Confessions of a Horseshoer

What Do Horses in the Wild Do?

13 What Do Horses in the Wild Do? This is a question I get all the time. People want to know how horses who aren’t privileged to have a visit by a horseshoer every eight weeks get along by themselves. I’ll try to shed light on that question, although, as with most questions about horses, there’s a variety of conflicting answers. An old cowboy pal once told me about what he called the “Golden Trim,” where, he claimed, shortly after the birth of the foal in the wild the mother chews off the excess growth of the new baby’s hoof to the exact proportions needed for that baby. From then on, he said, the baby’s foot would remain perfectly balanced in angle and length. (I couldn’t help but picture in my mind the baby extending its foot to be carefully examined and chewed to the exact angles by the mother who had learned this in some kind of instinctive equine birthing clinic . . .) Then,my friend said,the horse will run around on perfect feet that will never need any work until it is caught by a human and ruined by restricting the terrain available to the horse,and by putting iron shoes on its previously perfect feet. Along with the “Golden Trim,” the idea of unrestricted terrain is my friend’s favorite theory. He claims that horses 14 • Confessions of a Horseshoer • running free,like the mustangs,will stay on hard terrain until their feet get tender, and then move to softer ground. When the feet get too long because of the softer ground, the horses will move back to harder terrain to wear the hooves down to the proper length. That’s one theory. A different one, endorsed by another friend, is that wild horses develop a rockhard foot that can withstand any kind of terrain. They can go anywhere and run on any kind of ground, and their feet are just fine.I blame these two theories on two of my friends. I’m staying out of it. I do know, however, that once humans get their hands on a horse, it’s a different ball game.The horses can’t choose their terrain for self-care, if that’s the theory you prefer, and putting shoes on just starts a cycle of repairing the damage we’ve created. All that horseshoers do, really, is try to keep repairing the damage that we cause by putting the shoes on in the first place. By this I mean we’ll take a flawlessly balanced foot, nail a metal shoe on it, and watch the foot grow all out of proportion over the next eight weeks. When we come back, we pull the shoe off and try to trim the foot back to balance again. You might, for example, start out with the correct (for that horse) 53-degree angles on the front feet when you put the shoes on.Then the foot starts growing and when you get back to it in eight weeks the angle has mysteriously changed to 50 degrees, putting a strain on the tendons, and the left foot has grown faster than the right foot, so it’s a quarter inch longer. I’ve had the experience of trimming a horse’s feet to the correct length,and find in eight weeks that one toe is longer than the other. The owner complains. So I trim the foot to the correct length, carefully measure it, have • What Do Horses in the Wild Do? • 15 the owner carefully measure it to see that it is correct, and write it all down. Eight weeks later, I’ll pull off the shoes and let the owner measure them. Surprise! One is longer than the other. It usually takes doing this a couple of times, but eventually the owner can see that the horse is a bit out of the usual and that one foot does, in fact, grow faster than the other. If you’ve made a tiny little error in balancing the foot, you’ll notice with horror that it has expanded to where even your dog can see the difference in eight weeks. Then you’ll pull the shoes, correct all the glaring and non-glaring discrepancies, nail another shoe on, and wait hopefully to see what it looks like in eight more weeks. This is not to...