How to Clean a Horse Hoof for Riding

Video Transcript

" Hi my name is Sarah Stetner. I'm an expert horse rider and I'm doing a video on behalf of Expert Village. In the last segment, if you watched it, about the continuation of brushing the horses, I just wanted to let you know the reason why I have stopped here—because he is not all the way clean obviously—is because of the fact that he has wet mud on him. And the wet mud, I'm just going to have to let it dry, so that is why he is not perfectly clean. So now in this segment I'm going to show you how to clean the horse's foot, which we do before we prepare to ride him, just to make sure there is no rocks in his feet. So this is a hoof pick for those of you who don't know that. We have the hoof pick. The part that you pick the horse's foot with, right here, and a hoof brush that you can brush off mud and stuff off of his hoof. So in order to ask a horse to pick up his foot, you just go ahead and put your leg, go ahead and put your hand down on the foot, go ahead and squeeze right here, and either cluck to him and he will pick up his foot. This foot that Rowdy has has a bar shoe on it, it is his deformed foot so he has to have corrective shoeing: that is why it has a pad and a bar shoe—it is to make him move better. So you just kind of pick around that part and know we go to the other foot. Just ask him; just cluck to him. He doesn't have shoes on this back foot as you can see. And you use the rough side to pick the hoof of course, the metal side, and you just kind of pick all this stuff away. He doesn't have shoes on because it is winter time. We don't use shoes for his back feet in the winter time. So as you see, we have the hoof, well right here you can see that little line. This is a frog; this is the most sensitive part of the horse's foot, and you just pick around here. Sometimes there is rocks and stuff that gets stuck up in here, but you just have to pick them out. That can cause a horse to limp and go lame. So you just want to brush that off, and this part of the brush, this front part of the brush is just to brush off the hooves, brush off all the mud. And that is how you pick a horse foot."