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How To Keep Your Horse's Shoes On

Save Money, Enhance Health and Increase Riding Time Easily

Sep 7, 2008

When a pleasure horse loses a shoe, it costs the owner money, wastes riding time and may injure the horse. You can help keep shoes on, though, with attention to detail.

Two kinds of weather are hard on a horse's shoes; cold weather and hot weather. However, both cold and hot weather shoe loss can be minimized.

New Shoes Every Five or Seven Weeks

Timing is everything. The rule of thumb is that a horse needs new shoes every six weeks in summer, when the hoof grows more rapidly, and every eight weeks in winter. By shaving one week off the schedule, you'll avoid the shoes loosening, making them prone to come off. If you have had at least one "emergency" farrier call each year, increasing shoeing's won't even be more costly. Plus, it will save lost riding time and possible damage to your horse's hoof, leg or foot.

If you spend $100 for each four-square shoeing, you would spend $650 a year on a year-round 8-week schedule. By shoeing every seven weeks, you'd spend about $740, or about $90 more. But you would avoid the potential for remedial shoeing, and the potential for expensive remedial shoeing if some hoof wall came off with the shoe. Also avoided is lost riding time, and the possibility of serious harm to the horse from protruding nails ripping flesh, or pulled tendons as the horse tries to avoid pain or annoyance.

Hoof and Foot Care to Hold Shoes

Even if you increase the number of yearly shoeings, there's more you need to do to have the best shoeing experience for yourself and your horse. These are simple tactics, but often forgotten in our hurried lives, or as we come to take our riding life for granted.

To preserve shoes longer in hot, dry weather:

Each time you bring your horse in (whether day or night turnout is in force), pack his hooves with a good hoof-packing product. Many of these not only cushion the hoof, but help reduce swelling behind the hoof. Packing the hoof helps keep the sole from drying out.
Keep the hoof wall from drying out by rubbing it with baby oil. Brittle hoofs allow hoof wall to shrink away from the nails faster, leading to loose shoes and shoe loss.
Finally, apply lots of fly spray before the horse goes out. Horses will stomp when attacked by flies. Pounding an already drier-than-usual hoof on harder than usual ground increases shoe loosening and loss.

To preserve shoes longer in cold weather and "mud season":

Each time the horse comes in, make sure to pick all the ice and mud/ice out of the hoof.
Rub the sole and frog, and hoof wall with baby oil.
Before riding, spray the sole with cooking oil spray to help keep ice and mud/ice from packing in. Re-pick the hoof during a ride if need be.
In cold weather, hoof packing isn't needed to control swelling, except when you've ridden him hard on hard ground.

Reduce Shoes from Four to Two If You Can

If your horse's conformation, injuries or workload require that he have four shoes, consider using only front shoes. (If a horse jumps a lot, even if he's young and strong and uninjured, it is probably best to use four shoes, for traction and impact absorption.) When a horse forges - brings his hind feet up in front of the track made by his front feet - he may snag the back of a front shoe with his hind hoof. An unshod hoof is less likely to pull the front shoe off or make it loose than a shod hoof.

The copyright of the article How To Keep Your Horse's Shoes On in Horse Care is owned by Laura Harrison McBride. Permission to republish How To Keep Your Horse's Shoes On in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.