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I tried to trim my own horse once out of
desperation (long story).
I discovered that five years of watching my farrier
do it was
completely useless: I hadn't watched closely
*enough*.
Before one even gets to issues of getting the trim
correct,
there is a whole universe of critical technique
that a farrier
knows implicitly
that you have to know, too. The fact that
they know it so well that that they don't even
think about it
anymore is demonstrated by the fact that Rob
didn't
mention one of these things in his otherwise
excellent
description of "how to trim a horse."
The first big thing I ran into was, "How do I hold
the
horse's foot?" A farrier runs through a whole
series of
"positions" as
he works his way around a horse where
he holds the front and rear feet in different
places to
cut clinches, pull, trim, rasp, nail, clinch,
etc. If you havn't
memorized how the farrier holds the foot for
these
various operations, you're going to have a
dickens
of a time.
Then there's the way the farrier holds his
tools. I, too,
was having trouble using the nipper. (Small
female with small,
normal human weak hands.) It wasn't
until I watched the
farrier who does my other horse (again, long story) very
closely that I realized how he positioned the nippers
with *both* hands (I was trying to use one hand while
holding the hoof
with the other hand), and then uses
the
butt of his hands to
hold one arm of the nipper steady in
position while he closes the fingers of both other hands
to make the cut. Every move that a farrier
makes involves
this subtle adeptness at using his tools
correctly.
Finally, there is an issue of what fighter pilots
call
"proficiency." A farrier trims and shoes
horses all day
long, day after day, month after month, year in,
year out.
They are at a high level of "proficiency." If
all one is
doing is trying to trim one horse every six weeks, one
is never going to get good at it. Adequate, maybe,
but never *good*.
Linda B. Merims
Massachusetts, USA
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