The Natural Trim: Basic Guidelines

By Jaime Jackson

The Basic Guidelines of the natural trim explain in extraordinary detail how the author managed the remarkable hooves of the horses of the Association for the Advancement of Natural Horse Care Practices (AANHCP) over an eight year period (2010-2018). The horses lived 24/7 “on track” in the AANHCP Paddock Paradise, providing incontrov

• Language: English
• Publisher: James Jackson Publishing
• Release date: Jan 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9780999730539

Jaime Jackson

For 38 years, author Jaime Jackson has been an outspoken advocate for natural horse care based on his studies of America's wild, free-roaming horse living in the Great Basin. Jackson has been a professional "hoof man" (farrier turned natural hoof care practitioner) since the 1970s.

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PREFACE

Why This Book?

While I have been a natural trim hoofman ever since my sojourns into wild horse country (map on facing page ) 40 years ago, it was the years 2010 – 2018, in a Paddock Paradise environment, that I have learned the most about what I do. The objective of the natural trim has always been to pattern (mimic) the natural wear patterns of wild horse hooves, and thereby stimulate natural growth patterns. In fact, this act defines the natural trim . In my mind, all horses deserve this. While a noble cause, the reality has been that the domesticated lives of horses I’ve trimmed have always, in some measure, compromised my best intentions. From problematic diets, to living conditions, to horsemanship practices, to veterinary care, I have never had the opportunity to put stringent controls on the lifestyles of horses in my care that resonated with my own concepts of natural boarding based on the wild horse model. Unnatural lifestyles create unnaturally shaped hooves, no matter how precise the natural trim.

17 years ago (2005), I wrote Paddock Paradise: A Guide to Natural Horse Boarding in hopes that clients, and horse owners generally, could and would implement my ideas based on the lifestyles of Great Basin wild, free-roaming horses I had observed and studied. My reasoning was that horses could live more natural lives and that naturally shaped hooves would, at long last, reveal themselves in domestication, albeit in the Paddock Paradise tracking system. This didn’t happen. If horse owners were doing anything, I wasn’t hearing about it. Further, I was dubious that the growing numbers of barefoot trimmers actually understood natural trim mechanics anyway; and, if they did, did they ply the trim within a Paddock Paradise environment? And, specifically, in a truly challenging Paddock Paradise that simulated many of the critical features found in the horse’s adaptive environment.

Then, in 2010, fate provided me with the opportunity to create such a Paddock Paradise, replete with horses trimmed only by me. The natural trim would be put to the test and I would see the results before my very eyes. Not every 6 weeks, but every day, and at any moment I might chose. Sometimes by the hour and at other times minute by minute. All I had to do was look, measure, and photograph, all at my discretion. And this is what I did for the next 8 years. I had, in fact, initiated a no-nonsense, evidential hoof study of the confluence of the natural trim as I do it, the arid rugged land of our Paddock Paradise, and the lifestyles of our horses who lived outdoors, in any weather, and on track, 24/7. What I learned from all of this even surprised me.

Some of the surprise did come at the hoof, and that I will share later in this book. But the biggest surprise of all, and another motivator for writing this book (and its companion, the Advanced Guidelines), came not from what I learned at the hoof, but from visitors who came to see what was happening, including persons who trim horses. Without exception, visitors were as perplexed by the hooves (including how I trimmed them), as I was the first time I set eyes on a wild horse hoof many years ago. It became unmistakably clear to me that it was the wildness of our horses’ hooves that left the indelible impression of consternation on visitors’ faces. If you’ve never seen such a thing before, and you are unable to describe accurately what’s before you because it was totally unexpected, a bewildered stare is the result. Which perfectly described what happened. After a year of this, I gave up trying to explain or point out anything about the hooves. They were an inexplicable abstraction to visitors. On the other hand, just the opportunity to see the dramatic landscape and views across the mountains and the horses running about on rocky ground was enough to dazzle and delight most people. But not all of them. Although a few more circumspect suggested that the horses surely were suffering in pain because they had been taught that horses had to wear shoes on such terrain or be lame. I left it at that, convinced that seeing is not believing is a human trait not yet rooted out of our species by Natural Selection.

