Danny Ward Teaches Horseshoeing as a Sound Survival Skill for a Lame Economy

16 December 2009 | Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog at Hoofcare.com

Danny Ward's Horseshoeing School is featured on Blue Ridge Public Television this month.

Virginia's Blue Ridge Public Television made a field trip recently to a place many of us know very well: Danny Ward's Horseshoeing School in Martinsville, Virginia. But this time the reason wasn't the huge gathering of the farrier clan held there every November, or the visit of a horseshoeing guru from abroad, but an economic sidebar on the value of becoming a farrier as a second career in the stressed economy that is making finding a job difficult for many people who want to work.

Danny's school has been there since 1964, when his father, Smoky Ward, began teaching his skills, and it has weathered all sorts of economic boom and lean times in those 45 years. Danny just keeps on doing what he does. The world keeps beating a path to his iconic forge's door. It's kind of comforting to know he's there.

It's amazing to hear the optimism in his students' voices. I hope there is plenty of work for them out there. And I hope they are listening to every word Danny says, and staying up late practicing because they will need that sort of dedication to make it in the real world, no matter what shape the economy is in.

Thanks to Blue Ridge Public Television, JobQuest, and Carol Jennings for sharing this video.

© Fran Jurga and Hoofcare Publishing. Please, no use without permission. You only need to ask.

Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog is a between-issues news service for subscribers to Hoofcare and Lameness Journal. This blog may be read online at the blog page, checked via RSS feed, or received via a digest-type email (requires signup in box at top right of blog page).

To subscribe to Hoofcare and Lameness (the journal), please visit the main site, www.hoofcare.com, where many educational products and media related to equine lameness and hoof science can be found.

Questions or problems with this blog? Send email to blog@hoofcare.com.

Friends at Work: Colten Preston, Australian Farrier Apprentice of the Year

16 December 2009 | Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog at Hoofcare.com

Queensland's Colten Preston has been named Farrier Apprentice of the Year in Australia. Colten is 19, and works for racehorse farrier Mark O'Leary on the Gold Coast. He won a competition for apprentices in Victoria recently, but competition is nothing new to him; he is a serious polocrosse rider and has represented Australia internationally in that sport. Colten is just completing the Australian three-year TAFE training program, which includes college courses, and will work for Mark for one more year. Click here to read the nice article about Colten in today's Courier-Mail from Brisbane; photo courtesy of the Courier-Mail.

© Fran Jurga and Hoofcare Publishing. Please, no use without permission. You only need to ask. Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog is a between-issues news service for subscribers to Hoofcare and Lameness Journal. This blog may be read online at the blog page, checked via RSS feed, or received via a digest-type email (requires signup in box at top right of blog page). To subscribe to Hoofcare and Lameness (the journal), please visit the main site, www.hoofcare.com, where many educational products and media related to equine lameness and hoof science can be found. Questions or problems with this blog? Send email to blog@hoofcare.com.

The Farrier's Portrait: No Chestnut Trees in Sight

15 December 2009 | Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog at Hoofcare.com

A friend asked me yesterday who my favorite photographer of farrier subjects was, and I couldn't answer. I've been thinking about it ever since. My friend is an aspiring photographer who wants to capture the world of farriery right down to its most intimate gestures of tongs or rasp or nipper.

I guess my answer is that I'm just incredibly curious how people take pictures of the horse's hoof and, secondarily, its attendant humans and environment. I've looked at probably millions of photos and I am just amazed when I keep seeing a point of view or a subject that I hadn't seen covered before. The possibilities are endless.

Take, for instance, this self-portrait of British farrier Gary Huston. He put the camera on the ground at the base of his hoofstand and got an ant's eye view of the horseshoer at work. His face is distorted, but that's gravity and focal length at work.

Sometimes a portrait doesn't even show the person's face. It might be straight-on shot of something you see of that person every day; it can be magic if the colors are right and the shutter speed cooperates. Daniele Voltattorni from Italy captured every move farrier Giordano Gidiucci made while shoeing his show jumper Nelson. He did a great job with this one, and some lovely metal-on-metal portraits of his Delta nails and tools as well. I thought maybe he was their ad agency in Italy! But he just likes the color and texture and light characteristics of metal. There's no one element in this photo that competes with the sparks, they all compliment the flying colors and the light on the farrier's hands. You don't need to see his face.

It's really pretty hard getting a good portrait image of a farrier. They either have caps on, or the light is bad, or you can't see their faces. The talented New York photographer Sarah Jean Condon solved that problem for farrier Kaytlin Bell by using the horse's comfy topline as a prop. All you see of her is her face, and one gloved hand. The Hoof Blog won the American Horse Publications first place award for this photo back in June. Remember this one the next time a photographer comes around (and you have a gray horse handy).

