42 ARTISTIC HORSE-SHOEING. 



same effect as though the horse were traveling- without 

 shoes. 



I suppose that I had shod horses for twenty years, more 

 or less, before I knew why bar shoes were necessar3^ Of 

 course when a man makes and applies a shoe which he does 

 not know the use of, he naturally is liable to many faults in 

 construction. Some people condemn bar shoes but it is be- 

 cause they do not know their uses, or how to make them, or 

 how to put them on. 



A man must know in the first place that the horse 

 brought to him to be shod need's a bar shoe. He must un- 

 derstand the exact condition that the foot is in and what 

 sort of a bar shoe is best for that particular condition. 

 Sometimes w^e find horses with soft frogs and in other cases 

 they have hard frogs. Now formerly I did not know but I 

 could put on a bar shoe as Avell Avith a hard frog as with a 

 soft frog. Right here let me explain the secret of success 

 with bar shoes. If the frog is soft so that you can move it 

 easily with your hands it will bear all the pressure which 

 you can get from the bar shoe, but if it is dried up and hard 

 it will not do to apply a bar shoe until some measures have 

 been taken to soften the f i*og, otherwise the pressure on the 

 hard frog will be so strong as to push the frog up into the 

 sensitive portion of the foot and lame the horse. Of course 

 the object of a bar shoe in all cases is to remove the bearing 

 from the heels where there is tenderness arising either from 

 corns or from hard pounding on pavements or liard roads. 



In cases where the frog is hard it can be softened by soak- 

 ing the feet for a time in warm water and applying wai-m 

 flaxseed meal poultices at night until the foot is brought 



