Hearing loss is one of the many dangers that farriers face — and one of the easiest to prevent. The ringing of anvils, noise from the grinders and other activities farriers do every day can produce sound far surpassing the level that will make a person deaf over time. 

We naturally lose some hearing as we age, but why accelerate the process and damage our hearing further if we can prevent it?

Hearing Tests

Dan Bradley, a G.E. Forge & Tool clinician from Lucedale, Miss., delivered a presentation on hearing at the International Hoof-Care Summit. He began the discussion by asking the audience if any of them had ever had a hearing test. Many had not, so he described the process.

“You go into a booth and they put headphones on you. A machine makes a tone and you are supposed to press down every time you hear the tone. When I went for my hearing test I was 40 years old, and I thought something was going on, but I thought I aced the hearing test,” he says.

“When I left the booth, the worker said I had a case of classic deafness. She showed me a graph with a line on it indicating that I was deaf at a certain octave. I can’t hear anything below 800 hertz.”

Hertz is a unit used to measure the tone of sound. The range that people can hear is 0 to 20,000 hertz, and when you are young, you are able…