When there's nothing on TV

So, here I am again.  There's nothing on the TV here, since we only get limited channels.  NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, CW, something called Ion channel, and not much else.  One Spanish language channel and 5 religion channels.  And a storm last week knocked out our power for a while which somehow messed up the TV so that the color is all in shades of green.  The other two girls are out somewhere, having dinner with some of the guys as far as I understand.  Don't know, I wasn't invited.  Yeah, fun on a stick...

Other than that, though, I had a pretty good day both yesterday and today.  Yesterday I shoed a complete hind foot from start to finish.  YAY!  And today, I worked on trims and didn't get assigned a shoe.  I was pretty stiff and kind of sore today, so I didn't mind at all.  Plus, yesterday's foot was on a horse that had seriously overgrown feet with lots of thrush in the foot, so it felt really good to be able to help the horse feel better and walk better.  What is "thrush", you might ask?  It's a bacterial infection in the foot caused by standing in unclean conditions and not having the feet cleaned out regularly.  Thrush smells really bad and looks like black crumbly goo.  If left untreated, it can infect the entire foot and cause lameness.  As it was, on the horse yesterday, the hoof was quite dried out and brittle while I was paring it out and the smell was really bad.  On most horses, when you trim a foot up for a shoe, you take off about a half inch or so of the hoof wall that has grown.  It's like trimming fingernails, as it's made of keratin just like hair or nails on a person.  On the horse yesterday, I had to take off probably close to two inches of hoof wall, just to bring the foot into a good shape and length to match where the sole was at.  I know, that's a lot of terminology...so Google it if you're confused.  =P

Long story short, I felt that yesterday went really well.  Today was a good day, too, since I only trimmed 4 feet.  Hinds on one horse, and fronts on another.  Trims are a lot earier, since you don't have to take off as much hoof and there's no shoe to nail on.  A lot of times, there's no shoe to take off, either.  The horses today were really good, too.  They stood still and for the most part, didn't try to take their feet away.  And I felt like I'm really getting the hang of what I'm supposed to be doing.  Now I just have to work on my endurance so I can stay under the horse for longer amounts of time and get the foot done quicker.

For those of you wondering, I'll list out the steps involved in shoeing a horse from start to finish.  There's a lot of things, but most of them are not singular thoughts.  You'll understand that better as I list everything out.  First, the old shoe has to come off.  Using the hammer and clinch cutter, you have to straighten the clinches that are on the outside of the hoof wall.  The clinch is the part of the nail that can be seen and is folded over to hold the shoe on.  Once those are taken care of, you pull the shoe off using the pullers.  These look a lot like the hoof nippers, so the way to tell them apart is to check the handles.  The pullers have one round knob on the end of the handles while the nippers don't.  I'll get to nippers later.  So, you grab the shoe with the pullers and then with a jerk (or several!) toward the toe of the hoof, you work off the old shoe.  Once the shoe is off, you can clean up the hoof and get it ready for a new shoe.  You have to pare out the sole with the hoof knife next, removing the dead sole and exposing the live sole.  This doesn't hurt the horse unless you take off too much sole and quick them.  You know you've quicked a horse when they start to bleed.  To avoid this, it's best to check the sole by pushing on it: If the sole is soft, stop paring!  The sole is typically hard to compress with your fingers, so if you can compress the sole, it means you're close to quicking them.  Then, you trim off the hoof wall with the nippers.  These are quite sharp in order to be able to cut through the hoof wall and you never want to cut metal with them as it will gouge the cutting edges and you'll have to buy new nippers.  The pullers are great for cutting metal, though, and will cut off the ends of nails pretty easily.  That's later, though.  So after the nipper run, you check to see how level the hoof is.  Not only level between front and back but level side to side, too.  This is where we typically are thinking of a lot of different things at once.  You are mentally sizing up the hoof and seeing where you need to take more off to make that hoof level across the face of the sole and balanced with the ground so the horse doesn't stand unevenly on that foot.  You're also checking the angle the foot sits with the ground and the length of the toe so that when you do the other foot of the pair (front or hind), the length and angle match between both feet.  To make this happen, you pull out your rasp and file off what needs filing to make the foot level and balanced.  Once this is done, you go back to the hoof knife and take off just a little more sole near the hoof wall so that none of the sole is having pressure put on it.  Horses don't really stand on their soles much, mostly just on the hoof wall, so you don't want the shoe to rest on the sole.  Next, you have to shape the shoe to the foot (I'm presuming the use of a premade (keg) shoe, otherwise the next step here would be to craft the shoe).  You lay the shoe on the foot and look it over to see where adjustments need to be made.  There's no such thing as the perfect foot, so pretty much every shoe needs tweaking.  And front feet aren't the same shape as hind feet, so you have to shape the shoe with that in mind as well.  Shaping the shoe involves heading to an anvil and methodically banging the hell out of the shoe with what is basically a small sledgehammer until it fits the way it's supposed to.  It's hard to describe this part, since each shoe is shaped a little differently to each foot and different parts of the anvil achieve a different result when crafting on it.  And then you check it against the foot and you spen a while walking between the foot and the anvil as you tweak the shoe into the right shape.  It should fit the foot squarely all around, but you also have to mentally take into account the fact that the hoof wall can be flared out so the shoe needs to fit a shape that exists in your head.  Flare is removed after the shoe is nailed on.  So once the shoe fits satisfactorily, you drive two nails, one on each side and typically the second to last hole toward the heel in each shoe.  The ends of the nails are either bent over toward the bottom of the foot or twisted off completely.  Once the shoe is secured, you bring the foot forward and put it on the hoof stand.  Now you top dress the hoof.  This is when you rasp off the flare and bring the hoof back into a good shape.  The outer wall of the hoof should be smooth and free from bumps or blemishes.  This is where you make the foot into the mental shape from earlier.  Once the foot looks nice on the outside, you drive four more nails into the shoe, two on each side, and the ends again bent over or twisted off.  Then you set the clinches.  There's a device called a clinch block that looks like a wedge of metal with a flat top.  Some people have made their own, though, that are just a strip of metal folded up a third of the length and bent over at the top into a hook that drapes over the hand.  Either way, you rest the flat part of the clinch block against the end of the nail and smack the head of the nail a few times with the hammer.  This starts the nail folding over into a clinch.  If the ends of the nails weren't twisted off (and sometimes if they were but are still too long), they are clipped off with the pullers.  Then the foot is returned to the hoof stand and the clinches are set with the clincher.  The clincher is a funny looking tool, with one side of the jaws making a rounded 90 degree turn upward.  This is the side that sits on the outside of the hoof wall against the clinch while the other side of the jaws is braced against the head of the nail.  The handles are squeezed and the clinch is folded down.  Sometimes the clinch also needs a couple of taps with the hammer to make sure it's set.  The face of the clinch is then lightly rasped to make sure it's not jagged.  The wall of the hoof is them gone over with a sanding block to tidy it up and make it look nice.  That's a lot of steps to think about, huh?

I've had a request to put up some pictures of the facilities here, so I'll try and get some of those taken care of next time.  Feel free to post comments of anything you really want to see or know about and I'll do my best to get that information into a future post.

This is me, signing off.