Feet First

Before I even bought a horse I knew one thing for sure, I need to be able to do her feet. In school I had learned how to clip sheep’s feet and trim cows hooves so horses hoofs seemed doable. The plan was to move to rural France to be as self-sufficient as possible and knowing that a good farrier are hard to come by, being able to maintain healthy horses hoofs was a must.

I looked into the whole discussion on horseshoes or no horseshoes and came to the conclusion that going bare-feet was best, after all wild hoses go barefoot without much trouble and as I child I ran barefoot through shrubs and on stony beaches without even thinking about it, but now after years of wearing shoes my feet had gotten lazy. Besides that, I could not see myself become a blacksmith any time soon, an almost lost art I have great respect for, so barefoot it was.

On the other side of Holland there was a course in natural hoof trimming and of I went, joyfully thinking it must be like school once was and I´ll meet a bunch of horses today. The day started off with theory on hoofs and instruction on how to sharpen your knives and a lot of horrible before pictures of mismanaged horses feet and the stunning result after a good trim.  I hoped that we would not see any horses that had to walk on painful feet today for I would not feel able at all to help them out.

After lunch the teacher guided us to a barn in which a circle of chairs and in the middle a big plastic bag. We all sat down and he reached in to the bag and handed each of us a frozen hoof with still enough leg attached so you could clamp it between your legs. I was struck by the matter of fact-ness with which he handed out these tokens of lost lives and the coldness of the limb against my thigh.  We set to work and I cut and scraped, looked and learned a lot and all the while I could not help but think of the live this now frozen leg must have had, the painful feet and the fear of going to the slaughter and I cursed the humans that had made it so.

Now, years later, whenever I pick up my alive and thriving horses foot I silently thank the horse that lost its live and became my first barefoot teacher.