The Lockdown Farriery Podcast

Daniel Bennett AWCF CertEd hosts this farriery podcast, and its titles follow a plain pattern: LFP, a number, then a guest's name or a subject. Guests keep their post-nominal letters in those titles, from Stephen Hill FWCF and Tom Smith FWCF to Abby Bunyard AWCF and Kelvin Lymer DipWCF. Most of what follows is two-way conversation, though one entry is a recorded webinar. Competition runs through it. The same snatch of audio, insisting that every single thing is a contributing factor to winning or losing, surfaces near the top of several episodes. In the episode with Abby Bunyard AWCF, the talk covers the international running in tandem with bladesmithing and blacksmith contests, and a Saturday so busy that the crowd at a tent front cut off the airflow around the portable coke forges. Elsewhere in that episode, rain floods the site and a test surface gets likened to prodding a fast-food milkshake with a plastic straw. LFP 48 Social Licence & Farriery Competitions keeps the setting but turns the lens outward. A quiet yard horse can behave out of character in an unfamiliar venue, and a farrier shooing it away with a wave of the arms can alarm an onlooker without horse knowledge. The remedy offered is guidelines, experienced stewards and a designated welfare person. Most competitors, the episode holds, carry themselves with professionalism and sportsmanship; the trouble is that the rare bad moment is the one that goes viral. That worry about public perception carries into LFP 49 BFBA SLO Webinar with Daniel Bennett AWCF CertEd. The webinar grants that campaign groups who believe animals should live wild or simply be pets are very good at what they do, but calls some of their material fake news or edited for maximum impact. It also takes in footage of a dressage champion whipping a horse, which surfaced days before the Paris Olympics. Regulation is the other public-facing subject. The conversation with Tom Smith FWCF argues for a broad spread of candidates, young as well as experienced, to put themselves forward in an election, and describes regulators as protecting the public and horses by occupying a gap. One speaker admits finding the formality hard, and the verdict on regulation weighs good against bad before settling on a lot of good. The trade's history gets the same frankness. In the episode with Stephen Hill FWCF, speakers discuss grandfather's rights under the Registration Act, people training others with nothing to train them with, and a sense that farriery only began to lift its head in the mid-90s. The era of machine-made concave shoes is named as the time when people stopped looking closely at shoe wear. A clinical note surfaces in LFP 38 Innovative 3d Hoofcare options with Kelvin Lymer DipWCF: a bone cyst that changed weight bearing, and an admission that farriers have missed such early signs. A good first listen is the social licence episode, which holds the show's two instincts together: defending the craft where it is misread, and conceding that bad moments do happen.