Reaching into his 2,600-degree forge with a pair of tongs, George Shults pulls out a horseshoe that glows red. Quickly, he sets the horseshoe on an anvil and strikes the iron with a ball peen hammer.
“It’s done by feel,” he says.
Shults is a farrier — a blacksmith who shoes horses. On this recent chilly morning, he is pounding out horseshoes in an Orland Park stable.
The farrier’s task and tools have changed so little in 3,000 years: With his forge, hammer and anvil, Shults might as well be in ancient Rome, making horseshoes for steeds to pull Ben Hur’s chariot. The trade is still one where powerful hammer blows are required to bend glowing metal. And it’s still a dangerous job, one where a single kick from a quarterhorse can mangle a farrier’s leg for life.
“It’s not a matter of whether you’re going to get hurt, it’s a matter of when,” says the 59-year-old Shults, who lives in Frankfort and says his injuries have been minor. His shoeing partner, Rebecca Pelley, who is 25 and lives in Park Forest, counts a few broken toes and a dislocated shoulder among her wounds.
Despite its dangers and decided lack of dot.com IPO potential, the horseshoeing trade is staging a comeback of sorts these days.
The Industrial Revolution, which made manufactured iron plentiful and sent horses out to pasture, almost turned farriers into the human equivalent of the buggy whip. But in the last decade, the number of horseshoers has actually increased.
Since 1990, membership in the Lexington, Ky.-based American Farrier’s Association has nearly doubled, reaching about 2,700 last year. On top of that, the association counts more than 6,000 horseshoers in its database. Frank Lessiter, editor-publisher of the trade publication American Farriers Journal, estimates there are more than 25,000 full-time and part-time farriers in the United States.
A key to the growth of the trade is advances in equine veterinary medicine, which have helped horses live longer. Wind’s Legend, the thoroughbred that Shults and Pelley are shoeing on this frigid morning, has experienced what was once considered an exceptionally long lifespan and is 21 years old.
“Drinking age,” Shults cracks.
Horses today also are seen more as pets and less as property, which means that far fewer horses are sent to the glue factory when they are no longer capable of plowing a cornfield.
As horses live longer, there are more of them: 6.9 million horses in the United States, according to a 1996 American Horse Council study. The organization is now conducting another study that is expected to show that the number has increased further. “There are more horses now than there were in the early 1900s,” says Richard Howell, past president of the Illinois State Veterinary Medical Association.
The American Horse Council’s 1996 survey found that there were almost 3 million recreation horses, more than in any of the other three categories: race horses, show horses and other, which includes police, ranch and polo horses.
Steve Ralls, director of legislative affairs for the American Horse Council, suspects that recreational ownership is growing, thanks to the booming economy and thanks to the largest segment of the population, the Baby Boomer generation, reaching the peak of their earning. “The recreation segment seems to be the fastest growing,” Ralls says. “That’s what everybody seems to think, but there’s only anecdotal evidence.” Hard evidence should be available when the next installment of the council’s survey is completed.
More horses mean more hooves, which mean more horseshoes. The metal shoes protect one of the horse’s most important parts from the extra stress that domestication brings, as carrying riders or pulling buggies strains a horse and puts pressure on its hooves.
“No hoof, no horse,” says Russ Vanderlei, a 47-year-old farrier who lives in west suburban North Woods.
Because a horse’s hooves grow much like a human’s nails, a horse typically needs to be reshoed about every six to eight weeks.
The increased demand for horseshoes has made the job of the farrier more lucrative. Some farriers report they can make close to $200,000 annually, but most full-time horseshoers make about a quarter of that.
Shults and Pelley charge about $125 to shoe the average horse, which involves removing the shoes, trimming the hooves, reshaping the shoes and reapplying them. The national average, according to a 1999 study conducted by American Farriers Journal, is about $60 to trim four hooves and to reset and apply four shoes.
