Och hur förklarar du att de flesta skodda hästar ändå är friska och mår utmärkt?
Varför har man en gång börjat sko hästar?
1. Är dom verkligen så friska som du påstår?
2. Här kommer ett långt utdrag ur ´Horse owners guide to natural hoof care´ av Jamie Jackson.
"Ill effects of horseshoeing: an historicat perspective
Until more recent centuries, the historical record shows that most horses have been ridden unshod since their domestication 8 000 or more years ago *
(* The Red Earth People” of upper Mesopotamia are thought to be the first horsed society, ca 5000 BC. (See Francis Haines, Horses in America.) Other authorrities place the people of ancient Susa in Southwest Asia as the first domesticators, ca 3000 BC. Conceivably, however, North American tribes may have adapted horses in their cultures 10000 years ago or erlier.)
They lived relatively pastoral lives, in fact, under conditions which favoured strong helthy, and naturally shaped hooves. The ancient Greeks and Roman, Scythians, Mesopotamians, Hurns, Mongolians, Turks, Arabs, Bedouins, Berbers, for example, all rade unshod horses – domesticated horses that lived the better part of their lives on the rugged mountain ranges, deserts, and semi-arid regions of the world. The barefoot cavaleries of Hannibal and Xenophon have left vivid records of their system of natural hooof care and military triumphs using unshod horses.
Eventually, and coinciding with the rise of modern civilization, the riding stock of these early horsed people found their way into the hands of Northern Europeans. Significantl, these horses were also passed into an alien habitat whose moist, lush grasses and cold winters contrasted sharply with the sparse bunh grasses and and dry browse of the arid high desert biom of their ancient homeland. There is credible evidence that this change in natural habitatmay very well explain the epidemic numbers of horses that have succumbed to funder ever since. But another event soon occured which, in the of creating the modern horse breeds, obscured this issue – and nearly buried forever our knowledge of the tru natural hoof of the ancient homeland.
By 700 AD, increasing numbers of European horses found themselves living in close confinement. This was a by-product ocf the new feudalism, an era usherd in by the conquest ofthe Western Roman Empire by "barbarian" Germanic tribes. Castles, complemented wuth armies and cavaleries, were built by the victorius German tribal shiefs to give there subjects security from rival kingdoms. Horses were stabled i paddocks and stalls, where the hooves were subjected to the animal´s own wastes, day in and day out. Moreover, constantly confined, the hooves could neither function naturally nor optimally. The result was that hooves begun to deteriorate systematically across feudal Eufope during this period.
It was thought that horseshoeing, atechnoligy with obscure roots that may have originated with thw Pagan priests of ancient Gaul (France), and as yet not widely practiced during Middle Ages, could provide a remedy. Horseshoeing, or blacksmithin, henceforth, would evolve inexorably as a commonplace practice, its lampblack roots as last wedged firmly in midieval Europefor the reasons given here
Feudalism, however, soon declined, undermined by prosperous new economic conditions, ans, very important, the invention of the gunpowder and the long bow, the latter rendering castles with knighted horsemen ineffectual against cannons, harquebuses, long distant archery, and other "modern" inventions of war. Kingdoms were then replaced by thriving cities.
But the practice of close confinement of horses and horseshoeing in particular, held its ground into the Renaissance. Horses were put to more uses than war, and the conveniences of stalling horses was never questioned as a means of boarding them. Guilds were formed to advance the position of the blacksmith, now needed more then ever too meet the growing needs of a horse dependent civillization.
With theadvent of the Industrial Revolution, the late 18th century, most european, and later American horses, were routinely shod. This was in keeping with the custom of close confinement, augmented, as it were, by the old and entrenched feudal shoeing protocols few ever bothered to question.
Interestingly, some did. As early as 1800, the ill-effect of horseshoeing were beginning to be documented by veterinary authorities; wrote Bracey Clark, F.L.S., a British equine surgeon:
For a period of more than a thousand years has the present mode of shoeing horses been in use, without the public being aware that there was anything wrong or injurious about it, if it was but properly executed; and though accidents, and unequivocal expressions of suffering accompanied it continually, and were visible to the eye of every one, yet no one ventured to think upon a subject thet appeared so abstruse; or if he did, was it likely to be received but with rebuff and insolence: and the mischief´s arising from it were constantly evaded or denied, and were attempted to be overcome in every way but the proper and natural one, that of removing the cause, which cause also was, to the simple as to the more knowing ones, alike unperceived. *
(* Clark, Bracy. Podophthora: Demonstration of a Pernicious Defect in the Principle of the common shoe. Royal Veterinary College Library, London 1829, p 2.
[ Farriers reading this will be interested to know that Dr. Dough Butler – an icon of modern farriery science, should others wonder – noted in his landmark work, Principles of Horseshoeing, that Dr. Clark was one of history´s most knowledgable hoof care authorities.
Coming from Butler, no small praise.]
Blacksmiths, as they were then called, were not unversed themselves in the early protestations, and some went so far as to manufacture the first modern hoof boots. Still, by 1900, most horse owners had no memory of the pre-horseshoeing days.
After World war II, automobiles and tractors replaced horses for transportation, drayage, and farm work. Most horses would become ”plesure” animals, used recreationally for competition, trail, and companionship. Although many of these horses would be returned to the country or suburbs, some even living in pastures most of the time rather than in stalls, most owners by and large continued to keep their horses in close confinement and shod. After all, this had always been customary -who could remember back to a time otherwise?"