Recently I had the opportunity to make a trip to the Southern Hemisphere and do a clinic for a group of farriers from Brazil. What an experience that clinic turned out to be.

When the duo of Burney Chapman and George Platt popularized the use of heart bar shoes for foundered and laminitic horses in the late 1960s, it set off a firestorm of innovations and design-styles for therapeutic horseshoes that reinvigorated the hoof-care industry.

Until recently, unless a farrier had a certain level of forging skills, it was a time-consuming and often messy process to get a proper fit on many therapeutic shoes.