Confessions of a Horseshoer

A Different Kind of Bad Job

144 A Different Kind of Bad Job Once in awhile you run into really unpleasant people and situations in horseshoeing. I remember one in Oregon that still makes my blood boil.A barn manager I knew called me to shoe a horse who belonged to some new lady who had obviously been neglecting that animal. The barn manager was a responsible person and he was not going to tolerate neglect. He didn’t care that the woman had not asked to have the job done; he would add the cost of the shoeing to her barn bill. When I arrived at the barn, I was aghast at the condition of the feet.They hadn’t been touched for probably close to a year and were spread out so badly that it would be almost impossible to keep a shoe on. The foot had the consistency of a cantaloupe. Placing a horseshoe on the foot was like putting a cup down in the center of a big plate, the cup being the shoe and the plate being the foot.The foot should have been the size of the cup, not the size of the plate. In my opinion, that woman had abused her horse. This all happened about ten years after the situation in the previous section with the mare and her baby, and by the time of this Oregon story I had developed a pretty good • A Different Kind of Bad Job • 145 instinct about how people cared for their horses.I believe the lady in Northern California loved her horse.I don’t think she knew much about horses, and she probably just didn’t keep track of time. This lady in Oregon, I’m convinced, couldn’t have cared less about her horse. He was gaunt and uncared for, and his feet were a disaster. The lady should have been turned into the Humane Society. I did what I could, trying to compromise between the correct shoe size and the unnaturally spread out and oversized foot. I put the nails in the best places I could find and I trimmed off as much excess as I could. I knew I would need to go back in three or four weeks to pull those shoes and reposition them because I knew the nails wouldn’t hold longer than three or four weeks because of the spongy consistency of the feet. About two weeks later, I got a call from the barn manager telling me that the lady said I had done a shitty job and that I should come out and do it over again, for free. I went out and looked at the shoes.The nails were somewhat loose, as they would be after being in a cantaloupe for two weeks, so I pulled the shoes, re-shod the horse, and told the barn manager to tell the owner to go to hell.I knew this was going to be another case of someone bad-mouthing me wherever they went, but I didn’t care. This all happened a number of years ago, and as I write this I am wondering why I have chosen this particular incident to describe. It’s not as if I had never done a shitty job before. (About a month into the business I had done a girl’s horse just before Christmas, and on Christmas day she called to inform me that all four shoes had come off after 146 • Confessions of a Horseshoer • two weeks. They had been pulled off in the mud. I had not done a good job. I spent three hours on that Christmas day replacing the shoes.) I think the attitude and behavior of the customer is what makes the difference. The incident with the lady from the barn doesn’t seem like such a big deal as I read it over, but there’s still a lot of anger on my part. I’m not sure why. I might need to study on this a bit. I might learn something. ...