Free The Soul of a Horse by Joe Camp Page B

the very beginning I was worried about his feet. Ironically, not because he had metal shoes nailed to them. But because he only had
two
metal shoes nailed to them. On his front feet. His rear feet were barefoot. It’s a quarter of a mile walk on hard asphalt from our place to the local horse club arena. I was worried about his back feet having no shoes.
    “If his front feet need shoes, why don’t his back feet?” I asked everyone.
    “Because 60 percent of a horse’s weight is on his front feet” was a standard answer. In the beginning I was too intimidated to ask why a mere 20 percent meant the difference between shoes or no shoes. I still haven’t heard a good answer to that one.
    Here’s what I was led to believe a mere year and a half ago: Bare hooves banging against hard surfaces, be they concrete, asphalt, dirt, or rocks, will cause the hoof walls to crack, and shatter, and crumble. Therefore horses need metal shoes.
    At this point I didn’t know that such cracking, shattering, and crumbling doesn’t happen to the hooves of horses in the wild. Their hoof walls and soles are like steel. And there’s a reason for it. But nobody ever told me that. And nobody told me that a metal shoe is so unhealthy for the horse’s hoof that it can become the cause of cracking, shattering, and crumbling. I began this leap into the world of horses just like everyone else, because everyone else was who I was listening to.
    It was the relationship with Cash that made me keep digging, keep reading, and keep learning. Because I cared deeply for this horse who had chosen me, who had handed over to me so much of his livelihood, I was left with no choice but to do as right by him as I possibly could. And that meant I needed to gain knowledge.
    Still, it’s disturbing that once upon a not-so-distant time, I firmly believed that horses
must
be shod. That’s the way it was. Horses wore shoes. It never occurred to me to find out why horses in the wild, or in the past, got by without nails and shoes. And that’s worrisome. I consider myself a reasonably intelligent and curious individual. Why would I accept something so odd without even asking a question?
    Scary.
    But common, I’ve found, among so many horse owners.
    I was a novice blithely following whoever would speak up.
    In his seminars on leadership, Andy Andrews tells folks that the first step in becoming a leader is to be a person of action. When everyone else is shrugging their shoulders,
do
something.
Say
something.
    Hey, where do y’all want to go eat tonight?
    Gee, I don’t know. Where would you like to eat?
    Makes no difference to me. How about you, John?
    Oh, I’m good with anything. Bill, you decide.
    Oh, I don’t care. Really.
    “Just make a decision! Be a person of action! Name a place, any place,” screams Andy, “and suddenly you’re a leader!”
    Let’s go to McDonald’s!
    Hey, good idea.
    Fine with me. How about you, Bill?
    Yeah. McDonald’s. That’s good.
    Take action. Step out. Speak up. And they will follow.
    Do it two or three times and they’ll be looking to you whenever a decision needs to be made.
    Never mind whether or not you make good decisions. Or healthy ones. Or even whether you make any sense. Just taking action puts you at the front of the line. And, unfortunately, that’s how so much
mis
information gets spread. Somebody somewhere has the chutzpah to say something. That person might or might not have knowledge on the subject. He might or might not have ulterior motives. But he spoke out when no one else would. When no one else wanted to take the time to think about it, or research it. And now, voilà, he’s the expert.
    That’s the way it was with our horses and shoes. Everybody said do it and I didn’t question the advice. They had to know more than I did, right? After all, they had been at it for years. Some of them for decades. Who was I to question?
    Then I stumbled upon an article in a horse magazine. The first couple of