February 23, 2019 – Courtesy of Maryse Zeidler CBC News
It’s a chilly, sunny afternoon at Twin Oaks Farm in south Richmond, B.C., and Jeri Sparshu is putting away his tools while a tall horse named Pedro keeps an eye on him from a stall.
Sparshu, 42, has just finished working on Pedro — taking off his horseshoes, trimming his hooves, and putting his horseshoes back on.
Horseshoers, formally known as farriers, practice one of the oldest trades in the world.
“Horses have been a part of humanity’s conquests and domestication since we started working with them,” Sparshu says. “There’s evidence of [horseshoeing] being up to 3,000 years old.”
Traditionally, farriers learn through apprenticeships. At the Cloverdale campus of Kwantlen Polytechnic University, they can kickstart their career at one of Canada’s two accredited certificate programs.
But Kwantlen says it’s cutting off registration for the farrier program because click to continue reading.