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:
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There is no history of how bad became better.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man’s right to his body, or woman’s right to her soul.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)