Roving farrier at work

Waimarino Bulletin, Volume 5, Issue 16, 15 September 1987, Page 3

Roving farrier at work

One of mankind's earliest industries has been carried on in the Waimarino for the past 22 years by the same itinerant craftsman. Wayne Parsons is a farrier. The craft of farriery (shoeing horses) is an ancient art dating back to the time when horses were first used by man as a means of transport, as a beast of burden, as an agricultural tool and later as a competitor in 'the sport of kings'. Wayne Parsons hasn't been around that long but he's certainly shoed a lot of horses in his time ... at a rough estimate about 300 horses a year for 22 years! Wayne, who is based in Wanganui, travels a continuous 2-monthly circuit up through the Paraparas to Raetihi; Ohakune and National Park and then back to Wanganui; Patea and Waverley. Most of his work is with farm horses and pony-club horses but he also shoes race-horses (with aluminium shoes) and during his life as a farrier he has fitted three Clydesdale draught horses with their massive footwear - twice the size and thickness of the normal horseshoe. On each of his 2-monthly trips he attends to. the footwear requirements of some 300 horses with either a set of new shoes or merely an overhaul of existing footwear - cleaning,

refitting and dressing (filing) the hoof. The latter takes about 10 minutes, the former half-an-hour using the coldshoeing method which entails carrying many sets of ready-made shoes on the back of his ute which also doubles as his mobile workshop. Most of the shoes are of a standard size for fully

grown horses with smaller patterns available for foals and ponies but if the standard models don't fit at first they can, with a bit of gentle persuasion and a hammer and anvil, be reshaped to conform exactly to an individual horse's hoof. The shoes are attached to the hooves by 5-7 nails depending on the size of

the horse. The former hot-shoe method using a local blacksmith's forge and bellows together with a hammer and anvil (as depicted in early paintings) has now been replaced by the more practical cold-shoe method where the itinerant selfcontained farrier travels to | the horse rather than the other way round. Despite having to handle sometimes fractious and temperamental horses Wayne has only twice re- i ceived injuries requiring I stitches in the whole of his career - once to his hand and once to his head.