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...I know if we told Jake he would be on a diet like that he would run off a cliff!...

Jake's probably not the one you'll have to worry about, although Tennessee was built just like Jake until not too many years ago. It'll be Blade you'll have to watch. He tends to be an 'easy keeper' anyways. Of course you got a lotta years before you gotta worry about that. From what I read, the "magic age" for Walking Horses to start showing symptoms of EMD is about 17, and Tennessee was right on schedule. But I think a lot of it had to do with me moving him to a better pasture. I think if he'd stayed where he was before, where the mares are now, that he would've been fine. There is essentially NO grass over there. But even when he was over there, he'd have what I now recognize as intermittent bouts of laminitis back then. My MIL would tell me of days when he didn't come charging up to the fence at Mach 1 at supper time and slam on the brakes at the last minute and scare her to death like he usually did. He'd just come walking up from the barn real slow. I'd go look at his feet, thinking that maybe he had a stone or something in there, but everything 'looked' fine, and he'd get over it in a few days and I just didn't know what I was looking at back then.

It'll be Blade you'll have to watch. He tends to be an 'easy keeper' anyways.You are right, we have to work on keeping weight ON Jake and work on keeping it OFF Blade. Queen has been getting harder to keep in her older years of late. Not a problem with lush pasture for us this year, seems that everytime it rains it goes around us.

I'm sorry to hear about Tennessee. Keep us posted.
I have an interesting no-foot-no-horse story, that's the fault of a farrier, and neglegence. A friend of mine up in Maine has two horses, an arab pony, and an appy/arab cross. When she went to school, she free leased the appy/arab to the lady that owned him before her. She figured that he'd be in good hands. Well long story short, this lady turned out to be a loon, and tried to keep my friends horse when the lease was up. The horse is on thyroid medication, and she took him off it so that he regained all of his weight, (claming that he didn't need it). AND her farrier, somehow, when he removed and reset the arab's shoes, a) never sized them or forged them, instead nailing them on right out of the box, so that one shoe ended up being bigger than all the rest, causing him to forge, and there were three rows of nails in each foot. When my friend came to pick him up last weekend, the lady had replaced his halter with an old chewed up one, hid his lead, took apart the bridle and knotted the reins, and threw everything horse blanket included, into one giant trash bag. She also stole the silver name plate off of the halter. This saga has been going on for a month now, and it's been nothing short of unbelievable. I'm just glad that it's all over and he's back where he belongs now.