These are just a couple of shots that come to mind for me; it's all about how you look at things, and how/when/if that little crack of light sneaks in and lights things up. I think a good photographer always knows that there is a crack where some light will get in, in every good shot. That's where they start, and build the photo around the light, which might be just a speck...or the whole side of a horse.

I don't think that there could be a more interesting subject to photograph than horses' feet, farriers, veterinarians and all the barns and driveways and dark smithies and brightly lit clinics each present special challenges. When you get a really good image, you know you've earned it.

Many thanks to Gary, Daniele and Sarah for allowing their images to be shown on this blog.

PS: Farriers might be curious about the weird inner rim on Gary's shoe in the first image. I certainly was. It's not part of the shoe, it's the base of his hoofstand. He uses this plate (above) which he says is cut out to fit the size frog of most of the horses he shoes, and when the horse puts his foot on the plate, it locks in for Gary to rasp away on or clinch. Here's the plate all by itself; Gary took this photo just to explain it to me because I was a little slow to catch on to the concept.

© Fran Jurga and Hoofcare Publishing. Please, no use without permission. You only need to ask.

Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog is a between-issues news service for subscribers to Hoofcare and Lameness Journal. This blog may be read online at the blog page, checked via RSS feed, or received via a digest-type email (requires signup in box at top right of blog page).

To subscribe to Hoofcare and Lameness (the journal), please visit the main site, www.hoofcare.com, where many educational products and media related to equine lameness and hoof science can be found.

Questions or problems with this blog? Send email to blog@hoofcare.com.

FEI Veterinarians Form International Association for Sport Horse Competition Work

15 December 2009 | Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog at Hoofcare.com

The specialized responsibilities of veterinary care and management of international competition sport horses should see some improvements in the future; a group of international treating, consulting and regulatory veterinarians have formed a new association.

According to its founders, the goal of the fledgling International Sport Horse Veterinarians Association will be to create educational opportunities for treating veterinarians associated with international-level horses and events and to improve communication among these veterinarians in matters relevant to their management of these horses within international regulations.

Sport-horse veterinary specialists from all over the world gathered informally one evening during the convention of the American Association of Equine Practitioners, held in Las Vegas, Nevada, last week; their agenda: to establish this new association.

I had a chance to speak with the USA's Timothy R. Ober DVM (right), who was credited with running the meeting, when he stopped by my booth in the trade show. He was enthusiastic about the number of US and international veterinarians who had gathered and was optimistic that better communication could improve some of the logistics and questions that treating veterinarians had in the past when preparing horses for international travel and competition. Dr. Ober also said that the organization will work to develop an exchange of information and cooperation with the Veterinary Department of the Fédération Equestre Internationale (FEI).

Some of the international veterinarians who specifically mentioned their attendance at the meeting included show-jumping and eventing specialist Julian Willmore of Australia, and Jan-Hein Swagemakers, head veterinarian for the German showjumping team. Both foreign vets were enthusiastic about the new association and its goals.

A complete list of members of the new association is not yet available.

I was struck throughout the week by how many sport-horse specialist veterinarians from so many countries were in attendance at the convention, where a concurrent specialty program was offered by the United States Equestrian Federation. USEF's FEI Veterinarian Course was open to FEI-licensed veterinarians for continuing education credit and to licensed veterinarians interested in becoming FEI vets.

The course was directed by Great Britain's John McEwen MRCVS and the USA's Kent Allen DVM, Chair and Vice-Chair, respectively, of the FEI Veterinary Committee. Special seminars in rules, medications and infectious diseases were dovetailed with specific offerings from the main AAEP program to offer a complete curriculum for veterinarians whose work includes attending to international-level horses or officiating at FEI events. USEF also offered a second course for aspiring horse show veterinarians for USEF events.

© Fran Jurga and Hoofcare Publishing. Please, no use without permission. You only need to ask. Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog is a between-issues news service for subscribers to Hoofcare and Lameness Journal. This blog may be read online at the blog page, checked via RSS feed, or received via a digest-type email (requires signup in box at top right of blog page). To subscribe to Hoofcare and Lameness (the journal), please visit the main site, www.hoofcare.com, where many educational products and media related to equine lameness and hoof science can be found. Questions or problems with this blog? Send email to blog@hoofcare.com.

Sunday Humor: "Full Nelson Shoeing"

by Fran Jurga  | 13 December 2009 | Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog at Hoofcare.com

It's Sunday morning, which means that I'm allowed to lighten up a bit and hopefully make you smile. A new friend of this blog is farrier Andy Nelson, from the Nelson family of farriers in Wyoming. But Andy's been working on a second career, and he's made quite a name for himself and his experiences as a farrier by documenting his life in the rhymes of cowboy poetry.

