Confessions of a Horseshoer

What the Well-Dressed Horseshoer Wears

74 What the Well-Dressed Horseshoer Wears Horseshoer’s clothes are not particularly distinguished, but there are some peculiarities. Steel-toed boots are usually a good idea for protecting the farrier’s foot from getting smashed, but there are always stories about some horseshoer or another getting his steel-toed boot stomped on by a heavy horse and having the steel plate trap his squashed toes in the boot. It would take a jaws-of-life (or jaws-of-foot) to get these squashed toes free from the boot. You would have to cut off the bottom of the boot to get them out. As gruesomely dangerous as this sounds, I’ve still always worn steeltoed boots. I haven’t had my foot stepped on much, but I suspect I would if I even thought about going out in tennis shoes. And horseshoers being what they are, there’s always someone who does wear tennis shoes. It’s so they can get away fast, they’ll say. I never wear a ring while working with horses. I take off my wedding ring and put it somewhere safe in the truck, a long ways from the horse. I also put in the truck my wallet and everything else I don’t want lost in the dirt. My fear about my ring,more like a nightmare,is that a horse will step • What the Well-Dressed Horseshoer Wears • 75 on my hand and squash the ring flat with my finger inside it. I don’t know anyone this has happened to, but it could happen. Horseshoers almost always wear a hat with a brim,mostly to protect the eyes from a horse tail that’s swishing at flies. Anyone who has ever gotten a tail whipped in their face will know what I’m talking about. When I first started shoeing horses, you could walk around a stable or a ranch and locate the shoer by the hat. It always had a brim and often was a baseball kind of cap, and no one else wore anything like it. Everyone wears a baseball cap now.I have one on,in my own home, as I write this, and if I’m not wearing a cowboy hat outside, I’m wearing a baseball cap. I’ve got nine different baseball caps and ten different cowboy hats, including hats for the grandchildren to wear when they visit. Long-sleeved shirts are useful. In the summer they protect you from getting horse hair all over your sweaty arms, and in winter, they provide some warmth. For awhile, as a new shoer, I didn’t wear a shirt at all in the summer. I got a good tan, but eventually became disgusted with the sticky horse hair all over my upper body. I gave up going shirtless one day when I had the front foot of my horse up on the hoof stand finishing it off, and the horse started licking my back. I couldn’t get out of his reach and he would not be discouraged. I decided that day to go back to wearing shirts. The owners of that horse were amazed when they got there. They were new customers and since they were late arriving for the appointment, I had just gone in, got the horse out of his stall, and started working on him. They were baffled by their horse’s behavior. “How’d you get him out of his stall?” 76 • Confessions of a Horseshoer • they asked. “He’s really a spooky horse and he doesn’t like strangers.And he’s never very good with horseshoers,either.” I had no answer for any of this. Maybe licking the sweat off my back was some kind of tranquilizer for him. I knew a horseshoer who never wore a shirt in summer , a handsome, muscled up kind of guy that none of the other horseshoers liked. He always pointed out that the flies never landed on him because he was a vegetarian.“Flies don’t bother vegetarians,” he told all the meat-eaters who would listen. This guy was a showy kind of character, who always had a quick answer for everyone.The only time I saw him at a loss was after he told some old cowboy his theory that flies don’t bother vegetarians, and the old cowboy smiled at him and said, “Horses are vegetarians, ain’t...