As someone who has their nails done a lot, I can definitely feel at least minor discomfort with the filing and when I’ve had a hole drilled in the nail for dangly nail art. I find it incredible how the horses don’t seem to feel a thing when they’re having straight up iron nails hammered into their feet/toenail. And the scraping away of the fleshier part of the foot has got to be at the least uncomfortable. And when they are practically searing the hoof with the hot horseshoe. Do horses just have no nerves in their feet?
In: Biology
Because human nails are thin, hooves are inches thick. You have to dig inches in to get to any nerve endings.
Horses are not humans; our nails are very thin and serve a different purpose compared to a horse’s
The hooves do not have nerve endings running through their depth; the feeling sensation is more like a haircut or nail clipping than what you’d imagine of spikes driven into your nails
Of course they have nerves in their feet (it’s hard to walk without feedback about what you’re stepping on) and there are parts of the hoof that will bleed, get infected and cause serious problems when stones or nails get lodged in there, etc. (There are multiple YouTube channels which show medical hoof care, and you can see the animals limp in pain because of hoof damage. Don’t watch if seeing oozing pus turns your stomach.) But they don’t touch any of those when putting shoes on a horse.
The part of the hoof they file/hammer/burn is really thick and able to absorb shock. The hooves have to be tough enough to support half a ton of horse when galloping on uneven ground, so the things done during shoeing are no big deal.
Our nails are not a good comparison, because they’re not made for putting our entire body weight on.
In our case, the heel and bottom of the foot are incredibly tough. In horses, those parts are actually quite delicate. (relatively)
What part of the foot ends up being tough depends on whether the animal walks unguligrade (like horses, cows, pigs, walking effectively on the very tips of their toes), digitigrade (walking on their fingers/toes with the heel not hitting the ground, like dogs and cats) or plantigrade (whole sole contacts the ground, like humans or bears). There are some edge cases, like elephants, which technically are digitigrade but basically have built-in wedge shoes.
(On a related note, the reason some people think certain animals have “backwards” knees is because they think the ankle on the hind legs of unguligrade and digitigrade animals is actually the knee.)
Does it hurt when you clip your nails?
A hoof is basically a big nail. Just don’t go too deep and damage the actual foot.
Our nails are also thin enough that they flex and pass pressure onto our finger very easily. Hooves don’t flex
Our nails are flat, they only protect the tops of our digits. It really really only grows in 1 direction, if you are cutting through the part that grows past your finger tips you feel a pressure of it getting cut but you don’t feel pain because their is no never endings out that far. But if you have a hang nail and you try ripping it off you will probably go too far and bleed.
To make a horses hoof easier to understand make a fist and think of your knuckles (where you might have a sweet tattoo that says pony) as the bottom of a horses hoof and the back of your hand the front . Their hooves grow all around your fist. When a farrier is trimming or shoeing a horse they make sure to avoid their fist and only clip or file the nail growing around it. If done right the horse feels no more pressure than having your nails clipped, but if they go too deep or put a nail through fist section it will cause a lot of pain and bleeding.
Not all horses in captivity wear horseshoes but it’s best for horses to get their feet trimmed every 6-8 weeks. If not done their hooves continue to grow and can either break off in bad ways that crack the hoof or grow into wild shapes that severely limit the horses mobility.
Also horseshoes are not hot they used to be made by a blacksmith but now days they are mass produced and farriers either pick them up from a store like tractor supply or they have a dealer they order and pick up from. They still hammer the shoes out on an anvil to fit the shoe to the shape of the horses foot but no heat is involved in that.
Source: My father is a farrier and almost everyone on my his side of the family has spent at least a few summers shoeing horses.
Horses have nerves in there feet that is called a fork kinda looks like a v with a notch into it which is very sensitive and has blood flow but the rest of it is basically just keratin the same stuff that is your fingernails so basically when a maréchal does you’re horse he’s basically just cutting his nails and putting nails through his nails so basically no pain is put onto the horse. Horses actually enjoy getting there hooves trimmed and shoed since there hooves don’t get eroded has they prance around so it helps them even them out so they don’t have joint pain
Same reason trimming your toenails or fingernails or cutting your hair doesn’t hurt you.
Nails are not living tissue. They have no blood supply and no nerves. A horse’s hoof is just like a gigantic, thick single toenail.
Our nails are very short and attached very close. A better comparison is if you have long hair and put it in a bun. You can still sorta feel if something moves it, but you’re not gonna feel pain if someone cuts it.
You can cut or bite your nails down quite far before you feel pain.
Horse hooves are basically giant toenails covering the whole foot. You can trim or hammer nails quite far in to them without causing pain.
The horse will feel it, the same way you can feel your fingers when you cut your nails, but it’s not pain – it’s just pressure and movement.
Go too far though, and it will hurt. Same goes for horses. People that put shoes on horses and do those hoof-trimming videos know how far they can safely cut or hammer nails in to the hoof without hitting sensitive flesh.
Think of it like piercing the white part of your fingernail when it’s long. You can’t feel your actual nail, but if you were to pierce it further back it’d go through your finger.
Kind of the same thing for horses, the part of the hooves that the nails are driven into is like the white part of your fingernail, there’s no nerves or anything to feel with until you get further up the hoof
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