bridge is seen as a problem relating to some aspect of bridges. A kidney problem is isolated to something related to the kidney. Trying to solve problems with recipes and isolating the problem prevents us from seeing the totality. For example, a hoof crack seen as a hoof problem prevents us from seeing the hoof as related to the entire horse and the entire range of influences on the horse.
Let's look more closely at the problems of the recipe approach in terms of hoof care. When I started studying to be a farrier, I had a lot of "why" questions ... for instance, What is the purpose of the parts underneath the hoof? ... Why are they there, and what do they do? And, what seemed to be a very simple question ... How do you know how short to trim the hooves? I had a lot of such questions but found that the answers, which I thought should be straightforward and easy to find, were actually hard to find. As I searched through the world of not only traditional farriery but also the various barefoot movements, I couldn't find straightforward answers.
What I found was that hoof care was divided up into various factions and sub-factions, with each group having its own traditions, dogmas, and personalities. Some factions, like traditional farriery, had traditions that were hundreds of years old, while the traditions of other factions, like the barefoot movements, were only maybe 15 years old. But either way, the traditions were held to religiously, and any ideas originating outside those traditions were often considered a threat. Different factions had dogmas derived from diverse sources: From old wives' tales to MRI studies, from vaporous concepts like "shoeing to support the bony column" to studies done of the feet of wild horses living on a certain type of terrain. But whatever the source, the dogmas were unquestionable within their respective factions. The different factions also had their own personalities, or gurus--people whose views were expected to be accepted without question. The barefoot and natural hoof movements seemed especially prone to becoming groups formed around personalities or gurus, while the groups within traditional farriery seemed more inclined to be formed around different interpretations of tradition.
As different from each other as all these different factions may seem, I see them as actually being very similar, because they all largely operate confined to the same four-sided box. The first side of the box is formed by tending to look at the hoof as more or less an isolated part of the horse. Whether you read or hear something from a traditional farrier or a barefoot person, chances are you're going to hear first and foremost and most of all about the hoof. It's as though the hoof itself is isolated from the horse and the environment and the things for which the horse is used. (Here most of the factions would take issue with me, especially the barefoot and natural factions.)
The second side of the box is formed by the fact that the "evidence" given by the different factions to support their positions all consists of basically the same thing -- looking at the hoof in some way -- whether it be a photograph of the hoof, or an X-ray of the hoof, or certain measurements of the hoof, or a dissection of the hoof. The major differences between the factions in hoof care are really nothing more than different interpretations of what is seen by looking at the hoof in one way or another.
The third side of the box is the fact that the factions, to one degree or another, seem to be heavily influenced by personalities, or gurus. Hoof care professionals sometimes get calls from horse owners convinced that such-and-such person in the hoof care field has the answers, and many times the owners have gotten the mistaken idea that that particular person is the only one who knows about certain studies and thus is the only one who promotes doing things the "right" way. The reality is that the studies are and have been in the public domain for years, and even the new ones get lots of publicity in all the different hoof care factions, so that most people in all the different factions in hoof care know about the studies, even those studies originating outside their own faction. The difference is in how the studies are interpreted. A guru represents a person having a certain limited interpretation of studies which in themselves were basically limited to looking at the hoof in some way. Once this person is established as a guru, his or her interpretation becomes "the" interpretation, the followers can't understand why everyone can't see the light and accept that interpretation, as all other interpretations are dismissed as untrue because they conflict with the interpretation of the guru ... and hence the third side of the box is formed.
The fourth side of the box is that the main focus is on solving hoof problems after they mainfest themselves. That's how conventional hoof care operates, from traditional farriery on one side to the various barefoot movements on the other side. That's also the way the human medical system operates--you get a disease or problem within your body, and then you go to the doctor to have it fixed. The problem is that the "fix-it" approach leads not to finding and correcting causes but merely to suppressing symptoms. Around 40 years ago, a War on Cancer was declared in the United States, but during those 40 years the rates of cancer skyrocketed. Only 25 years ago, your chance of developing some form of cancer during your lifetime was 1 in 5 (up from 1 in 30 in the year 1900), but today it is 1 in 1--which means that today, despite decades fighting a War on Cancer, chances are that everyone will get some form of cancer in his or her lifetime. What happened was that the War on Cancer concentrated on a fix-it approach--on "fighting" cancer once it was diagnosed--and merely spawned a massive cancer treatment industry. Hoof care is the same. Conventional hoof care, whether shod or barefoot, is basically a treatment industry and concentrates on a fix-it approach, "fighting" symptoms after they occur and masking them, or covering them up. Hoof care professionals can't really be blamed for that, though, because they're just responding to customer demand.
