Life As A Farrier? Start Here

Congratulations on your choice of industries. If it becomes for you half of what it has been to me, you are in for a great life. There are few jobs or industries that I know of that will give back like this one, so enjoy the ride.

 Radio broadcaster Paul Harvey once quoted someone on his radio show who said, “Find something you love to do. Do that thing for a living. You will never work a day in your life.” As I look back on my career, I feel that there were never truer words spoken. 

Like all jobs, there are the down sides. Bad weather, bad horses, bad customers and just plain old bad days. However, those have been few and far between when compared with the good side. Sometimes the bad horses and the bad customers became the game of the day and helped to break up the monotony.

Shoeing horses is a day of breaks. While you are working at the anvil, you have a break from the horse. When you are under the horse, you have a break from the anvil. You will sometimes look around you with a smile as you realize that someone is actually paying you for all the fun you are having. If my customers had any idea how much I was enjoying myself, they may have charged me.

Still, horseshoeing is not for everyone. It takes a special person to make it in this industry. You must be a self-starter to be self-employed. Making sound decisions in the short term that will make you prosperous in the long term requires discipline and foresight. You must have a desire to help horses above all else. Shoeing for the money will end up leaving you without any joy in the job, while shoeing horses for the horse will make you crave it even more.

Two Characteristics Of A Successful Farrier

It will never matter how efficient and competent a farrier you become, you will never reach that summit of knowing it all. If you someday feel that you are there, then it is time to find something else to do. 

I have known a lot of great farriers, and they all shared these two common traits. 

Education. Foremost among these was the fact that they never quit learning. I am amazed how often a horse, a student, my wife, a clinician or an article teaches me something new about this thing that has been my obsession for more than 20 years. 

Love Of  The Horse. There are those that become competent mechanics and don’t like horses, but I don’t know any that don’t like horses among those that I would call great. If you do not like horses, you might think about looking elsewhere right now. You can’t shoe horses for the money and remain happy. You have to shoe horses for the horse. Do that, and it will be a good trade for you. Also, if you do it for the horse, the money will follow.

Address Your Weaknesses

If you were hoping for a get-rich-quick scheme, let me redirect you to the back of the comic books. Farriery is not that. It is, on the other hand, a very lucrative trade for those that are willing to invest the time and effort to become good at it.

There is such a range of skills needed to be a great farrier, that most of us are lucky to master a few of them. For our part, my wife Kelly and I aren’t good at bookkeeping. We don’t like it, it is not natural to us, and our business has suffered as a result of that failing. On the bright side, we have been fortunate enough that the other skills have been enough that we were able to survive.

Do your best to find out what your weaknesses are, and then do what you can to improve. For us, that meant we pay more for accounting services. If the weakness had to do with mechanical skills, well, you can’t hire a CPA for that, so get in the forge and fix it.

The first step is to identify the weakness. The second step is to determine a plan to change that weakness, and the final step is to turn your weakness into your strength. 

One of the best illustrations of this concept is from an old friend of mind named Dave Showen. Dave was a farrier in Colorado when we lived there, and we used to get together and compete and practice. 

Dave hated to work aluminum. Back then, there were not a lot of clinicians that would do anything with aluminum. This was the early 1990s, and the American forging skills as a whole were not what they are today. Dave had tried aluminum, but it ended up in a puddle in his forge, or ended up shattering.

Dave got frustrated and determined. The first thing he did was to bolt a pair of hinges from the front of his forge to the front of his forge stand. This allowed him to dump the molten aluminum out of the bottom of the hot forge liner when a shoe melted. He would shut off the forge, grab the top of it, and swing it forward when it was full of liquid aluminum. Next, he bought a pile of aluminum bar stock and began to make everything out of aluminum. He had aluminum Scotch bottom drafts, aluminum roadsters, aluminum toe weights, you name it, he made it out of aluminum. 

Pretty soon, he was welding all sorts of bar shoes out of aluminum. He figured out what wire he needed, what flux, (not available at farrier supplies like it is now), and what method worked best. Remember, this was the early 90s, so Dave was pretty far ahead of his time. 

Before long, Dave became known for his skill in working aluminum. He did several clinics for farriers wanting to see this man work aluminum, and I still have some of those shoes he made back then. What a fantastic story about determination, and turning strength into a weakness. It can be applied to most aspects of farriery, and I would encourage you to look carefully at where you want to be, and make a plan to get there.

Safety With Horses

Whether it is the first or last horse of the day, each animal you work with deserves the same level of dedication and commitment from you.

You are going to be sore. You will get burned. Your hoof knife is going to cut the thumb on your off hand. New rasps will remove skin easier than hoof. Some horses will kick you. Others will bite you. You will be able to brag about the large number of broken toes you have suffered, or you will wear boots to protect them. All of this, and more await you. 

If this is enough to make you turn away, then perhaps this is not the trade for you. But if you are aware of this and more prior to starting, you won’t be surprised the first time a horse paws you into next week.

