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When Shoes Go A Wandering

Lost horseshoes can turn up in the oddest places


PIERCED EAR. (top) Somehow, this wild donkey that wanders the hills of a Tennessee farm managed to impale its ear with a very old horseshoe. Farrier Tim Goolsby says the real mystery is where the shoe came from. No shod horses are kept in the area and the shoe seems to have been years old.

Every farrier has “lost shoe” stories. You get a call from a client whose horse reported back to its stall with one missing. Now the client knows it had all four shoes when she turned it out in the paddock. What’s more, she’s searched the paddock on her hands and knees, mucked out the stall and gone over the area between paddock and stall with a fine-tooth comb and no shoe. It either vanished into thin air or was absconded with by space aliens, Big Foot or a competing farrier who wanted to study your techniques.

Or maybe your horse owner needs to stop focusing on the ground.

For your amusement, as Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling might have said, we present two tales of horseshoes; horseshoes that wandered away from their hoof home and found their way into ...  well, if not another dimension, at least a place where horseshoes aren’t intended to be.

A Donkey Fashion Statement

Tim Goolsby, a farrier from Watertown, Tenn., had an encounter with one of our wandering shoes that started when a group of trail riders noticed something odd while riding on a 340-acre area farm owned by…

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Pat tearney

Pat Tearney

Pat Tearney is a long-term newspaper and magazine veteran writer and editor. Before retiring, he served for a number of years on the American Farriers Journal staff and continues to share his writing talents with our readers.

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