“You’re putting your life in the horse’s hands”

A look inside KPU’s farrier program

By: Monica Mah & Kyle Prince

Have you ever sat on Santa’s lap and asked for a pony? Well, you might not get to bring the horses home with you, but in Kwantlen Polytechnic University’s farrier program you’ll learn to care for horses’ hooves by trimming their nails and making horseshoes for them.

Sure, it may not be the magical pony adventure you dreamed of having in your youth, but people will actually pay you for these skills.

According to Gerard Laverty, an instructor for the farrier program, the courses include, “quite a bit of what people would consider blacksmithing,” but that the main focus is on making the shoes themselves.

Beyond the metal work, there’s much more that needs to be learned before you can deal with real horses. Laverty himself has more experience being a farrier than KPU has experience being an accredited university.

The students will have to go through quite a few anatomy and physiology lessons before getting to handle a live animal. One of the tests even involves taking apart a dead horse’s leg and putting it back together again.

“They’ll skin them and take them apart and eventually boil a set of bones down to just clean bones, and they’ll rebuild the leg with artificial tissues so they’ll have all the tendons and ligaments back on the leg,” explains Laverty. The idea here is that once the students have an intimate knowledge of the leg, they’ll know what to look for and have a good idea of what’s happening if something goes wrong.

And that’s just the first term project.

After that students really get their hands dirty by stepping into the blacksmithing portion of the course. With live animals, hot forges, and a whole host of other dangers around, Laverty insists that safety is the number one concern for himself and his students. The animals are also a concern; since the new students aren’t as precise as they could be, Laverty has to teach them the small margin of error.

“The border that we actually apply the shoe to is the fingernail but it’s about three-eighths of an inch thick, and if you went inside that it would be the same thing as going underneath your fingernail. That’s going to hurt.”

Although our stereotypical image of blacksmiths may call to mind big, sweaty men with the muscle required to forge iron and steel, Laverty dispels that notion pretty quickly.

Take, for his example, Desirae Delcourt.

“Desirae isn’t very tall, so you see these students that are all big six-foot-tall guys and they had to stand in a circle and watch her swing a hammer properly,” says Laverty.

“You have to be crazy to be in this program,” Delcourt says. “You’re putting your life in the horse’s hands.”

In spite of all the danger, Delcourt says she still loves the program and feels right at home as a farrier student. She enjoys the small class sizes and how the students all band together to form a family of sorts. Delcourt also mentions that each horse that comes in has it’s own personality and traits that you have to learn how to deal with.

“There’s a horse that comes in here that all the new people have to work with, and he whips his feet out and you swear he laughs,” she says. “You can see him chuckling to himself.”

She also speaks to the talent of Laverty. “Gerard is one-of-a-kind, he just knows everything. You ask him anything about a horse and right off the top of his head, doesn’t even hesitate. He’s like a horse whisperer, like when you’re having trouble with a horse, he goes under there and he does it all and the horse doesn’t move at all, and you’re like, ‘Wow, I want to be like him.’”