History
Horses were used for work and pleasure by man for thousands of years prior to the invention of horse shoes. The Ancient Greeks did not shoe their horses, and Xenophon in his classic work on horsemanship wrote "...naturally sound hooves get spoiled in most stalls..." and advised measures to strengthen horses' feet:
| “ | To secure the best type of stable-yard, and with a view to strengthening the horse's feet, I would suggest to take and throw down loosely four or five waggon loads of pebbles, each as large as can be grasped in the hand, and about a pound in weight; the whole to be fenced round with a skirting of iron to prevent scattering. The mere standing on these will come to precisely the same thing as if for a certain portion of the day the horse were, off and on, stepping along a stony road; whilst being curried or when fidgeted by flies he will be forced to use his hoofs just as much as if he were walking. Nor is it the hoofs merely, but a surface so strewn with stones will tend to harden the frog of the foot also. | ” |
More recently, Jaime Jackson, who studied wild and domestic horse hooves, promoted the modern variant of natural hoof care in The Natural Horse: Lessons from the Wild (1992).
Read more about this topic: Natural Hoof Care
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“I am not a literary man.... I am a man of science, and I am interested in that branch of Anthropology which deals with the history of human speech.”
—J.A.H. (James Augustus Henry)
“I believe that history might be, and ought to be, taught in a new fashion so as to make the meaning of it as a process of evolution intelligible to the young.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“Humankind has understood history as a series of battles because, to this day, it regards conflict as the central facet of life.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)