Thoroughbred Logic, Presented by Kentucky Performance Products: DIY Farrier Work

“After a million tack-ons and trying my very kind farrier’s patience, I gave up. I had a flat shoe and a flat hoof with existing nail holes. I had a cutely painted small hammer for art projects … And I had the tools to trim nails, clinch and rasp…”

Welcome to the next installment of Thoroughbred Logic. In this weekly series, Anthropologist and trainer Aubrey Graham, of Kivu Sport Horses, offers insight and training experience when it comes to working with Thoroughbreds (although much will apply to all breeds). This week ride along as Aubrey shares her logic on the benefit of being able to handle basic farrier work on your own (and only when necessary).

Horse people are often experts of creative fixes. Those who manage or help out at farms inevitably become specialists in duct tape and hay string. There’s almost always some way to rig something well enough to get by so that the day can carry on and maybe a real fix can happen tomorrow. Gate hinge broke? Fix it with a hammer and a crescent wrench, or tie a few lead ropes around it and leave it til the morning. Handle pulled off the broom? Meh — you can duct tape that back on passably for now. Fly mask velcro fell prey to the geldings? Hay string stitch it back together and carry on.

One of the few things that I have seen stop horse people in their tracks are lost shoes. Sure, maybe you can put a diaper and duct tape boot together to protect them in the stall or turnout, but if it’s a front shoe, or you have a sensitive horse, you can’t ride in that. The equine supply world has of course made a plethora of quick fixes to protect them — from ridable scoot boots to cloud boots for the stall. Good, those are worth having on hand (along side the duct tape and diapers to create a hoof pack). As an aside, I love going to the grocery store and, as a middle-aged woman, staring way too long at the wall of diapers wondering “which size will fit my horse’s hoof?” The answer: usually a size two.

Annoyingly common situation in the New York mud season (with a horse just entering the shoeing program). Photo by author.

Thoroughbreds have a reputation for less than optimal feet. Not only are the commonly shod at the track with long toes and low heels (a trend that carries on way too often off the track too), but also they sport an additional array of potential negatives: thin walls, minimal soles, low heels, negative angles, shelly/brittle feet, high-low conformation of the front feet, etc. That said, they can (and many do) have good feet — especially if you have good farriers to help get them there.

I have been exceptionally lucky on that front and my horses’ hooves have been a testament to the quality work and expertise. Nonetheless, they still lose/lost quite a few shoes — especially in the Georgia summers where stomping at flies and the combination of damp grass at night and baking dry sun during the day cause the hoof to expand and contract, constantly enlarging and loosening the nails. Now in New York mud season, we lose them in less complicated ways — simply sucked off in the clay-based mire.

Juice being his epic lost-shoe self. Photo by author.

Juice (Pulpituity), who I restarted in 2019, tested my sanity by throwing shoes pretty much every three days. I learned about double bell boots (pull on on the bottom, larger velcro ones on top) and got really good at making a hoof pack. I bought a set of farrier tools and learned how to tighten clinches and eek a few more days out of a wobbly shoe. I figured out how to best pull one when all hope of keeping it on was gone. But regardless of how the shoe came off, I still couldn’t work him until the farrier was able to come back. I’m pretty sure he’d see my text and just roll his eyes and mutter something about “Thoroughbreds.” Juice took forever to get started as I simply couldn’t get on him consistently enough to make progress.

My favorite shot of Juice once we did really get going. Photo by Kassie Colson.

But it was Uno (Hold Em Paul) who finally caused me to break down and regain some DIY control of the situation. Uno, a hulk of a gray Tapit-bred Thoroughbred, came to me with a set of some of the worst Thoroughbred feet I had seen. They were splatty, weak-walled and thin-soled. Uno’s claim to fame was that he could be shod at noon and have stepped his shoe off by midnight. The best part was in Uno’s early post-track days, he would go sore standing in a boot in a stall or standing in a hoof pack, so that shoe had to go back on.

