Video Humor: David Letterman Shoes a Horse with Farrier Ada Gates Patton

14 February 2010 | Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog at Hoofcare.com

Here's my Valentine to the hoof world: the ultimate weekend humor video. I'll never top this one. Where were you the night when farriers stayed up late to watch one of their own on the big stage in New York City? The night one of their own upstaged the great David Letterman? The night David Letterman lost control of his own show? Ada Gates Patton is in a league of her own. The fact that she was the first woman licensed to shoe horses at a racetrack in the United States is only the beginning of the story. A few years ago, we were in Kentucky for a convention and she made a special trip to Three Chimneys Farm to visit Wild Again, one of the horses on her list back in the 1980s, when he won the Breeders Cup Classic. Ada was international horsemen's liaison for the Breeders Cup in California, and coordinated farrier services for the 1984 Olympics in California. She tells wonderful stories about being shunned by trainers from the British Isles during the Breeders Cup; they went looking for a man to shoe their horses. When the call came for shoes from a French trainer, Ada picked up her shoeing box and headed over, expecting the worst. Instead, the Frenchman had the opposite reaction and welcomed her as if she had been sent by the gods.

Ada is originally from New York; she is a descendant of Henry Burden, a Scottish immigrant who invented the first machine to manufacture horseshoes. His machines are credited with helping the North win the Civil War; his factories stretched forever along the banks of the Hudson River in Troy, New York and Burden horseshoes supplied the US cavalry for decades. Henry would never have dreamed that women would someday shoe horses, let alone one of his descendants, but Ada made the history books too.

Today, Ada owns and runs Harry Patton Horseshoeing Supplies near Santa Anita, and serves farriers all over California. The business was started by her late husband, the famous racetrack shoer Harry Patton, and she has built it into a multi-store retail chain, with business partner Michael De Leonardo in northern California.

Ada stares up at the derelict but grand church built by her great-great-grandfather so that horseshoe factory workers had a place to worship. She saved the church from demolition through a loophole in the deed that made a provision for a descendant of the founder to lay claim. What would Henry Burden think of one of his descendants selling horseshoes?

Ada is originally from New York, and she is the great great grand-daughter of Henry Burden, the inventor of the horseshoe-making machine. We reconnected her with her roots a few years ago by explaining that her family's church would be torn down if she didn't claim the deed and save it--which she did, and subsequently opened the beautiful old church and invited our Hoofcare@Saratoga tour group of farriers in for lunch as part of one of our tours of the Burden Iron Works.

Last year Ada was honored in her family's church by the Burden Iron Works Museum and its preservation efforts. The image at right is the outline of the Burden horseshoe company's office building, which now houses the museum. The museum and Ada found each other through Hoofcare & Lameness Journal and our Hoofcare@Saratoga program and tour of the museum. The museum is dedicated to preserving the history of horseshoe manufacturing in Troy, New York.

Today, Ada is busy selling shoes. But she recently "joined up" with one of her old shoeing clients, California horseman Monty Roberts, and the two made a DVD together on hoofcare and horsemanship for hard-to-shoe horses. She teaches simple hoof balance principles at horse owner events and markets a hoof ruler to help them keep track of changes in their horses' hooves' dimensions. Horse Illustrated profiled Ada's pioneering career spirit in this tribute article. Ada is one person who never forgot where she came from, and is not done getting to where she's going. She's still giving us all a lot of laughs along the way, and digging this video up out of the 1990s will insure that more people around the world join in. Monitor Hoofcare News on Twitter.com! Follow @hoofcarejournal!

© 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: Hoof Knives Hand-Made in Vermont by Farrier Jim Hurlburt

13 February 2010 | Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog at Hoofcare.com

Please wait patiently for this video from WCAX-TV in Vermont to load.

Vermont is one of the horsiest states in the USA, although you might not know that unless you went there and drove the back roads. As a former dairy farmer friend remarked to me recently, "Horses are the new cows."

Texas doesn't have to worry about Vermont beating them in the number of horses in a single state, but the number of horses per square mile, or per capita, must be right up there.

For as long as I can remember, Vermont has been famous for having more cows than people--it is, after all, the home of Ben and Jerry's ice cream--but lately a lot of dairy farms have been converted to horse farms. And a lot of veterinarians and farriers and hoof trimmers have moved to the Green Mountain State to serve those horses. Some were even born and raised there.

The Vermont Farriers Association was formed about five years ago, has an active educational program and was one of the first farrier associations to openly welcome non-shoeing trimmers to its membership and its events. They'll host a seminar with veterinarian Tracy Turner of Minnesota next month.

The winters are long in Vermont, and most of the people are involved in some sort of craft or hobby or a second job during the dark snowy months. Farrier Jim Hurlburt of Stowe drives right by the famous ski lifts of his hometown to pursue his work with horses, and comes home at night to work on his hoof knives, which he sends all over the world.

That's the kind of place that Vermont is. Out in any back barn you can find almost anything being made, designed or invented on a cold February day. The roads may not be paved, but somehow FedEx and UPS find the most out of the way cabins and farmhouses and the labors of Vermonters get shipped no matter how deep the snow is.

Enjoy this little video about Jim Hurlburt and his knives, courtesy of WCAX-TV in Burlington, Vermont. I hope no one on the tv crew cut themselves while making this video. Jim's knives are sharp!

© 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.

Racetrack Surface Research Video: Building a TTD for the Track in a Box at the University of California

3 February 2010 Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog at Hoofcare.com

(Caution: You might want to turn down the volume on your computer before you play this video. The soundtrack is loud!)



