Veteran shoers say backyard horses are a great way to get started in the business and can help round out your schedule when you move up to more specialized hoof-care work

Shoeing backyard horses is like many other things in life. Everybody does it, but few want to admit it.

Get a group of horseshoers together and they’ll talk about lameness or their high profile customers. Yet few will mention the two old horses they shod yesterday in the junky pens located out behind someone’s house.

These horses may not bring fame, but they were a start for nearly everybody in the footcare business. For many shoers, they still represent a steady piece of a successful business and are even the preference of some farriers who could be shoeing anywhere.

Like all shoeing customers, backyard owners come with good points and bad. While the horseshoer and client relationship is generally more personal, whether or not this is good or bad is often a matter of opinion. Backyard owners usually don’t have many horses and that can lead to putting more miles on the shoeing rig, an increasingly troublesome concern with today’s rising fuel prices.

The horses tend to be gentle, but they’re sometimes spoiled. Backyard horses usually aren’t performance horses, so they don’t seem to over reach and pull shoes as often. However, they will pull shoes off on the wire fence that’s sagging down so badly that they stand on it to eat grass on the other side.

Backyard…