Pelley and Shults charge more for their work because they specialize in what they term “therapeutic” shoeing. Wind’s Legend, for instance, suffers from arthritis and other ailments.
Holly Light, who lives in Oak Park and owns the thoroughbred, says the horse could hardly bear to walk if it were not shoed properly. In addition to horseshoes, Shults and Pelley apply special vinyl pads, known as wedges, to the front hooves of Light’s horse. The wedges help relieve the stress on the animal’s legs.
“He’s got some problems, and they shoe him to correct those problems and it works,” Light says of Wind’s Legend.
While the farrier trade has the potential to be well paid, it requires a lot of travel simply to get where the horses are. Shults says he puts more than 30,000 miles a year on his vehicle, a modified pickup truck with what looks like an aluminum tool shed mounted on the bed. Inside are the tools of the trade.
The job is physically demanding, too. In shoeing Wind’s Legend, Pelley crouches beneath the horse, picking up one of its legs and holding the hoof between her knees for five minutes at a stretch. The work is demanding enough that she breaks a sweat in the chilly barn.
Using a pair of nippers, she loosens the shoe from the hoof and pulls out a handful of long shoeing nails. Then with a hoof knife, she cleans the bottom of the hoof and trims the sides. The horse has no nerve endings in the hoof, and the procedure is painless.
“It’s like a big pedicure,” says Pelley, who is the lone female certified journeyman farrier in Illinois. Only 17 other women have reached that level of certification, the highest offered by the American Farrier’s Association; by contrast, the association counts 674 men as active journeyman farriers.
The job has traditionally been dominated by men — likely because it requires unusual strength. It is also dangerous and always has been. It is not by happenstance that Hephaestus, the Greek god of the forge, is often portrayed as a lame blacksmith.
Vanderlei knows firsthand the job’s downside. In shoeing horses for more than 30 years, he has had a lifetime’s worth of pain. His first major injury occurred in 1977 when a horse kicked him in his right knee.
“It was a compound fracture,” he recalls. “I had the bone coming right out of my leg.”
The injury kept him out of work for nearly a year, he says. Insurance covered some of the cost, and fellow farriers chipped in for some expenses. The rest — he estimates his total medical bills came to about $36,000 — came out of his own pocket. “It took me 2 years to pay off that injury,” he says.
Other maladies followed. In 1989 he had an attack of sciatica — the result, he surmises, of bending from the waist shoeing horses day after day. More recently he has complained of carpal tunnel syndrome, which comes from using the hoof knife repeatedly.
“I tell the young farriers to make sure they’ve got full insurance coverage,” he says.
Despite the threat of having bones snapped in half, the job is attracting recruits. The farriers association database lists 53 horseshoeing schools in the United States.
Roy Evans has run the Midwest Horsehoeing School in Macomb since 1972. He says that in the 1990s he consistently had about 14 students in his 12-week professional horseshoeing class every term.
“There’s more of a demand for horseshoers these days,” Evans says, “and you can make some good money at it.”
But the appeal goes beyond money. Shults enjoys the freedom of working for himself.
“You can work as much or as little as you want,” he says as he hammers out a final horseshoe for Wind’s Legend. He has been shoeing horses professionally since the early 1980s, when he quit his job as a corporate pilot.
“That was a rat race,” he said, explaining that he wanted a try at running his own business. He has made a decent living, he says, for nearly 20 years as a farrier.
The job appealed to Pelley, she says, because she grew up riding horses and likes being near the animals she loved as a child. She makes no secret that the cash appeals to her as well.
As she prepares to nail a horseshoe, still scalding from the forge, on the hoof of Wind’s Legend, she warns: “This is going to stink.”
She jams the shoe against the hoof, where the hot iron glows like burning coal before disappearing in a thick gray smoke. She then hammers in a handful of nails to secure the shoe, while the reek of burning horsehair lingers in the air.
“It may stink to you,” she says, “but it smells like money to us.”
