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
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.
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