This video shows the development and constrution of the University of California, Davis, J.D. Wheat Veterinary Orthopedic Research Laboratory track-testing device (TTD). The TTD is instrumented with a load cell, accelerometer, and laser displacement sensor, and is used to compare the dynamic properties of Thoroughbred racehorse racetrack surfaces as part of the lab's "Track in a Box " project to simulate racetrack conditions in the laboratory.

The "box" in the lab acan be filled with layers of dirt, stones, asphalt and racetrack surface materials that could include wax, fibers or other materials. A drainage system allows the effects of rain to be testing. The spring-loaded mechanism simulates the impact of pounding hooves up to 100 times the force of gravity while measurements are taken to characterize surface behavior.

The finished TTD positioned over the box

The "Track in a Box" project is the work of Jacob Setterbo, a PhD candidate in the Biomedical Engineering Graduate Group, and Dr. Susan Stover, director of the school’s JD Wheat Veterinary Orthopedic Research Laboratory. The project is funded by the Grayson Jockey Club, the Southern California Equine Foundation, and the Center for Equine Health with funds provided by the State of California pari-mutuel fund and contributions by private donors.

I asked Jacob Setterbo about the fact that the TTD contained everything exect a shoe, and wondered about adding a shoe to the TTD, or even using it to test how different shoes load in different footing. Setterbo and Stover worked on a sensor shoe for racetrack testing which was featured on the hoof blog in an article last fall.

"That is a possibility we considered," Setterbo answered. "So the TTD was designed so that a new interface to the load cell can be machined so that a shoe can be added, and things such as toe grabs can be compared. Because we first need to establish the functionality of the TTD we decided to first start with a simple impacting part, which is an aluminum piece which is approximately the same area of the hoof. But the answer is yes, it is possible to modify the TTD to test different shoes."

© 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.

Hoofcare Scholar: Design a Foot with Professor Robert Full

by Fran Jurga | 1 February 2010 | Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog

 

 
Caution: Don't start watching this video unless you have 19 minutes and 24 seconds to watch the whole thing through. And then you might want to watch it all over again. Professor Robert Full is Director of the Poly-PEDAL Laboratory in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of California at Berkeley. This video, which is now five years old, was always too long to post on the blog, but now it is possible...so here you go. If you like this, you'll enjoy a few more scholarly (but not too scholarly) videos that we've been preparing for you.

Dr. Full may work with cockroaches and crabs and centipedes and geckos, and he may be trying to build a better robot, not fix a lame horse, but this video can make you think about what a foot is and what it can and should do. And what you can add to a foot to achieve different goals, i.e. move across different surfaces.

Many of the concepts will be everyday to you. And maybe some of the exercises that Professor Full reviews will lead you to some brand new thoughts...or a brand new way of thinking.

Happy 19 minutes and 24 seconds!

And thanks to Robert Full and the TED conference for making this clip available! PS The impetus for this research is a robot that would be useful for first responders in emergency and disaster scenarios. Apparently some search-and-rescue robots have been used in Haiti during the earthquake response, but Professor Full might need to add digging to the task list of his robotic feet when it comes to quake rubble. Bare human hands apparently did most of the work, and search dogs were found to be very helpful. Texas A&M University is home to CRASAR, the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue.


© 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. For more news, follow @hoofcarejournal on www.twitter.com.

Weekend Humor: A Desperate Polo Widow and High Hoofcare Fashion News

31 January 2010 | Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog at Hoofcare.com

It's Sunday, time to relax and have some hoofcare- or lameness-related humor. This week our humor comes from South America: what happens when the worlds of polo and fashion collide below the hock in Argentina?



I have to thank my friend Molly Knott of DappledGrey.com out in Oregon for that video. If you are interested in equestrian fashion or know anyone who is, Molly's web site is the place to find out about the newest and most stylish English gear and clothing for horses and humans.

The polo wrap boots from the video are an actual item--they really are for sale! What's more, they are a fundraiser for Ethiopian children with the foot disease Podoconiosis, an infection caused by a fungus in the soil there.

And from the runways of European fashion boots come hoof boots for humans, all part of the hot new equestrian look. Christian Dior last week showed models in veiled hats and side-saddle attire, and here we have boots that make women's feet and legs look like hooves, with just little black bases sticking out at the bottom.

Wait, there's more! I made a new friend this fall, San Francisco fashion designer Trace Cohen of Bind. Trace was interested in farrier aprons.

He added both a farrier apron and a tanner's apron to his line of super-hip men's clothing, so if you're walking around New York or LA or Milan and see someone walking down the sidewalk wearing a farrier apron...it might just be an expression of high fashion, not a horseshoer. The high-fashion farrier aprons come in black for winter.

Do you think that New England deep-winter barn clothes will ever have a high-fashion value? Two fashion shoots I've often thought someone should do were women from Maine in their favorite barn clothes and (more seriously) Saratoga's early-a.m. exercise rider colony, who have quite a style all their own.

That wraps up the fashion report, I hope it made you smile! It's all true!


© 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.

Jumper Recovers from Laminitis to Win First "Pfizer HITS Million" Qualifier

30 January 2010 | Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog at Hoofcare.com

The HITS Pfizer $1 Million Grand Prix is the talk of the East Coast show circuit this year, but when the first qualifier was held last weekend in Ocala, Florida, the prize money may have been upstaged a bit by the comeback story of the winner. Allison, an 18-year-old Rhinelander mare from New Jersey ridden by Callan Solem, has returned to the show circuit after recovering from severe illness that included laminitis and no prediction that she could ever even be ridden again, much less jumped at the highest level. Allison lived at Mid-Atlantic Equine Medical Center in Ringoes, New Jersey for two months while recovering from laminitis in all four feet. You'll want to be reading more in Nancy Jaffer's coverage of Allison's unbelievable story while I try to find out more about the laminitis. (NJ.com/Nancy Jaffer photo)