When looking at making changes in a shoeing rig, Brent Chidsey says there are a half-dozen critical considerations.

Just in case one of your Web-surfing, world-traveling or horse show-attending clients raises the subject, let’s get up to speed on cold water hydrotherapy as an aid to equine hoof and leg health.

Like many other farriers, Mike Dawson of Las Vegas, Nev., has modified a few tools to make his shoeing go better.

Excuse the older folks who still pull to the side of the road when Clint Laybourn’s shoeing rig approaches from behind. Even without its emergency lights flashing, the truck still looks very much like the ambulance it once was.

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.

Back in 1976, when I decided I didn’t want to work for a living any longer, I decided to become a horseshoer and enrolled at Bob Reaume’s Wolverine Farriers School in Howell, Mich.