Welcome to Amanda's Foundered Friends
Horse and Equine Rescue!

Our Mission: Amanda's Foundered Friends Horse and Equine Rescue is a 501 (c)(3) non-profit organization designed to welcome and actively seek out horses, ponies, donkeys, and mules that have foundered or are considered chronically or incurably lame. Through tried and true natural hoofcare management and a natural lifestyle, our team of equine enthusiasts work to rehabilitate foundered equines and give them a second chance at a comfortable, long life.

How we care for and rehabilitate our hooved friends:

In recent years there has been a lot of new information in the horse world about natural horse and hoof care, and at first glance it seems like absolutely amazing stuff. From our experience, and from what we've heard from others, it is amazing stuff. The best part is: it's all natural. It doesn't take a lot of drugs or pricey food or expensive horseshoeing to make our horses feel better. A lot of it is very contradictory to everything the equine world has been doing for the last couple hundred years: every time a horse has hoof problems the "treatment" has been to load them up with drugs to cover the symptoms , and nail on an iron shoe to try to shape their feet into what we have thought they should be, instead of fidning and treating the cause. No one had ever really bothered to study wild horses and their natural lifestyle in the past; all of our knowledge had always come from our domestic horses and what we had always done with them throughout the past centuries. In recent years research has been conducted on our horses' very close relatives: the wild mustang. New knowledge has come to light about what it means for our horses to be truly "natural", and how their hooves and lifestyles play a role in being truly healthy.

To help rehabilitate our rescued horses, we focus on providing the three basic fundamental aspects of a horse's natural lifestyle- diet, exercise, and hoof care. A horse's natural diet is made of sparse dry grasses, not the rich sugar-laden legumes that domestic horses are traditionally given. One of the root causes of founder is too much sugar, so we feed a basic diet of dry grass hay- no extra sugars from alfalfa and horse treats that only cause problems for our known founder-prone equines. They are offered supplements with additional vitamins and minerals from natural sources, but only at a free choice option for the horses. They know what they are lacking, and will eat accordingly. The second aspect we try to mimic is exercise- a horse naturally moves all day long, foraging as it moves. Horses in the wild travel up to 20 miles a day or more- every single day! We try to stimulate this natural movement in our horses in the environment we have them in. We do this in a few ways, such as keeping them in a herd environment to stimulate natural horse interaction, and spreading their food out to encourage natural foraging behavior. We also will hand walk or ride them for additional exercise. The amount depends on the specific equine's needs- from once or twice a day to several times a day, to full-day trail rides in the more rehabilitated cases. The third aspect we try to mimic is hoof care. Of course, in the wild, horses don't have anyone maintaining their hooves for them. They do it themselves, by traveling 20 miles a day over all types of terrain- rocks, boulders, dirt, sand, hills, water, and more. Ideally, our domestic horses would travel that far over all kinds of terrain as well. Unfortunately that's not always possible, so we trim on a regular basis (every 1-6 weeks, depending on the horses' growth rate and hoof changes) to simulate the regular wear that they would receive if they could travel that much. Any longer between trims can lead to separation of the hoofwall due to the breaking down of the laminae which is the main structure we are trying to rebuild on our foundered horses.

Here at Amanda's Foundered Friends, we try to learn as much as we can from as many of the natural hoof care pioneers as possible. We are always finding new information from a variety of sources: classes, clinics, workshops, books, television, the ever-present internet, and the horses themselves. There is a lot of great information out there, and we encourage everyone that loves their horses to research natural hoofcare. We have seen it help several horses ourselves, and heard from countless others the amazing ways natural hoof care and a natural equine lifestyle has helped equines all over the world.

We will be adding more information in the future to help answer any questions you may have. If you have specific questions you would like to hear our opinions on, please send us an email and we will respond as soon as we can.