On day 1 of your footcare business — as an apprentice or out on your own — you will face tough challenge that you must resolve using your code of ethics. Some of these challenges will be simple to overcome, while others will present potential outcomes that will be difficult for you to answer without negative consequences for one party.

Each year, we ask farriers via an exclusive survey to comment on ethical dilemmas that they might face in their hoof-care work. These scenarios were pulled from the dozens of responses submitted by farriers in the previous year’s confidential ethics survey. There are many other dilemmas that could affect your practice.

In this year’s survey, hoof-care professionals shared how they would deal with each of these entirely different ethical situations. We focused on a problem owner and unprofessional farrier because these scenarios are something you could face as a new shoer.

Each of these ethical dilemmas is described in detail here along with a summary on how these farriers indicated they would deal with these troublesome situations. As you will see from the survey results, there are no easy answers for or 100% agreement from farriers on these three ethical predicaments.

Looking through each scenario, how would you have voted on…