I have been shoeing horses for 50 years this year, and in the 1990’s I spent eight years as Head Farrier for Lindsay Park Stud (then one of Australia’s most successful racing stables). Nowadays I specialise in hoof reconstruction and shoeing for performance, and I travel Australia teaching trimming and shoeing to the ringers on outback cattle stations, as well as running courses for horse owners to learn to trim their own horses’ hooves. After 50 years of shoeing I tell people attending my hoof care courses that I am still learning – and I really do mean it. Why is it that so much has been written on farriery, over hundreds of years, yet none of them really answer the question ‘How do we correctly balance a hoof.’ While an enormous amount of literature has been published by highly qualified people on horse shoeing technique, horse shoeing beliefs, preferences and trends,Continue Reading ››
When balancing the hoof, it is imperative to check for a correct T-square down the back of the pastern.A T-square is actually a ruler used by a draftsman – it has a long ruler attached to a short, sometimes sliding, perpendicular crosspiece at one end, used for establishing and drawing parallel lines, perpendicular lines and right angles. (Pic 1)My dear old Mum had a dressmaker’s square for measuring the distance of hems from the floor on my sisters’ dresses. A carpenter uses a carpenters square to cut perfect right angled ends on his pieces of timber. He also uses a spirit level to make sure his timbers are parallel and that the cross pieces are at perfect right angles to the uprights before he nails them.I use the word T-square; you might like to think of it as right angled, perpendicular, or 90 degrees. It all means the same thing.I was never any good at geometry, and could never make any sense out of my protractor and my set square if I could find them at all. The angles of my triangles always added up … Continue Reading ››
