Someone at church this weekend asked me why horses need shoes. What a great question!!  Let me practice explaining.

Humans have domesticated horses. This means we have taken them out of their natural environment and brought them home to live with us. They are designed to live in herds and run around on hard terrain, ground that trims their hoofs on a daily basis. Put them in Western Washington (or Florida, or Kentucky), and they spend a lot of time in a wet environment, whether it’s in the mud or in a dirty stall. Moist hoofs are like wet fingernails: soft and weak. Shoes lift the horses up off the ground a bit, helping the hoof to keep dry. Additionally, shoes can protect a horse during various activities: ground is too rocky?  Put on a steel shoe!  You need more traction in a sandy performance ring?  Put on a swift aluminum shoe!  Your horse is lame? Put on some Stryofoam and duct tape and let the pony rest!

Or, you could just call the Farrier to trim the hoofs every 8 weeks. That’s common too. This week, for example, we took a field trip to a stables full of Arabian horses. Twenty-eight, to be exact. These horses are entered in all sorts of beauty pageants, which is why they can get away with names like Lady, Angel, and Princess.

I think Barbie is missing her horse.

And then we get clients like Dolly, a pony for sale on the side of the road. She was found by a family who drove by, saw her tethered up, and bought her on the spot. She’s been a member of the family for 9 years, and arrived at the school in the back of a suburban for her trim:

School starts at 9am each day, and usually by 9:30 the horses have arrived and we each share the work of shoeing them. Today, me and Kevin (the rookies) were given a hind hoof each. Pulling off a shoe should take < 2 minutes. My shoe took 20 minutes. Between the horse’s jerky foot movements and my clumsy use of the tools, I had beads of sweat running down my face before 10 am. But don’t worry, I won 🙂  By lunch time I had taken off a shoe, trimmed the hoof wall, rasped the heels, drawn my lines and shaped a brand new shoe for “Missy.” She had only crushed my fingers twice and landed on top of my foot once. When it came time to “set” the shoe, I got a handful of special horseshoeing nails and got ready to drive the first nail. 

Back to the story: I drove my first nail to set the shoe, right where it belongs!  2nd nail, bam! Third nail, took a few tries, but then it finally went in. I took a break to straighten up my back and give the horse a break, when Kevin exclaimed, “Are you okay?!”  “Yeah, why?”  “There’s blood on the floor!”  My third nail had gone into the soul of the hoof, and Missy was, indeed, bleeding. The assistant came right over, filled the puncture with “hot nail solution,” and then said my shoe was on crooked, which is why my nail got in the wrong place. I felt terrible: the hoof medicine had a pungent smell and stung my eyes a bit; my hand was in a lot of pain from when the horse had stepped on it, and I was so bad at it all that I had to excuse myself to cry out my stress in the dingy barn bathroom. I didn’t know whether I felt sorry for myself or sorry for the horse. Actually, I know I felt sorry for the both of us.

Bright spot in the day: we celebrated three birthdays with a horse cake!