Confessions of a Horseshoer

Flies

128 Flies Closely related to horses and ponies are, of course, flies. They come with the territory.On a nice warm day a deposit of fresh horse turds will have a thousand flies on it before it hits the ground. I think the flies watch the horse and know when he’s ready to let go, then mill around the exit and grab hold on the way down,fighting for the best spots.Some experts say the fly larvae live in the horse’s bowels and spring to life when the manure lands in the dirt. I doubt that the fly larvae cause much distress to the horse from inside, but once outside, the battle begins, and the horseshoer is right in the middle. I certainly don’t pretend to know anything technical or scientific about flies, but from my position at ground level, I can describe several kinds and I will tell some stories about each and the battle waged against them by horse and shoer. The most prominent buzzing nemesis looks like a regular housefly, and for all I know, it is.These flies don’t give up easily. They generally swarm around the feet and ankles of the horse and sometimes get so engrossed (an appropriate word) in the often bloody feast that you can squash them right on the horse. If you wave them off, they rise about an inch and jump right back on. These flies won’t bother a leg that is being held by the shoer,but that leaves three other legs • Flies • 129 for them to assault.And that’s where the trouble starts.There is no way an average horse is going to stand quietly with one foot in the shoer’s lap and three feet on the ground being eaten by flies. You can yell and shout and insult the horse for wriggling around, but the horse is simply not going to stand still under this kind of fly attack.All of this limits the options for the shoer.Assuming there is no fly spray (more about that later), the shoer will probably try to get as much work done as possible on a foot before the horse reaches the limits of its tolerance and breaks loose, scattering horseshoer and tools. Sometimes these kinds of flies settle on the horse’s stomach and sometimes on the face.The flies on the stomach can at least be periodically re-arranged when the horse whips his tail around, but even this can cause some grief to the shoer because when your head is down working on a foot, the tail will slap you right in the face. It feels like a whip.That’s why shoers always wear baseball hats or hats with a good brim to ward off the blows from the tail. A brief aside: I was once asked to testify in court as a defense witness for a customer who was falsely accused of managing a dirty barn. Part of the accusation referred to flies being everywhere. This was not true. His barn was incredibly clean, with almost no flies at all, and I was well aware of this. While on the stand, I was asked by the opposing attorney how I could substantiate that there were no flies. My response was that his barn was the only working facility where I did not wear a hat. My bald head was safe from fly attack and I didn’t need to protect my face from the horses’ tails because there were no flies to be swished away. My testimony, according to the attorney, won the case for my customer. It also caused a lot of laughter. 130 • Confessions of a Horseshoer • If these kinds of flies are not controlled, the shoer needs to be cautious not only about being hit in the face with the tail,but also about getting kicked in the head.This is how you can get kicked in the head: if you are working on a hind foot while it’s on the hoof stand,you are putting your head directly in a position to get kicked if the horse kicks back with a front foot to chase flies off his stomach.This happened to me only once. I got a foot right in the middle of the forehead that knocked me back about five feet. I still have the scar. The best...