As we get ready for calving we make sure we have all the right gear – warm jacket, long underwear, a good pair of boots, maybe some new gear and horse shoes. That’s right – horse shoes! Not only do we get ourselves ready for calving, we get our horses ready too… and part of that is a good set of shoes. Shoes help protect the horses’ hooves from rocks and hard, uneven ground. Are they necessary? Well, that depends on who you ask and has a lot to do with the horse. Some horses can run around and do just fine without a set of shoes, but most horses, however, need them. For me, I consider them a necessity for any working horse — would you go to work for 14 hours where you’re on your feet the whole time without a good set of shoes? Me either, and that’s why we plan a couple of days at the start of each spring for the farrier to put the first set of shoes on our horses for the season.
The farrier can do about 6-8 horses a day if he’s putting shoes on them, more if it’s just a trim. He can do 6-8 horses in about 5 hours. So you’re probably thinking – there’s more hours in the day, why not do more? Well, you try being bent over in a fetal position for 5 hours straight holding up 1200 pounds of muscle and tell me if you feel like doing more. A good set of shoes lasts about 6-8 weeks and then we do it all over again until the horses get their winter vacation from work, sometime in late November. So, here’s just a few pictures to show you what shoeing a horse entails.