Caballo Barefoot Trimming offers holistic solutions to hoofcare. Caballo Equine Body Work offers you the best in equine performance enhancement.
28/01/2025
It's been a while so I thought to do a re-introduction post seeing this year is my 20th year of working in the hoofcare industry. What started as a situation that made no sense to me at the time, ended up in a career path that I never thought I'd end up on. It's been a wild ride constantly filled with ups and downs, challenges, and many satisfying victories.
Back in 2005 my parents bought me my first horse, a Thoroughbred, who lived in the mountains and was pretty sound for what she lived and walked on. I instinctively preferred a horse barefoot and that's honestly all I really knew about hooves.
Her new life was at the coast, on lush green grazing and soft going, yet each time the farrier trimmed her she was very sore for days on end. I was presented with the solution: shoes. But that didn't make sense, why was it that she was sore on soft going with regular trimming and sound on pretty harsh going when she was barely ever trimmed?
I refused the offer of shoes and bought hoof boots. I fired my farrier but didn't really know where to turn from there. Thanks to the help of a few farriers in my area and the assistance of Lisa Huhn and Anne-Louise Macdonald from Equinextion over the following years (at a distance, but nevertheless) I kept my horse sound and comfortable. She was never shod, and nor was any horse I owned thereafter. In fact, I pulled shoes off all of them successfully, and they were all Thoroughbreds.
I quickly learned that to be successful at keeping horses barefoot, a holistic approach needed to be adopted. I was educated on appropriate diet for growing healthy hooves, how posture/body issues tie into the greater scheme of things, and how very important hygiene and movement are if one is to succeed. I learned what to do when things fail even after trying everything else, especially where hooves and suffered some permanent damage (enter hoof boots and composite shoes) and how we still wouldn't necessarily have to get those horses shod in metal.
While I am pretty set on working with a certain formula to get horses barefoot, I've become a little less dogmatic about it over the years, realizing that sometimes there is some wiggle room for error in the formula, but it is small and for some horses the small wiggle can be to their detriment, and for others it can be insignificant.
In 2019 my husband Giacomo joined our business shortly after completing his barefoot trimming courses with Ida Hammer in USA. I had trained him some years prior to this and what was his part-time business before we married very quickly became full-time, helping us to grow substantially and help many more horses.
In 2024 we and our colleague Theo Janssen founded the Barefoot Trimmer's Association of South Africa, realizing that there is a dire need for education in our industry, as well as the offering of formal qualifications that will in the future be easily accessible to South Africans.
Fast-forward to the year 2025 and we are still at what we love doing, splitting our lives between our peaceful home in the Eastern Cape and Gauteng, which offer various different climates and unique challenges. We are forever learning, growing and we retain an open-mind towards new developments in the hoofcare world.
Thank you to all of our supportive clients who have stuck with us loyally over the years, as well as to my family who have supported me through all sorts of seemingly "wild at the time" ideas since I was very young. I am grateful I was never pushed into a certain direction, always encouraged to ask "why" and to challenge ideas before making up my mind about something.
