Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

Day Fourteen



THIS IS AMAZING! Haha. This is what I found most interesting about my day. This is a pad used on the hooves of Shires and Quarter horses, and so on. Basically the world of working horses. This thing is HUGE! It is literally the size of a dinner plate. So as to show how large this thing was, I put my hand in the picture and dang, my hand doesn't even come close to covering the thing. Can you imagine putting that on a horse?

He showed me the halters they use on the bigger horses and it was giant. Usually those horses are between 18.5 - 20+ hands. That's GIANT! Haha.

This is his little furnace like thing in the back of his truck where he heats up the horse shoes and bends them to the shape he needs to fit the shape of the hooves he's working on. All hooves are different shapes, therefore all the shoes need to be bent in a different way to be a comfortable fit for the horse.







This is the farrier filing down Cowboys back hooves. He puts the hoof on this little metal stand and just files away the outer part. This is sort of like having your fingernails get really long and/or kind of jagged. This process is just like trimming nails. Only...You know...On a few thousand pound horse...*Shrug* No biggie...

=]





This is the farrier reaching for his tools, Cowboy had moved away a little bit, so he really had to reach for his tools.











The little add on at the top of the pole just allows him to put the horses hoof in it so he doesn't have to constantly hold all of the pressure that the horse is pushing down on him as he holds the leg up. Those horses can get pretty heavy, and if you do three or four in a row then I'm guessing your back might start to ache. Add onto that the fact that this is only the third time Cowboy's been with the farrier and it makes it even harder to do.





Without the added on top the horses hoof just sits on the top of it as he he measures the angle and how much is left of the hoof to see how far there is till he reaches blood vessels and hurts the horse. Can't have that.









This tool digs around the horses frog area and gets out any overgrown parts of the hoof or any dirt that's lodged deep in the hoof.

From this picture you can't really tell what he's doing that well, but you can kind of see the tool.








The front hooves seem a lot easier then the back since they lift up a little higher and are easier to hold onto. The back legs are more muscled and therefore if they pull away, stronger and make it easier for them to pull you away as well.









This is just another picture to show how fast he does his work. He's been doing this four around 10 years now, so he's pretty experienced.











This is what a hoof looks like. It's pretty cool. Earlier I mentioned a 'frog' and if you don't know much about horses or anything really horsey you were probably really confused and/or laughing. So I will clarify for you. In the hoof, the area that sort of looks like a triangle with the crevices on either side of it, that is the frog.







This horse shoe is made from a sort of plastic and it's referred to as the tennis shoe of the horse shoe world. I actually wasn't aware how many different types of shoes there were and what the differences between them were, and what they meant. This shoe is used for horses who walk on pavement or concrete a lot, generally police horses and the like.






This is the part that gets attached to the hoof.