Personal Narrative: The Infection Of My Horse

When I was younger, I remember distinctly watching with curiosity as the farrier hammered nails into a horse’s hoof. “Doesn’t that hurt him?” I asked, to which the answer was a definite “no”. This baffled me at such a young age, not understanding that a part of the body could be simply numb, especially after all that I had heard of the importance of cleaning rocks from the hoof, or making sure that they don’t step on anything sharp. It wasn’t until years later that I was prompted to revisit my curiosity about this part of a horse. The prompt came from a difficult situation: my own horse had developed a persistent fungal infection in his hooves, and in searching for treatments, I discovered that there was much more to them than I ever imagined.