You cannot ride a barefoot horse on rocks...

This one always makes me snicker – especially when we are on a particularly rocky stretch, and someone makes this comment to me…. Not realizing that my horses are all barefoot. All it takes is conditioning them on rocks – either on your normal trails, your gravel driveway, your rocky pasture, or you can add pea gravel around commonly traveled areas in the pasture(like feed and water troughs.)

I stumbled into barefoot by “accident”… the only good farrier in the area (and I mean ONLY – I wouldn’t let any of the other hack jobs near my horses with a ten foot pole) got injured at the appointment before ours. Even though his leg was broken, he knew our horses were polite, so he put us first on the schedule for a few weeks later. The day before he was going to come out, his father died. By this time, having the shoes hanging by a thread was worse than me pulling them off. I bought some easyboots so I could continue riding.

Suprisingly, even without the boots, the horses quickly adapted. It was from that point that I started to research. Many years and many successful transitions later, I got the Pete Ramey DVD set. He showed in a scientific fashion what I had noticed just by trial and error. I picked up a few new pointers, too. I started doing all my own trimming. I also trimmed for a rescue, and was able to transition all of the horses that came through – from a QH with TINY feet, to gaited horses, to OTTB’s with cracked, thrushy pancake feet.

Online I got to know a few more people who did barefoot. This is a video that one of them took of four barefoot horses on day 3 of hard riding. All horse’s feet were maintained by their owners, and did beautifully over the long weekend. You can hear the clacking of hoof against rock.





One thing that always makes me wonder is when we meet up with someone on the trail whose shod horse is sore from the rocks, and they still don’t believe we did the same trail barefoot – when we are right in front of their eyes.

Not all people can go barefoot – you have to do it right. Some horses will transition quickly, others can take a year. Depends a lot on the effort you put into doing it right, and how much you ride. Barefoot is NOT pulling the shoes and - voila! It takes time to toughen the feet – sometimes you have to grow in a whole new, correct, hoof.

The absolute best part about barefoot? You never again have to miss a ride due to loose or missing shoes!