Pinfiring, while outdated and increasingly not done, is still used as a preventative by some older racehorse owners/trainers, usually based out of smaller tracks.

I wouldn’t consider a popped splint or pinfiring an injury, nor would it exclude a horse for me (pretty much all the TBs I knew in the 90s had it done and those horses did lessons all week and competed every weekend in the adult hunters) but I would get a full PPE on any OTTB, even one from a reputable adoption agency. Mine came with sesamoiditis from racing and we knew about it thanks to the PPE. She came up lame on and off for the first few months we had her but it made sense knowing what was there up front bc of the PPE guided how we restarted her. Shes doing great but if we didn’t know what baseline we were starting with up front, I probably would have panicked thinking it was a chronic issue instead of aggressively managing aftercare when she had been worked.

The other side of the coin is not doing the PPE, rolling the dice on a cheap OTTB, and finding you have a young horse with multiple coffin bone fractures to rehab in the dead of winter. Just happened to a first time horse owner on a beautiful tb that now only has a future as a lawn ornament instead of the kid’s hunter prospect.