Scooby

This is Scooby. Scooby is a rescued Percheron gelding. He was brought to Dancing Horse Farm in August of 2004 by Amy S. She found him at a farm which had many horses, several of whom starved to death. The state had stepped in and the owner was told to sell or find homes for all the horses within a given amount of time or the state would take them. Scooby was one of the last 4 left. His Percheron partner had to be put down because he was in such bad shape. Scooby was several hundred pounds underweight and had a severe injury to his left front hoof where the shoe had been ripped off and had taken most of the hoof wall with it. Scooby was actually walking on the sole of his foot. We were not sure he would be able to recover but I felt he was worth the effort so with help from a lot of people I took him on. Scooby is doing very well! He quickly gained the weight and we got the abcess on his foot to heal (a long process), then we found an excellent farrier who was willing to travel here to work on Scooby! Our vet thinks he is in his late teens/early twenties, and she also found he has EPSM so I put him on a special diet. It's been over 2 years now, and Scooby's foot is better all the time. The hoof wall is actually growing again! This is what his foot looked like about 10 months after he came here. Still pretty bad, but lots better than it was! I will try to get a photo of his hoof now and will post it soon. As you can see from the photo, my farrier (Bruce Matthews) put the shoe on backwards here so it would support the heel. Bruce had to get very creative with Scooby and he tried a lot of things at different stages of Scooby's healing. We are lucky we found Bruce!!!

Scooby will never work again. He used to be a logging horse. At some point we may hitch him to a cart and go for short rides but for now he is enjoying his retirement and loving any and all attention he gets.