Confessions of a Horseshoer

Weather

78 Weather Shoeing horses is not a pleasant way to make a living, but when the weather is extreme, it is downright miserable. The extremes are heat, cold, and rain. It’s best to stay home when these conditions are severe,but when you have no food in the house, you have to do what you have to do. Heat, without question, is the most troublesome for me. I’ll choose rain over heat, any day. In fact I will no longer shoe a horse on an extremely hot day unless there is a cool barn or some kind of shelter. I’m from the Northwest and we don’t quite know what to do on hot days. We don’t get a lot of them,so when it gets to be in the high eighties or nineties, everyone just stands around in confusion and complains. Air conditioners have arrived in most business offices and fastfood restaurants, but are seldom found in anyone’s home. I only recently got a truck with an air conditioner. One hot day in California during my first year of shoeing when I usually took two hours to shoe a horse under normal conditions, I took almost five hours to shoe one horse. I drank a lot of water, but the heat got to me. I’d work for awhile, get dizzy, and go into the hay room and lie down on a bale of hay until the dizziness went away.I turned a hose on my head and upper body every now and then, but that didn’t • Weather • 79 stop the dizziness.That horse stood out there the whole time in the blazing sun, mostly asleep, and didn’t seem bothered at all by the heat. I probably suffered from heat stroke and didn’t have the sense to recognize it. No one was around to point it out to me. I apparently didn’t learn anything from that experience because I continued to shoe horses in the direct sun for another three or four years,when finally,the lesson got through to me.The occasion was a 110-degree day in Northern California , on a Belgian draft horse ranch.The job was to simply pull the shoes off ten huge Belgians and trim their feet. No shoeing.The first horse should have convinced me to put up my tools and go home. The way it worked was that I would pick up a foot, cut the nail clinches, set the foot down, and rest,sweat breaking out.Then I would pick the foot up again, pull the shoe off, set the foot down, and rest. More sweat. Then I would pick up the foot,trim half of it,set it down and rest and sweat. . . . You can see the pattern. That first horse, who turned out to be the easiest one of the day, rocked back and forth the whole time I was working on it. About five horses into this disaster, I took a break. I sat in the shade with my shirt off and listened to the old rancher tell me how this was nothing, and I should have been there in the old days when it was really hot. Then he began to bad-mouth another shoer, my best friend. I took a half-hour break, but even though I was in the shade, I couldn’t stop the sweat from pouring out of me. At this stage of my life, I had no excess fat on me, and couldn’t understand where the sweat was coming from. I started to worry, but had five horses to go, so I tried to ignore the problem and go back 80 • Confessions of a Horseshoer • to work. The last five were worse than the first five and it took me longer to do them. I had to tie up the legs on two of them (see section on Different Kinds of Wrecks) in order to get them to stand. When I had finished, the owner tried to talk me down in price because of volume. No. I would not do that. He asked me to come back in a few weeks to put shoes back on the horses. No, again. Forget it. I thanked him for the lemonade and left, a wiser person. I took the next day off to recover, and never again shod another horse, big or...