Testimonials

I purchased a horse from Spain in March 2007. He arrived (shod) on the Monday, lost a shoe later that day and was immediately lame. My farrier came and removed the 3 remaining shoes the following day, Romeo was so hideously lame it was heartbreaking to see. He was kept in on soft, deep bedding until he was x rayed later that week. The x rays showed that the pedal bone of his off fore was sunken and rotated, also that his soles were paper thin. 

The vet and remedial farrier suggested shoeing as a matter of urgency to offer support to the feet and to protect the soles. I was told not to expect to be able to ride Romeo in the near future and that possibly he may never be sound enough to be ridden. To say I was devastated would be an understatement.

Initially this was the route I followed but I quickly realised that although Romeo was a marginally easier on his feet he was by no means sound at all.....so I rang Trevor and cried down the phone to him relaying the awful story.

Romeo had his shoes removed the following day. Trevor spoke to the vet at length and gained her support for what was to be a potentially difficult transition to going shoeless.

Initially Romeo was turned out in boots and pads to both protect and stimulate the soles of his feet and was seen by Trevor every 3 weeks for a whole year. I had a strict conditioning regime to follow and by keeping in touch with Trevor constantly he was able to monitor Romeos progress in-between visits.

Romeo's feet have undergone such a massive transformation it's sometimes hard to remember just what a dreadful state he was in. To my absolute delight Romeo is now sound and being ridden. 

I hack him out (in boots) over the rockiest and roughest terrain imaginable, he is learning to jump and has has just started competing at preliminary dressage. We qualified with a win of 72% for the Cotswold Dressage Championships first time out. He was 5th(!)in the Championships and has just won two more classes this weekend with scores of 71 and 65.5%. I could not be happier with the progress that Romeo has made in such a short time and I know too that Romeo is a happy horse with feet that just keep going from strength to strength!!

I honestly believe that if I had chosen to keep shoes on and there was no such thing as AEP, Romeo would not be sound today and may not even be here at all.

I can't thank or recommend Trevor and AEP enough!

Sincerely

Helen

Elli is a 15.3hh Irish Sports Horse. She was a 9 year old at the time she went lame after we had owned her for just over a year. Her lameness was quite acute to begin with, but subsided with a few weeks box rest and coming back into work slowly, however it kept re-occurring from May to September. My vet was treating her fetlock, and he did x-rays and ultrasound and seemed to think there was a tendon injury, but by September I wanted a second opinion.

I got another vet out, who put a nerve block at the lowest point, and she came sound so we knew it was in the heel. He mentioned the DDFT, which generally has quite a poor prognosis. So she went back on box rest with hand walking out to graze, and as we were going into winter I decided to keep this up for the whole winter to give her a chance to heal.

By January, she took a sudden turn for the worse after the farrier put natural balance shoes on her when I wasn't in attendance. We called him back and he refitted the shoe in case it was a close nail, but there was no improvement. She went on like this for a few weeks, hardly able to put one foot in front of the other, then I asked the vet if I could be referred for an MRI scan to decide if she had a future as I couldn't bear to see her suffer any more. In my head I had resigned myself to having her PTS and had even planned what to do with the corpse, and to donate her leg for dissection etc.

The MRI was done on insurance, otherwise we couldn't have afforded to spend £1,000 on a condemned horse.

While I was waiting for the results I bumped into an Applied Equine Podiatrist who visits our yard - Trevor Jones, and I was quite upset at the time as I thought my horse was going to be PTS. Trevor thought Elli could be helped, although he thought her immediate lameness was due to collateral ligament damage, something no one had mentioned before.

When the scans came back, she did indeed have collateral ligament damage. She also had arthritic and navicular issues and a small tear to the DDFT. I didn't think she would get back on the lorry having had her front shoes off for the scan, but strangely she was more comfortable already with them off. A few weeks later, Trevor removed her shoes and she had her first consultation.

We had to then work on conditioning, which was basically hand walking with sole mates pads. She found immediate relief in pads and our walks out to graze became more pleasurable.

From there she went from strength to strength. She was turned out in March, and Trevor said he no longer considered her a remedial case, just a normal barefoot transition. I had almost sold her saddle, but he suggested we start riding her again for the good it would do her mentally.