The Natural Horse

Choosing to take care of your horse, including horse hoof care, in a natural style is your first step in a long and enjoyable relationship with your horse. Keeping a horse barefoot is a true joy and well worth studying and accomplishing.

Barefoot trimming is the term used to describe trimming horses hooves so they can be ridden without the use of metal shoes. Before you jump in, understanding the basics of the barefoot trim and how best to create healthy hooves, read this brief primer.

What a Natural High Performance Barefoot Trim is All About

Even if you choose to employ a barefoot trimmer for your horse hoof care needs, I would still seriously recommend you understand what they are doing, and how they trim. Once you know and are able to recognize a good trim and what a healthy hoof should look like you will feel more confident about your decision to take care of your horse with natural horse care.

are in the driving seat and will then be able to work out how best to exercise and work your horse(s) and how often they will need their hooves trimmed.

Having Someone Trim Your Horse’s Hooves Without Experience is Risky

Why? Because you are allowing them complete liberty with your horse’s hooves.

Why do I focus on this? Because poor hooves create lame horses, so badly trimmed hooves can also create lame horses and lame horses are not something any of us want.

So, if you cannot recognize a good barefoot trim and not understand how to transition horses from shod to barefoot it is then opening up the possibility that you may not achieve healthy, barefoot horses. Top-notch horse hoof care is imperative.

Leaving someone to trim your horses hooves without really understanding what they are doing I personally think can be risky. This was our biggest mistake and set us back many, many months and in retrospect all we really needed to do, was to understand the basics.

Your Top 3 Options

Learn to trim completely by yourself, which is perfectly possible (and if you need support you can always contact me through my website).

Find a trimmer and learn alongside them as well as studying at home.

Attend a barefoot trimming course.

• Let someone else do all your trimming without knowing what they are doing - (This may be your only option but it is not something I would recommend.)

With options 1, 2, and 3 of you will need excellent material so that you can learn as quickly as possible and not waste valuable time; read on.........

After reading countless books and papers, watching numerous DVD's, working with several barefoot trimmers, researching and reading material on many barefoot websites, I have found the DVD's to be the very best educational material I have ever come across. I only wish that these had been available when I began my own journey to learn about the barefoot trim they would have saved me an enormous amount of time.

Discover the Best Information

The best DVD series I found included valid information on reading hooves and potential hoof problems.

Additionally, it is important to know how to go about booting your horse and the finite changes you can make to the boots so that they work to the best of their ability for the horse.

Some of the better how to DVD sets go into deeper detail, and they cover foot development, Laminitis and Navicular disease. This is an obvious area that has to be discussed and covered when talking about barefoot trimming.

What I found was that there was such valuable information on these DVD's it was easiest to watch each DVD, sometimes, over the space of a couple of days and taking notes at the same time.

I can highly recommend that if you want to learn to trim and understand barefoot trimming, this particular set of DVD's is like gold and is worth every penny. Provided that you invest a small amount of time by watching these DVD's they will help you to successfully transition your horse(s) to barefoot soundness with as little confusion as is possible.

It will not be long until you feel more confident with your barefoot trimming.