Since Christmas is coming, I thought I would post a couple of Andy's poems over the next few weeks and perhaps you'll head to his web site and order a cd, hire him as a entertainer or at least have some more laughs.

Farriers are often the subject of poems. Shakespeare waxed poetic about the smithy, Longfellow immortalized the chestnut tree shaded forge, and the Irish poet Seamus Heaney won the Nobel Prize for Poetry, in part, I always like to think, by inverting Longfellow's romantic hero in "Door into the Dark (The Forge)". The first book ever published by Hoofcare Publishing was The Smith Writes Back, an anthology of farrier and blacksmith poetry for a staged poetry reading by farriers at Cornell University.

Andy Nelson will sure to be included in volume two of that book! Visit www.cowpokepoet.com to learn lots more about him and buy his cds.

Note: I normally bristle when people make jokes about farriers, but when a farrier pokes jokes at himself, I think it's ok. The meaning of the title is based on a play on words on a wrestling move, but refers to the Nelson family business. As you can probably tell, I made the media file and Google seems to have cut off some of the artwork. I am sorry...and if anyone can coach me through a way to fix it, I'll be glad to.

© Fran Jurga and Hoofcare Publishing. Please, no use without permission. You only need to ask.

Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog is a between-issues news service for subscribers to Hoofcare and Lameness Journal. This blog may be read online at the blog page, checked via RSS feed, or received via a digest-type email (requires signup in box at top right of blog page).

To subscribe to Hoofcare and Lameness (the journal), please visit the main site, www.hoofcare.com, where many educational products and media related to equine lameness and hoof science can be found.

Questions or problems with this blog? Send email to blog@hoofcare.com.

Stem Cell Video: Lava Man Will Be An 8-Year-Old Gelding Racing on a 3-Year-Old's Ankles

by Fran Jurga | 11 December 2009 | Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog

On Saturday, American horseracing has a chance to welcome back one of its great heroes of recent years, the rags-to-riches California claimer Lava Man. The gelding is coming out of retirement to run in a stakes race and he's probably getting more press for his comeback than he did for winning more than $3 million in purses during his first career. You remember, the one he ran on his original legs.

That's right, Lava Man has been true to his California roots and he's been having some "work done". But it's not his nose or his chin or his thighs that were worked on, but his ankles. The gelding had his own bone marrow stem cells extracted and then injected into his lower limbs to help with some chronic wear-and-tear injuries.

The procedure was done at the lovely Alamo Pintado Equine Medical Center in Los Olivos, California. The clinic is in the Santa Ynez Valley north of Santa Barbara and is the sort of place most horses can only dream of seeing out their their windows when the vans brake to a stop.

Apparently some people are concerned that Lava Man is too old to race, or that the repaired ankles will backfire on him somehow. My guess is that if something backfires, it won't be the ankles. Racing is a young horse's game, but advances in veterinary medicine and sportsmedicine have allowed some senior campaigners to do very well in the sport lately--Commentator and Better Talk Now come to mind, not to mention Pepper's Pride.

Outside of racing, stem cell treatments are pretty standard for horses as old or older than Lava Man. Although every horse and every injury is different, stem cells are routinely injected into the injured legs of mature jumping horses who make comebacks. Consider the British National Hunt campaigner Knowhere, featured on this blog last year. At ten, he came back to jump racing after stem cell treatments on his bowed tendon and his first race was three miles, with 21 fences.

The British stem-cell technology firm VetCell studied 168 national hunt horses and identified that the re-injury rate, following stem cell therapy for superficial digital flexor tendon injury and return to full work, in the three years following treatment is 24 percent compared to 56 percent reported for horses that have undergone more traditional tendon treatment.

Horse racing stories doesn't usually make the New York Times in December, but Lava Man is in there today. The big races are over, the Breeders Cup is fading into a dreamy memory, but on a slow weekend on the slowest month of the racing year, here comes this great old gelding, back to the track to try again. His owners say they are doing it for racing, for his fans, and for him.

Maybe they should add that, if Lava Man succeeds, they are doing it for lots of other older horses that can be managed carefully and correctly into extended careers.

Video courtesy of www.alamopintado.com

© Fran Jurga and Hoofcare Publishing. No use without permission. You only need to ask.

Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog is a between-issues news service for subscribers to Hoofcare and Lameness Journal. This blog may be read online at the blog page, checked via RSS feed, or received via a digest-type email (requires signup in box at top right of blog page).

To subscribe to Hoofcare and Lameness (the journal), please visit the main site, www.hoofcare.com, where many educational products and media related to equine lameness and hoof science can be found.

Questions or problems with this blog? Send email to blog@hoofcare.com.