After a million tack-ons and trying my very kind farrier’s patience, I gave up. I had a flat shoe and a flat hoof with existing nail holes. I had a cutely painted small hammer for art projects that my mother had given me at some juncture. And I had the tools to trim nails, clinch and rasp. F*&$ it. I got nails and started to put the shoes back on.

Looking for Uno’s lost shoe at Chatt Hills. Photo by Cora Williamson Photography.

It felt like a rebellion. Nailing a shoe back on crossed a line trainers aren’t supposed to cross. And I knew Patrick Roth (my then-farrier) was likely to going to want to kill me. Somehow he didn’t. Perhaps because it saved him the urgent texts and constant calls to the barn, he let me watch more and learn (like about which side of the nail goes to the inside of the foot — always the stamped side, which was news to me). Then slowly and carefully, I started to drive nails and get shoes back on feet. I wasn’t good at it, but I was able to err on the side of caution and not hot nail anyone. My shoes maybe lasted a week or two at best, but it meant at points that I didn’t have to scratch at a show when I lost a shoe out XC schooling in the evening. It meant that Uno finally was able to get in work and stay in work. And it meant that when a horse showed up barefoot and sore from the track untrimmed just days before Christmas, I could shape a foot, find a shoe that would fit and get at least something on the hoof until my farrier could get there and do a proper job (and not interrupt their holidays with family).

I didn’t find the one in the water complex, but did find another that would work well enough to get him through the show. Photo by Cora Williamson Photography.

I added a pile of used (but healthy: flat and not sprung) shoes to duct tape and hay string and old broken lead ropes. I never had an anvil or forge so I couldn’t shape or flatten a shoe effectively, but I could find one that fit passably enough to get by until I could have a properly trained professional fix the situation for real. I’d dig around in the pile of used shoes looking for the right one in a bit of a reverse Cinderella act. But it worked, and I got better at it, and the pile of spare shoes grew bigger by the week.

First photos of Ramen (Plamen) sporting my “dug-from-the-pile” shoes. Eric Gilleland (farrier) had him looking far better a week later. Photo by Alanah Giltmier.

When I took on a new farrier in 2023, he had been warned that I would put shoes back on. Believe me, no farrier will actively encourage this — I’m not even really sure that I’m encouraging it. Hell, I’m pretty sure Eric was extremely skeptical of what he was getting into when he set up an every-Tuesday shoeing schedule at my barn. But in the two years he worked with me (before I moved to New York and failed to convince him to move his family north to keep shoeing my horses), I think he had to come out only a handful of times to fix shoes in between scheduled farrier dates. He is an exceptional farrier and my horses were sounder for his work. Uno got super custom shoes (hand-made reverse heart bars) and he started to keep them on without my off-hour assistance. But even so, when Eric’s rig would roll into the barn each Tuesday, there would be a list of horses who needed to be shod and a list of horses who had shoes on that I had tacked on (which I needed him to please pull and properly redo, or at very least check the work).

The reverse heart bars built for Uno. Shoes by Eric Gilleland and photo by author.

Grace Putnam, who now shoes for me in New York, has grown accustomed to the lists and checking my work. She is talented and also somehow immensely patient with me meddling with the horses’ feet. But with her living over an hour away, I don’t think either of us mind the DIY temporary fixes that keep her from having to try to find time in her schedule to hustle out for a tack on.

Frankly, I’m not really encouraging anyone to take the liberty to just go nail a set of shoes on. But I am encouraging everyone to learn how to do it — maybe just follow the existing nail holes — or at least learn and have the tools to get the shoes off if need be (yes, most barn owners can do this, but owners ought to know, too). Just in case. Because I can confidently say, of all the things I have learned in the past few years, being able to capably pull a shoe and DIY a tack-on are likely the most useful of all of them.

So go ride folks and always thank your farriers.

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