Finding the right furrier school to meet a prospective student’s needs is not much different than the long ordeal friends have gone though when trying to decide where to go to college or what subject to study. But with your interest in shoeing, you may have an advantage since you’ve settled on a subject that interests you as a career.

To provide prospective students with valuable insights on how to evaluate the 70 private and public shoeing schools in North America, we asked several school owners for their advice.

No Easy Answers

Bob Smith says this is an interesting subject that school owners discuss regularly. “We all have stories of folks who came to school with very little horse experience (for whatever personal motivations) and became very successful as professional farriers because they had excellent people and business skills,” says the owner of the Pacific Coast Horseshoeing School in Sacramento, Calif. “There are also lots of stories about people with very good horse skills who lack personal drive, common business sense or people skills and they didn’t last 6 months as a farrier.”

Smith says the problem for school owners is trying to list admission requirements for students entering shoeing schools so the vast majority of graduates become long-term successful farriers. Yet for every recommendation, schools have exceptions that would render that requirement unnecessary.

“Success as a professional farrier is in the intangibles, as it’s what’s inside the student that really counts,” Smith says. “Shoeing horses is extremely hard physical…