Category Archives: Floating

Floating

FLOATING THE HORSE

You are probably asking ‘Now what does floating the horse have to do with the farrier?’ I shoe a lot of horses from my home property - most of my clients bring their horses here and some arrive very late, citing the same old problem that the horse wouldn’t load, and consequently arrives still in a distressed state, which makes shoeing it less than desirable. There is also the danger involved in loading an untrained horse that jumps sideways off the ramp and splits its hooves or pulls a shoe off, or various other injuries which all add to the drama.

So what is the problem with training the horse to load properly?

There are many and varied ways of training your horse to load, and training the handler to train the horse is the first step in almost all methods, or should be. I agree with any method as long as it is peaceful and doesn’t waste time. Horse owners spend great amounts of money to learn … Continue Reading ››

Floating, General

FURTHER TO FLOATING THE HORSE

A letter in a magazine article regarding floating problems when the horse was on the driver’s side but not when on the passenger side caught my attention and prompted me to respond. My own observations have been gathered over forty-nine years as a competitive horseman, colt breaker and Master Farrier. As a colt breaker I used to wonder why some colts mouthed better on one side than the other - was it because of something I was doing? I would change my methods with that particular horse, spend more time on the slow side, but still they behaved differently and were uneven to control. Then as a farrier, I noticed when shoeing these ‘uneven’ horses for the first time that about 99% of them were always half a size different in their front hoofs. So, relating that back to their initial mouthing tendency, there seemed to be a pattern emerging that the colt which was slow to yield on the near-side rein nearly always had his off-fore … Continue Reading ››