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When you look at a horse standing in front of you, the frog is invisible-you can only see the frog by picking up a hoof and looking at its underside. That V-shaped rubbery-looking dark area, with a cleft in it, is the frog.

But what is the frog, actually, and what does it do?

Let's consider the whole hoof. Horses stand on one toe on each leg. Inside the hoof is a bone just like the last little bone on the end of your finger-it's called the "coffin bone." And just like that bone in your finger, the coffin bone has around it, protecting it, a "fingernail" or "toenail"-the outer hoof wall, the part you see. If you look at your finger end-on, you see that your nail curves a little, in an arc. On horses, this protective "nail", called the hoof wall, grows almost all the way around the hoof. That's the outside "hard part"-dark colored in dark hooves, light colored in light hooves-that you see as a big curve right at the outside of the hoof on the underside. The hoof wall protects, and holds together, the soft tissues and the coffin bone inside the horse's hoof...it is like the sides of a box.

The bottom of a horse's hoof has both the sole and the frog. If you look at your finger again, you see that the end of your finger is skin. If you cut your nails short and do activities that put pressure on that skin, it grows a callus...it gets thicker and harder. That's roughly (very roughly) equivalent to the sole of the horse's hoof. It normally looks grayish, or whitish if it's just been trimmed, and it fills the space between the hoof wall and the frog. Ideally, the sole is slightly concave upward, like an upside down saucer, and like the hoof wall it's fairly immobile.

Now consider the back of the horse's hoof-that hairy area where the hoof wall seems to sink down and disappear and there are a pair of rounded bulges-the heel bulbs. With the hoof upside down again, you can see that the heel bulbs and the frog are related-the frog is a sort of folded in place (thus the cleft in the frog, and the groove on either side of it.) The healthy frog feels rubbery, not hard and chalky like the sole, or horn-like, like the hoof wall. We don't have anything ilke that, no matter what we do with our fingers and toes.

Why would it be like that?

Because the frog has two functions: it's a cushion and it's like an auxiliary pump. As a cushion, the frog and the hoof wall together protect a normal concave sole from concussion that can cause lameness; horses with flat soles, or horses whose frogs

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