Confessions of a Horseshoer

Culinary Aspects

153 Culinary Aspects People always ask me about feed for their horses.They worry about feed as much as they worry about their own diets .I usually tell them to ask their vet or go talk to the old guy at the feed store (any feed store will do), but over the years I’ve gotten enough information to be able to speak to this subject with some authority. I’ve learned that a chicken feed called “scratch” is a remarkable curative for crumbly hooves, that cider vinegar makes miraculous changes in arthritic horses, that horses behave better if the shoer arrives with a box of—God help us—sugar cubes, and that 50 percent of founder cases, a serious foot condition, occur on Christmas day because the owners run out to their ponies and horses with a gaily wrapped coffee can of sweet grain, an unaccustomed treat, which, if eaten in one sitting almost invariably ends in colic or founder, either of which can kill the animal. I’ve also learned to be careful with my food words when I’m distracted by the job at hand. An example: I was trimming a new customer’s horse and we were talking away in the usual manner when she asked me if I knew how to clean tarweed off the horse’s muzzle and legs. Tarweed is a small bright green weed with little yellow flowers that horses enjoy eating. It puts out a sticky black tar that gets all over the 154 • Confessions of a Horseshoer • legs and faces of the horses. It’s a real mess. Busy working on a hind foot, I admitted I had no answer for her, but suggested she go talk to the wise old home remedy expert at the feed store. “He’ll probably give you some wacky recipe like kerosene and penis butter,” I inattentively suggested. Horror struck, I murmured,“I mean ‘peanut butter.’”I didn’t look up. I didn’t say another word. Neither did she. Without looking at each other the money was exchanged and I left. I’ve never heard from her since. Getting back to food, one of the moderately bizarre but always present aspects of working with horses is the group of eager dogs who wait to eat the parings cut off the horse’s feet. These parings are like giant toenails, only grosser. They’re usually caked with urine, manure, and mud, and can generally be counted on to be incredibly smelly. Occasionally, they’ll have a black, sticky, infectious, mucousy gunk, called, for some inexplicable reason, thrush. All dogs love this stuff. Knowing the shoeing routine, the barn dogs wait in eager anticipation for the first cut, sometimes catching it before it hits the ground. They fight over it, they slobber over it, they gulp it down, sometimes they throw it right back up, and wait for more.The fouler it is, the better they like it. I’ve often wondered what the horse must think, as it watches these carnivores fight desperately over parts of his body. One riding stable where I worked had an Irish Wolfhound who loved hoof parings even more than most dogs. He was big enough to easily fight off other dogs so he could be first in line,but unfortunately for him,he was seriously allergic to the parings.The day he ate my contributions, he became deathly sick and had to have his stomach pumped,or,according to the • Culinary Aspects • 155 vet, he would have died. Normally he was kept inside when shoers were on the premises, and they were all instructed to carry all parings away when they left. They were told not to put the parings in garbage cans,either,because the dog would tip over the cans and dig them out.But on the day I was there, he had inadvertently been left outside, and at that time I was unfamiliar with his history. I felt bad after hearing what had happened to him and how sick he had become. He recovered fully, but it must be difficult for a dog to live on a horse ranch and not be able to eat hoof parings on pain of death. One day, at another ranch surrounded by the usual group of hungry dogs, I noticed the owner’s four-year-old boy chewing something. I slowly put the horse’s leg down...