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Huey, hooey, pooey, phooey. Anyway...
Huey lost a shoe. Our farrier is retiring. So we spent a good 5 days trying to find a replacement farrier. We finally got one who came from 45 minutes away. Huey had never been hot-shod as far as we know. He fell asleep for his trim, looked up when smoke filled the barn, then went back to sleep. What a wild Thoroughbred.Have you noticed how hard it is to find farriers? Like getting a plumber or an electrician. I could be eating cold Campbell's Soup in the dark, up to my behind in water - and I'd still have to wait.
When I was in high school, they encouraged us all to go into "intellectual" careers. The "safe" jobs of the future were in computers. Funny, I know a lot of computer people who are continually laid off. I know college graduates without jobs lined up. And give me 5 minutes and I can get someone from outside of the country on the phone to fix my Dell. But I have to wait days for a farrier to replace a shoe.
Think we were hoodwinked? Or am I waxing populist?
That lovely photo is from one of my favorite blogs Fran Jurga's Hoof Blog. Visit that link to read about the history behind the photo. It is really amazing.
4 comments:
Farriers are hard to find, particularly if you have only one or a few horses. Sounds like your new guy is OK - or at least your horse thought so!
I never had trouble finding a farrier. What I did have was trouble finding a good farrier. Thank goodness we have a great guy now who was referred to us by one of our all time favorite farriers who couldn't travel to where we moved.
Sounds like Huey likes this guy. That's great.
Really. Plumbers, electricians, farriers. Those hands-on skill jobs are the hardest to find good people doing and yet they're very critical to people (like me) who like running water, electricity, and horses that can walk.
We had a similar problem at my barn--the previous farrier retired, but no one wanted to take on 20ish horses. And then, once we found a guy, it's hard to get a hold of him and even harder to get him to come. We pay the day of service, all the horses stand just fine, no one has major problems... you wouldn't think it would be so hard to find someone to do that.
A good farrier is like the proverbial needle in a haystack - thankfully, we have a wonderful one (and I sure hope he'll live to be the ripe old age of 103 :o)
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