Natural Hoof Care

"If you put six holes in something solid, it does not make it stronger. No matter what they say."

.....I began horseshoeing school having been almost raised by horses. I had been riding for almost 15 years. Of course, at the age of 22, I thought I knew everything there was to know about horses and the way their feet should be maintained. I thought THEY SHOULD ALL BE WEARING SHOES!!!!! When I graduated, I thought I would put shoes on every horse that walked by. I knew how to make bar shoes and wedge shoes and modify keg shoes 6 ways to Sunday. I spent hundreds of dollars on bar stock, a propane forge, a welder, a drill press, nails, hammers of every size and shape... You get the picture.

.....As with anything, in order to get started you must pay your dues. So, my first couple of real clients were people, or horses, that other farriers didn’t want to deal with. Either the horses were crazy or the people were crazy, and if that wasn’t the case, the horses feet were so messed up they would never be sound again anyway. And, that made them not worth the efforts of many other farriers. While I agree that some of the horses I worked on should not still be gracing the earth with their presence (they were suffering,) I am ever so glad they were here to teach me.

.....I did my best, prettiest shoeing job on all those horses and it did not make them better. In a few cases it made them far worse. As I started looking at what was going wrong with one particular horse, I remembered the master farrier I learned from saying “six holes in something solid does not make it stronger.” Right then and there I pulled the shoes off that horse and decided I wouldn’t base what I did on what was drilled into my head by generations of horse people following horseshoeing traditions, (Traditions like: “They should all be wearing shoes.”)