By Graham Knight

Let me share with you a quote from the Technical Manual from the US Cavalry. This quote is from the second paragraph on the first page of the book:

“That shoeing is a necessary evil cannot be denied. Shoes fitted and applied in the best-known method are detrimental to the free functioning of the foot structures. Every nail driven into the wall of the hoof destroys a number of horn fibers and tends to weaken the main weight-bearing part of the foot. The shoe raises the frog from the ground and interferes with the functioning of the horny frog and elastic structures.”

In other words, there are times when need outweighs the detrimental impact of shoeing. When that time comes, your horse needs shoes. Back in the days of the Cavalry, the horse could not stand the pounding their feet took traveling for long hours down hard packed dirt roads pulling heavy equipment. Today we still ask a lot of our horses whether we’re riding dressage, show jumper, hunter jumper, eventer, western, pleasure, reiner, polo, or driving horse there may come a time when your horse needs to be shod.

When that time comes shoe your horse and when that time has passed take the shoes off.

There is another aspect to this key paragraph in the Cavalry manual and that is, the best placed shoes are only as good as the trim. Imbalance the foot and place a shoe on it and the imbalance is locked into place. Imbalance the hoof and leave the horse barefoot and the horse has a little more freedom to adjust to the imbalance. Don’t be afraid of shoeing, be afraid of imbalance.

I have several friends that are barefoot trimmers and I keep in touch with them because I want to share my experiences with them and share in their experiences. General speaking what we are finding is that when a horse is healthy with healthy feet they do well barefoot depending upon how they are used and I’ve met some amazing horses including a 9 year old barefoot event horse.

We’ve also discovered that horses generally heal up faster when barefoot and I’ve seen some amazing results here too. My own horse Smokey is only a minor example. My polo friend, who introduced me to the barefoot method in the first place, had a major success story. He bought a navicular horse off the meat wagon. He healed the horse using barefoot techniques from Dr. Strasser (Yes there is a connection between improperly trimmed/shod horses and navicular disease) and turned that horse into one of his top playing polo horses. There are; however, times when, regardless of whether the horse’s health is compromised or not, going barefoot just doesn’t work out (read the story about Sir Haus).

These kinds of contradictions exist everywhere in the horse world, i.e. Sir Haus’s story v. Smokey’s story. That is one of the reasons why the job of a farrier is considered part art and part science. In the horse world there just is not one application that fits or works for every horse. A bar shoe applied in one fashion on one horse with a given condition my leave another horse completely crippled when suffering from the same condition. One horse may excel barefoot while another won’t. I hope in the future that the barefoot method v. the shod method will come to coexist. Just like shoeing there is a time and a place for both methods.