Ironically, as the years went by, fewer and fewer people came to visit our Paddock Paradise. In the last year alone, there wasn’t a single visitor. Except me. But part of me was relieved. The tours had become a form of torture, Paddock Paradise a kind of incarceration, horses my wardens. We decided to close things down, and our Paddock Paradise was then dismantled. The horses were moved elsewhere across the U.S., and my business partner in the whole affair and I charted new paths together in the horse world. Not long ago, I paid a visit to the location of our Paddock Paradise, and it had become completely overgrown with wild plants. Not a vestige of what once was. Indeed, by looking, one would never know that such a great experiment was ever contrived and conducted there.

Thinking about that experience, I have come to realize that wildness can be a formidable barrier to understanding transformative events in the conscious mind that is saturated with, and only knows, domestication. What I learned was that the outcome of the natural trim — cast in a simulated adaptive environment of the equine species — is either totally incomprehensible or, at best, perplexing and given to misinterpretation or suspicion. Or at least by those who have not traveled among wild horses as I have, and studied their hooves at arm’s length in BLM wild horse corrals. You would not know what to look for, or what to expect. They are two different worlds of hooves, if not the animals themselves, divided by extraordinary differences in lifestyle. Questions I attempted to answer during our visitor (V) tours were revealing of this. Examples:

(V) What is that triangular thing in the back of the hoof? (JJ) That’s the frog. (V) I’ve never seen a frog that looked like that.

(V) His heel bulbs are on the ground; isn’t he sore? (JJ) Those aren’t the heel bulbs, that’s the frog. (V) I’ve never seen a frog that looked like heel bulbs.

(V) How do you trim that frog, it looks so different than my horse’s? (JJ) I don’t. (V) Then who does?. (JJ) No one does.

(V) That sole sure looks smooth and hard. How do you trim it to look like that? (JJ) I don’t, nor does anyone else. (V) Hmmm?

(V) Well, what do you trim then? (JJ) Only that which would wear away naturally in the wild. (V) What?

And so it went.

Regardless, Paddock Paradise, as I had hoped, breeched the barrier between wildness and domestication. But, in so doing, created a new abstraction, a void fraught with a steady stream of blank human faces. For those who thought they knew what a naturally shaped hoof looked like in domestication, only stared and gulped in dismay like the horse owner visitor who knew nothing at all about hooves. In the rare moments when I dared to trim in front of someone, it became clear that observers really had no idea what I was doing or why. Nor could I explain any of it that made real sense to them. But none of this is actually new. Others, who never even came, were unbridled in their opinions from afar, often making the craziest of claims about wild horses, wild hooves in domestication, and even about me and wild horses! I could write a book about it. Some had developed natural methods that produced hooves that were superior to wild horse hooves, though they had never seen one. Others claimed that all hooves self trim like wild horses, regardless of habitat, including what we know are laminitis traps! Some claimed to have trained for years with me, even though I have never heard of them. Even a particular BLM manager asserted to a colleague of mine that Jaime Jackson had never seen a wild horse or visited their BLM processing corrals or they personally would have seen me there. Of course, this official wasn’t born until several years after I left wild horse country for the last time, including the corral network they managed! Photographs of wranglers assisting me there four decades ago were as incomprehensible to naysayers as the wild horse hoof. On and on it goes. Insanity? Perhaps. At one point, I thought to myself, I am terrorizing people with facts, and I am personally responsible for an unprecedented Wild Hoof Derangement Syndrome. Maybe I was the one with Wild Horse Derangement Syndrome!

