A Meydan farrier shoes a lead pony ahead of the 2014 Dubai World Cup. Daily headlines from the UAE and around the world brought to you by Gulf News. See more at: http://gulfnews.com/gntv
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00I like working with horses. I always have. I like meeting people. You get to meet heaps
00:13of people here in Dubai. If you're going to shoe horses, this is probably the best place
00:21in the world to do it. Just placing the shoe on now and just letting the glue slightly
00:33harden and then we'll nail it on from there. You need to have a pretty good, solid idea
00:43of anatomy, obviously, so you can understand what's happening inside, what little changes
00:48we'll make to the horse's gait, to its overall performance, what you can see happening before
00:54it happens. Stuff like the thermo camera has given us great insight into pre-empting issues
01:01that happen. You can see hot spots way before you could feel them with your hand or they
01:06showed up in a lameness trot exam or one of those sort of things. That's given us a far
01:12greater depth of knowledge. There's a lot of new technology coming along that's helped
01:16us. So what we're doing now is just the digital hook gauge, measuring what angles these feet
01:22are and then what angles we need to do to get them balanced. Depending on what angles
01:27that are, depending on how high it is, and then just gives you a digital reading so you're
01:34not having to look at it. The tapita has no traction on it at all. It has nails, so the
01:44nails sit nice and deep in here, so there's no actual traction. So in a dirt shoe, this
01:51piece of metal plate will actually sit up about three or four mils as traction, but
01:56on the turf and the tapita which we run on World Cup night, it will have none. If the
02:02track is a bit stickier, as in deeper and the foot's not sliding as much, you still
02:09want to have a certain degree of slide in the foot. When the foot slides, it actually
02:14takes some of the compression out. Where it stops, the joint actually takes most of it.
02:19So yeah, having less traction helps with some of the sliding. This time of year, you do
02:34between about 100 and 150 horses a month on a rotation, on a monthly race. A lot of
02:39horses coming in and out. Some horses are already shod, and so it's more of a maintenance
02:44ration. And then obviously we're working at all the race meets as well, just in case something
02:48goes wrong and we're there to help out. You put the nail in too deep, that's your fingernail
02:59and that's where the nail's meant to run, right up there. If you do it too deep, there's your bone,
03:05it's like me putting it straight under your fingernail. At this level, you cannot leave