Much of what was said above about hoof care can be said about the two other established branches of "natural" in the horse world--natural horse care and natural horsemanship. If you buy a standard book on natural horse care or holistic horse care, you'll get a compendium of alternative methods of treatment, and it will concentrate mainly on herbs used as pharmaceuticals, with a little aromatherapy and massage mixed in, and if you get a really good one, it might have a little about energy work such as acupuncture. What you get is a recipe book in which you can look up the symptom your horse is having and then refer to the list of standard alternative methods to treat that symptom, in case you want to add those to supplement the symptom treatment methods your veterinarian is already using. Many such books still advise feeding processed feeds and supplements, still talk about stall bedding, and still refer the reader to a farrier for hoof care (unless of course you don't ride much, in which case you might be able to get by barefoot). It's really not that much different than an article you might read in a standard horse magazine. Just throw a few herbs in with the horse pellets, and you're going natural. It's waiting for a problem to occur and then treating the symptoms. In the same way, natural horsemanship too often concentrates only on certain interpretations of horse behavior in an effort to solve some kind of behavioral problem. I once went to the barn of a trainer with a reputation for using natural horsemanship methods. I watched as he led a horse out of a concrete-floored stall with metal-grated sliding doors and watched the horse clomp up the asphalted barn aisle, shod in a full set of shoes with clips...!
Horse care is often made too complicated. For example, if you read an article on some aspect of hoof care, it will of course likely be about solving some sort of problem, compensating for some symptom. There will be diagrams and pictures and all sorts of technical terms and measurements and the results of studies which "tend" to suggest that the use of such-and-such recipe might be appropriate. It all leaves you confused and with the impression that hoof care is so complicated that you might as well give up on understanding it. Similarly, an article on horse nutrition, for example, might be full of complicated nutritional analyses, graphs and tables (or maybe just summaries of the graphs and tables), and studies which "tend" to suggest certain recipes for a horse diet. The reader is again left feeling overwhelmed--yet another suggestion to try, recommended by yet another expert with impressive-sounding credentials, yet another product to buy. But horse care and understanding horse behavior are not rocket science. It's actually just simple common sense, and if you think about it in common sense terms, you don't need to worry about all the complicated analyses and all the technical terms, and you don't have to have certification or advanced degrees to be able to understand enough to provide proper care for your horse. If you throw off the layers of overcomplication, you might in the long run find that those layers of overcomplication were what was actually causing you to have so many problems with your horse in the first place.
Let's take an example from hoof care--the practice of using X-rays of horses' feet in order to trim or shoe the hooves so that breakover or some measure of balance is optimized. But just stop and think a minute. Horses existed for eons before X-rays were ever invented; horses existed as wild animals living on their own for untold ages before they were domesticated, and today, all over the world, horses exist in a natural state with no intervention from humans. Who optimizes their breakover and hoof balance? Who optimizes the breakover and hoof balance for zebras? ...for deer? ...for antelope? And yet despite the fact than an entire industry has developed around doing this for domestic horses, they are still hindered by far more hoof and lameness problems than free-roaming horses who receive no hoof care at all.
I've been in lots of barns where fairly expensive horses were kept, owned by people who were trying their best to provide good care for them. Many of these horses were nervous wrecks with bad habits, or were plauged with health problems, or were standing on small, contracted feet. In the tack rooms were all the recipe ingredients -- an arsenal of different kinds of feeds, supplements, topical preparations, medications, and books to combat whatever problem the horse was having. Yet in spite of all that, the horses were still nervous wrecks, or were still unhealthy, or still had hoof problems. The recipes hadn't worked.
By and large, the recipes don't work -- the recipe approach doesn't work, even though it represents the established ways of keeping and dealing with horses. At best the recipe approach can compensate somewhat for symptoms, but it can't provide wellness. For true wellness we have to consider the horse as a totality, climb out of the little boxes created by the recipe approach, and see and understand the horse as a living being in relationship to its environment, influenced by all aspects of that environment. And most importantly we have to get our own thinking out of the boxes created by the recipe approach. We have to be willing to consider things that those who write the recipes don't consider -- we have to be willing to consider things we can't see and measure, and we have to be open to more than a "fix-it" approach ... and then maybe we can see problems not as something to be fought, but as part of the ebb and flow of normal existence, and sometimes signs that point out to us that something we're doing or something about the way we're keeping the horse is not right.
