40 THE PRACTICAL HORSESHOER. 



contracted heels. The heels of a horse should be kept up 

 well and the toe should be kept down. By lowering- the 

 heel you thrown the entire weight of the horse on the back 

 tendons of the legs, and thereb^^ produce lameness from 

 over-taxing a very important set of tendons. By keeping 

 up the heel you throw the weight upon the wall of the foot, 

 and in this position stumbling- is generally prevented. 



I sa3^ it is wrong to pare the sole of the foot as some 

 smiths do. Very little, if any, paring should be done to 

 the sole. The braces should not be pared. All or most of 

 the cutting, paring-, and smoothing of the frog, brace, bars, 

 or soles is an injury to the horse, making him less valuable 

 to his owner. Nearly' all the corns in horses' feet are pro- 

 duced b^^ this process of paring. 



The frogs have been placed in the foot by nature to ex- 

 pand the wall of the foot, and as soon as you cut the frog- 

 the oily substance begins to leak out. The frog dries up 

 and becomes hard. The wall gets dry and hard and then 

 cracks. I say no man who owns a horse should ever allow 

 a blacksmith to cut the frogs, braces, or soles of his feet. 

 I don't think any smith ever saw a contracted foot which 

 had a good frog. By throwing the weight upon the frogs 

 you force them up between the walls and cause them to 

 spread, and I think the only cure for contracted feet is the 

 method of assisting nature to grow a g'ood frog, which in 

 turn will act as a wedge, crowding out the walls, and soon 

 contraction will be no more. 



I don't think it right to use a red-hot shoe in fitting ; it 

 extracts too much moisture from the hoof. I believe the 

 walls of the feet should never be rasped above the clinches, 

 and they should be rasped as little below the clinches as 

 possible. All rasping and filing on the outside of the foot 

 tends to weaken the wall by cutting the fibres of the foot. 



As to how a shoe should be put on, I will just say that in 

 all cases you should get the shoe as near the size and shape 



