Founder Chronicles: Rejoining the world

Founder Chronicles 1: Killer lameness strikes
Founder Chronicles 2: We fight back
Founder Chronicles 3: Encouragement, more remedies
Founder Chronicles 4: Battle of the bulge
Founder Chronicles 5: A diagnosis, more solutions
Founder Chronicles 6: Hot days, higher pulse
Founder Chronicles 7: Another little miracle
With her backwards shoes, Bonnie rejoined the world and her pen mates as a mostly-normal horse. We began riding her bareback at a walk around our soft, quarter-mile track. Eventually we phased in little jogging jaunts, starting with one quarter of the quarter-mile track, and then coming back down to a walk. Later Bonnie moved to a more standard shoe with a custom, frog-supporting pad made by our farrier. Bonnie was always spooky on our trails when ridden alone, but I did not want to pressure her to go too fast or work too hard by ponying her off of another horse. I started bringing my yellow lab, Buck, on the leash for our rides, which while unorthodox, gave Bonnie company. Bonnie calmed down with Buck at her side. Buck, true to yellow lab form, soaked up the exercise like a sponge. When he saw “his” horse, Buck would begin jumping straight up into the air, all four feet off of the ground. Bonnie put up with the nonsense. We started letting Bonnie tell us what she was ready to do, and by late fall, Bonnie would chafe at the bit, asking for a lope. Buck the Dog would pull ahead, and the two would compete for “first place”. We kept the speed to a fast lope for safety, but Bonnie and Buck always asked for more. A friend brought out some new-fangled digital x-ray equipment that he wanted to test. Bonnie became the guinea pig. The news was good: Unless you knew Bonnie had foundered, you could not tell based on the x-rays. Next: Snow rescue, a cure