The natural trim, in my mind, had, in fact, metamorphosed from basic trim mechanics into a chess game of complex biodynamic responses to what I did to the hoof. If I did such and such, what would the response be? All of this simply laid outside the experience and understanding of visitors and even trimmers, and certainly farriers, who are acculturated to cause and effect in the moment — not in an abstract, 4th Dimensional chessboard that I anchored myself to. I no longer trimmed, but had become a facilitator of an unprecedented biological order that existed only within an alien environment I had chiseled off from the outside world — Paddock Paradise. While I truly appreciated Nature’s epiphanies, I also came to see this new order as a distressing conundrum. One that slapped me brutally in the face during the last teaching clinic of my career several years ago.

Before a small group of freshmen students, I had deluded myself into thinking that my mini-lecture on a particular application of the Theory of H° (Chapter 4) in my Paddock Paradise experiment was as obvious to them as the clear blue sky. Smiling away after completing my talk, I was greeted with the same blank visitor faces I had come to dread in the Paddock Paradise tours we gave. Clear as mud, came the verdict from one of the students. I had failed, and miserably so. I vowed then and there I would never teach again. And I haven’t. The theoretical biodynamics of H° can’t be taught, I argued before my business partner. She was sympathetic, but only to the extent that I was not to be comforted, Teach the mechanics then, and that will have to do.

Instead, I have written the Basic and Advanced Natural Trim Guidelines. They represent my current thinking about NHC and what I personally and specifically do as a professional NHC practitioner. They are very technical, and, in my opinion, truly constitute a discipline in their own right. Thus, while I have no intention of discouraging anyone from availing themselves to these guidelines, they are not intended for backyard trimmers who have no real interest in the pursuit of NHC science or the deeper and profound implications of the hoof’s inherent natural healing forces. Indeed, the hoof is biologically equipped to work with us, or fail in the worst of ways.

Yes, I have remained faithful to my moratorium on teaching clinics in the field, but am open to discussions with students and others who will reach beyond basic trim mechanics to the call and response world of a living organ that has its own message to communicate to us. My partner and I did concur that it will be up to the practitioner to bring the natural trim into the simulated adaptive environment of Equus caballus — Paddock Paradise. And from that least tarnished vantage point, ally themselves with the unseen healing forces of Nature that they may see for themselves, as I have seen, the clear blue sky.

CHAPTER ONE

What Is the Natural Trim?

The natural trim is a humane, barefoot trimming method that mimics the natural wear patterns of wild, free-roaming horses (aka, the mustang) of the U.S. Great Basin. This simple action immediately triggers healthy new growth patterns, that, when accompanied by other natural holistic practices also based on this wild horse model, eventually result in naturally shaped hooves. By all accounts, this transformation is truly a miracle of nature, but, technically, it is a perfectly natural outcome — a biodynamic response — of the specie’s adaptation, embedded in the DNA of every horse living today. ¹ Hence, one does not force the foot to look like a wild horse hoof, but simply facilitates its growth through the natural trim method.

Why the wild horse model?

I have been queried more times than I call recall: Why would the wild horse hoof serve as a model when domesticated horses aren’t wild? The short answer is because both the wild horse and their hooves are the pictures of health and soundness — characteristics we would, logically, want to emulate in our care of horses! But technically, other than differences in their respective lifestyles, both are exactly the same species. Paleo scientists using genetic markers (mitochondrialDNA²) have studied the evolutionary migrations, ecology, and biology of the horse and determined that today’s modern horse, Equus ferus caballus, is genetically indistinguishable from their wild, pre-domesticated antecedents, Equus ferus ferus, who arrived through evolutionary descent over one million years ago.³ Moreover, it is highly significant that the arid, high desert biome of the U.S. Great Basin, home to America’s wild horses, replicates the ancient adaptive environment of this species. What this means is that the Great Basin wild horse model provides us with a clear vision of what the specie’s adaptation means as a model for humane horse (and hoof) care.

It is also interesting, and a testimony to the overriding power of natural selection, that all of the domestication humans have heaped upon the horse over the past 10,000 years has not changed what nature created long before our two species ever began to mingle at the dawn of human civilization in Eurasia. In fact, the natural trim method presented here is based upon this inherent genetic stability of the species. I still find it hard to believe that, until I conducted my wild horse research literally thousands of years after the first horse was domesticated, the scientific basis for