Hardknock School of Horseshoeing

Blood, sweat, and anatomy lesson at Chris Gregory's

Hardknock School of Horseshoeing

The students glance from textbooks to Chris Gregory and back to textbooks as he describes the ligaments and bones found in a horse's leg. Pencils fly as the students frantically take notes trying to keep up with Chris who rattles off body parts as fast as an auctioneer chatters through bids for an antique. More than a few of the students took bewildered.

"Now our short sesamoidian ligament originates on the dorsal distal borders of the sesamoids and inserts into the proximal P I like so," says Chris, as he quickly draws a diagram of what he just described on a large board.

The students scramble to copy the drawing.

"I had no idea there was this much studying," a perplexed Jonathan Anderson says after the class. The young man from Sarcoxie thought he was at Gregory's farm to learn to shoe horses, but just two days into class at the Heartland Horseshoeing School he finds himself buried in equine anatomy. At one time Chris made his students learn 69 ligaments, all below the knee. Now, for the sake of brevity, he makes them learn only 24.

Intense would be a good way to describe both Chris' horseshoeing school and the instructor himself. The 29-year-old military high school graduate and Army veteran commands his class of seven Students with martial authority laced liberally with humor. The world-class farrier is on a mission to train his students to properly shoe a horse and care for a host of equine diseases and injuries of the leg and hoof -- all in 12 weeks.

"This ain't a Girl Scout camp," Chris says, laughing at a student's complaint that he's going too fast.

A New Mexico native, Chris grew up working with horses on his family's ranch. He competed in high school rodeo and went to college on a rodeo scholarship. Chris took his first horseshoeing class at age 18 and has been a farrier since.

Chris started Heartland Horshoeing School near Lamar two years ago with his wife, Kelly, also a farrier. They left behind another shoeing school and a successful horseshoeing business in Colorado to move to Missouri where the Barton County Electric Cooperative members say they felt the environment was better to raise their two young children, Cody, 5 and Jacqueline, 4.

Their first year was a little lean, but Chris says he wasn't worried because he claims he's never seen a hungry farrier. The horse population in the United States is increasing steadily, according to Chris, and there aren't enough trained horseshoers in the country to meet the demand. Soon students, hoping to tap into that growing market, were signing up for class.

"The United States is so big and we have so many horses that it's easy to make a good living at this," he says. "There were 50 farriers within a few miles of us in Colorado and we still made a decent living."

Chris offers six and 12-week courses and his latest class has attracted students from; Arizona, New Mexico, Kansas, Florida, Iowa and Missouri. The most recent class to graduate included a student originally from England and one from Argentina.

"I'm a long way from home," says Richard Jones of Ramah, N.M. "I could have gone to school 50 miles down the road, but this was where I could actually get the instructor on the phone and talk to him."

Heartland Horseshoeing is one of the smaller of the 47 farrier schools in the country. Chris says he's happy to graduate 50 students a year while several programs boast turning out more than 400 shoers a year. Chris believes that's too many. He should know.

Besides his decade of experience Chris also started farrier program at the Colorado School of Trades in Lakewood after writing the school and suggesting they offer farrier training and that he be perfect to head it up. They took him up on the offer. While talking himself into a job might brash, Chris has never been shy.

"I've always been driven," says Chris, who has several college degrees including bachelor's degrees psychology and social science and a master's in human resource development. "When I was 22 years old I was a certified journeyman farrier and the youngest one in the country."

Brash might also describe a young American who travels to England to take the hardest farrier's certification test in the world, something only one other American has done. This spring Chris spent two weeks in Great Britain studying shoeing at the British Army School of Farriery in preparation for the associateship exam of the Worshipful Company of Farriers, the governing body of shoers in England which dates back to 1356.

The 10-hour exam includes oral and written tests, diagnosing X-rays of injuries, making horseshoes and shoeing horses all under the close scrutiny of a panel of judges made up of a lawyer, a group of farriers and a veterinarian.

"It was the hardest thing I've ever done and I was totally and physically exhausted," he says. "No one over there expected me to pass. It's the highlight of my career so far."

Chris respects English farriers, who by law must go through a four-year apprenticeship to shoe horses, as the most highly trained in the world. That level of training is missing in the United States. "All you need is $500 worth of tools and you have a job (in the United States). But some guys have no business touching a horse."

Chris says he works his students hard to make sure they're qualified to shoe horses. Students learn anatomy and diagnose leg and foot problems like founder. They spend hours forging horseshoes from hot metal and learn to trim hooves and nail shoe to hoof. And they must learn on the job. A number of the Gregorys' customers bring horses to the school for the students to shoe -- at a discount price. By the time the students are done with their training, they will have shod dozens of horses.

The work is hot, dirty and exhausting. Farriers work all day bent over trying to get huge, sometimes cantankerous animals to stand still while they drive nails into their feet.

"Farriers get kicked, stepped on, bitten," Chris says, "but it's still a great career. You work outdoors and you get to be your own boss. It's funny, though. You sit next to someone on a plane and they ask you what you do for a living and you say shoe horses and they say, "No, really. What do you do for a living."

Rural Missouri Magazine
Written by: Jeff Joiner

Thank you to the Rural Missouri Magazine and author Jeff Joiner for allowing us to use this article.
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