I’ve been watching a lot of farrier asmr lately. I didn’t know about farriers until recently — those who care for and maintain horses’ hooves. This includes things like cleaning, trimming, and shoeing the hooves. Another thing I didn’t know until recently is that hoof maintenance is hard. The videos often come out to 10-15 minutes for just a single hoof. And that’s after being edited down. At perhaps 30 minutes per hoof, it could take as much as 2 hours to care for just 1 horse. Time aside, the work is physically intense. The farrier is often hunched over, crouching with the hoof between their legs. The tools they use require a lot of grip strength. Every hoof needs to be addressed individually, with attention to detail.
I watched one video recently about an Arabian horse that had been neglected. Its hooves were long and curved and looked unnatural, almost like shoes. The farrier had to pull out a chainsaw to help get rid of the old growth. The end result looked so much more comfortable and correct. I can’t imagine how much time it took to do. It was interesting though — the horse had gotten so accustomed to its old, neglected hooves that it looked like it needed some time to get used to walking in its new ones!
I find these videos so weirdly fascinating. I love cutting my nails. The amount of relief I feel after is insane. At any given time, I vastly prefer my nails short and clean. Looking at the horses’ hooves, I can’t help but imagine how uncomfortable they are before having their hooves cared for, and how much better they feel after. Wild horses have their hooves naturally worn down because of the long distances they run. They run across a variety of surfaces, some of which are rough and help trim the hooves. Similarly, at some point in time, humans didn’t cut their finger nails. Instead, our nails naturally got eroded from manual labor and walking around barefoot. It’s always interesting to learn how something much history and change there can be for things as mundane as hooves and nails. More importantly, now that I’ve watched so many of these farrier videos, I’m so glad that human nails are easy to care for, especially compared to horse hooves.
