Barefoot v. Steel

[guest@endurance.net]

K S SWIGART   katswig@earthlink.net

Karen Chaton said:

>>But in Kat's post she claims that her
>>horses naturally travel 100 miles a day in her pasture.  So which is
>>it? My self I would believe Kat, in that horses travel that far in a
>>day, naturally, while they are grazing and going to water.
>
>Only if that was a typo!  Wild horses go between 20 and 30 miles a day.
I
>can speak from experience when I say that the wild horses feet here look
>like hell.  They are broken, chipped, split and a lot of them are lame as
>all get out.  Doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that if the
>wild horses feet look like that, then what would my horses feet look like
>if I took their shoes off and rode them even longer distances over the
same
>country?

It wasn't a typo, it was a misquote. I never said that my horses
cover 100 miles a day.  I said that my horses cover about
100 miles in FIVE days (which is on the low end of your 20-30 miles a
day, but then my horses only have about 100 acres to roam on...and don't
have to go so far for food and water).  In my spying on my horses, I
put them in the 15 - 25 miles a day range.  And for the ones for whom
this amount of travel out paces their growth, I put shoes on them
(because NONE of the alternatives to steel shoes are adequate for
100% turn out).

kat
Orange County, Calif.