Horses are bigger and stronger than we are. However, they lack opposable thumbs. They also fall under the category of prey, while we are predators. That fact alone causes some problems for the horse right at the beginning. 

Getting around untrained and mean horses is something of a wrestling match. There are moves that you can do to keep you safe, and moves a horse can and will do to try and prevent you from accomplishing your task. Handling some bad horses to learn safe areas and safe moves is a good idea if you can arrange it. 

The hind feet are much safer than the fronts, and you can often win the battle of shoeing the hind feet on a bad horse. They are safer because the horse can’t see you as easily when you are working on the hind feet, and getting kicked is only kind of like being punched really hard. Couple that with the fact that the reciprocal apparatus allows us to lock the joints in a flexed position where we only have to battle the weaker extensor muscles, and you have a safer working area.

On the front feet, a horse can see, bite and paw you. Pawing can be like someone jumping off a building and landing on you, and is much worse than being punched. The extensor muscles of the front limbs are quite strong, and there is no reciprocal apparatus to give us a mechanical advantage when we are in a fight. This makes it difficult to do a good job.

There are several restraint methods that are common and useful. Like most things with shoeing horses, there is more than one approach to getting the job done. As long as the final result is a sound horse, a sound holder, a sound farrier and the barn doesn’t look like a biker bar after a brawl, you can’t argue with it too much.

Non-Equine Hazards

Safety as it applies to the inanimate objects in your world is pretty self-explanatory. Don’t touch hot steel, although you are going to a few times. Avoid dropping anvils on your foot. You should definitely wear safety glasses when forging. Not only for the protection from breaking top tools and hammers, but the scale off the hot steel as well.

As far as gloves go, you will use your hands a lot for “looking” around a shoe and foot. Here is what I think about gloves. If you are trying to become great at any trade, you should look to those that are already great. You will see quite a few farriers wearing gloves, but you won’t see any at the World Champion Blacksmiths Contest. Watching a certification, you are more likely to see the shoers that are going for the lower level wearing gloves than those at the top level. Now, this doesn’t mean you can’t become a great farrier wearing gloves, but it does mean that it is not common. I wear gloves when I work with barbed wire or when it is cold. Also in the occasional forging class at Calgary where you need to hold steel with your hands that you should be holding with tongs. 

 A lot of potential farriers tell me that their back is keeping them from the trade. Do not worry. Once you start using your back, God will make it stronger and build you a back brace out of muscle. Once you start using your hands, God will make the skin thicker and stronger to make using your hands in tough situations easier. You just have to get through the initial painful part, and you are good to go.

Quality And Standards

Each horse needs to be approached as if it were your own. Each shoe needs to be shaped and leveled as if it were going to be inspected at a contest. Your standard needs to be almost like religion to you. If you are too tired to do that next horse at a high standard, you are too tired to do that horse.

There will be times where you do as good a job as the horse will allow you to. When dealing with raucous and untrained animals, you will end up having to take what you can get on occasion. That is not what I am referring to. I am talking about your everyday horse and your everyday standard. Make it high, strive to keep it high, and bring your shoeing to the next level with every horse.

 When you do a good horse at a bad standard, you have reset your standard lower. Consider it this way. Your standard will be an average of the work you do normally. When you do one horse at the bottom of the curve, it brings your standard down. Try to always be pushing that average up, not letting it come down.

Responsibility

Put yourself in the horse’s shoes for a minute. You are caught out of wherever you are, stall, pasture, arena, etc. A maybe good, maybe bad, halter that has had the sweat, dirt, manure from who knows where is placed over your nose and buckled onto your face.

Next, you are tied in a barn alley. Hopefully, it is safe because you might not be. If it is your lucky day, a competent, caring, conscientious, skilled, able, experienced, (should I go on) person is here to work on your feet. 

Why does it matter? It matters because you are going to have to deal with what this person does to your feet. Trimmed flat? Level? Shoe fits? Friendly and polite? Respects and admires your attributes as a horse that is a product of its environment? All of these become important if you put yourself in the horses’ shoes.

Now, put a loved one in that horse’s shoes. What the incoming farrier is, or is not, has now really started to matter. For me, I could take a little bit personally if I was saving money, didn’t hurt too bad, or whatever the case. But if you ask me to have my wife Kelly suffer, no way. Now I need the best that I can find.

For the horses that you are going to shoe, you need to be the best that can be found. You need to be the person who gets his or her name inserted every time someone mentions the best farrier in the area. Keep working hard and presenting the highest standard, and now your name comes up every time someone mentions the best farrier in the state. Then the United States. Then the hemisphere. Eventually, you will have a group of customers that are certain, with no reservations, that you are the best farrier in the world. All because you are taking this responsibility of shoeing the horse seriously. This has to come from within you. If you have it in you, it will show up on the horses’ feet. Take this commitment to heart and do what you have to do to become the best farrier that ever swung a hammer.