The care nobody sees

Mane and coat collect the compliments. Hoof and skin decide how long there is anything to compliment.

This routine has no before-and-after. It has an after-a-year, which makes it the care most often left undone. Only one thing helps against that: a fixed rhythm that does not depend on how the day is going.

Every day, while grooming

• Pick out all four hooves, clefts included, even when time is short.
• Run the flat of your hand over crest, dock, saddle patch and girth line. A dry or warm spot is felt sooner than it is seen.
• In summer, sun protection on muzzle and blaze before the horse goes out.

Once a week

The hoof oil, on wall, coronet and bulbs. The coronet is the real building site, because that is where new horn is formed before it grows down at roughly eight millimetres a month. What you do there today, you see at the bearing surface a year from now.

Through the wet season

Between October and March the frog care joins in, two or three times a week, on a picked-out and dry hoof, nozzle into the collateral grooves and the central cleft. No more often than that, and never instead of the hoof pick.

As needed

• Mane crest, when the horse rubs and the mane thins at the top.
• Dock, on the underside, where the rubbing actually happens.
• Girth line and saddle patch after work, never before.
• Elbows and inner thighs on dry, flaky skin.

Where care stops

A clear line, and it sits deliberately in the middle of this text: if the frog is breaking down, crumbling, bleeding or smelling strongly, if skin is weeping, crusting or itching badly, that is not a case for a care product. The horse belongs in the hands of your farrier or your vet, and in the same week.

A beautiful coat is the report the skin writes about the last four weeks.

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