“This foot isn’t going to look pretty and be comfortable to her,” McGann tells Cowboy State Daily, pointing at a deep notch in the hoof.
The cuticle was damaged in an injury and, just like fingernails, likely won’t ever grow back correctly. It's dangerous because the notch could catch on something and tear up the horse's entire hoof, so it has to be trimmed.
McGann's goal, as with all the horses, is minimal intervention.
She lops off one of the notches at an angle so it’s seamlessly in line with the rest of the hoof.
There’s a quick smoothing, and then she sends the horse back home to the waiting herd.
“Now that’s out of the way, it will be six months until it gets kind of long again and needs another trim,” she said.
There’s never any fuss as the horses are brought to McGann. They all come willingly, without a rearing or sound of protest.
It’s as if they all get that McGann is there to help them.
That’s something McGann prides herself on. As she sees it, this is all about developing a partnership with the horses.
Now all the horses appear hearty and healthy, but it wasn’t always so.
These are all retired racehorses, some of them once worth millions of dollars. Some were in such bad shape when they arrived at Kate Anderson’s ranch in Chugwater that she thought they might have to be destroyed.
But there’s something healing about the wild Wyoming landscape for horses born to run free.
It’s a healing gift that has helped these horses regain the health they’d lost even when all the traditional approaches had failed....
