While roaming around in this broad, busy country of ours, I have drifted into many shoeing shops, and have worked in not a few of them. The greatest fault I find with my fellow craftsmen is their universal tendency toward overdoing. In their zeal to excel the other fellow they resort to “fads” and adopt unnecessary methods, many of which are decidedly injurious to the horse, and you who have horses to be shod should insist that you prefer a plain, careful job, minus the whittling, polishing, rasping, etc., and the shoer, in these days of close competition, will be only too glad to obey orders.
But how shall the owner know what is best for his horse? He is a butcher, a baker or perhaps he is the time-honored “candlestick maker,” and is as busy as any of us in this mad rush of to-day, from which there seems to be no escape. So, really, I don’t believe he ever will give much attention to his faithful horse’s feet, and between unscrupulous horseshoers and third-grade veterinary surgeons, “poor old Dobbin” will continue to be, as he has been in the past, the victim of his master’s misplaced confidence. What does the average man know about the needs and requirements of his own body? He has been called “a bundle of habits,” and from what I can observe, he is about ready to draw a good salary as the star performer in “a comedy of errors.” But in spite of stumbling blocks, and millstones around our necks, out of the rank and file of common men there comes occasionally, an Edison, a Horace Greeley, a Mark Twain or one like your own Major Thomas, whose portrait adorns the frontispiece of your March number. From the same source comes an occasional good, honest, painstaking horseshoer, whose sole ambition is not for the dollars he may lay up. He is one whom “goodness and mercy will follow, all the days of his life”—one who knows the importance of his calling and who realizes that a reputation for sobriety and honesty, coupled with natural ability and acquired skill, will bring to him the reward he is seeking.
I have written enough for this time, and what have I said in the above preamble that will enlighten the reader who really is trying to post himself on the care of the horse’s foot and the proper method of shoeing it? He does not desire to become a student of anatomy, and I know from experience that the advice of an humble knight of the anvil would not be taken seriously by the majority of horse owners.
But I have in my library two small volumes on shoeing, and the care of the hoof, which to me are worth their weight in gold. The first is “Practical Horseshoeing,” by T. Fleming, President of the Central Veterinary Surgeons’ Medical Society, Edinburgh, Scotland, published by D. Appleton Co., New York. No honest man, who knows whereof he speaks, can even criticise this work.
The other is “Pathological Horseshoeing,” by Joseph B. Coleman, V. S., which goes a little farther into diseases of the foot and their treatment.
Get these two little books, brother horse owner, and when the good horse goes lame, bump your head against the side of his stall and think. They will help you to see how far you are keeping from nature’s ways. Consider that your horse is made of tissue and nerves, almost as delicate as your own; that he is entirely at your mercy and unlike the “Devil Wagon,” he cannot be patched up with files, monkey-wrenches and cement.
LA FORGE.
Pecatonica, Ill.
TROTWOOD’S MONTHLY Devoted to Farm, Horse and Home.