Popular farrier bitten, smitten shoeing horses

Sam's lips quiver as they move closer to the back of Jason's neck.

Feeling Sam's heavy breathing, Jason, who's giving Sam a pedicure, wards off what might have been a slobbery kiss with a softly thrown elbow.

"No, sweetheart," Jason says.

Sam hesitates, licks his lips, and once again makes a seemingly affectionate move on Jason's neck.

"No means no, I reckon," Jason says again, calmly shrugging off the apparent tenderness.

Spurned, Sam shudders, whinnies and then begins a seemingly endless offering of fertilizer.

"Oh, Sam," Jason says, hustling away from the quarter horse's business.

When you trim overgrown hooves and shoe horses for a living the way Jason Terrell does, you get up close and personal with four-legged beauties in ways most people can't imagine.

Still, Terrell's starched denim shirt, blue jeans and tan boots showed no evidence that Sam did a number on him.

"I prefer a horse's lips not to be touching me," the 32-year-old Terrell says laughing as he stands in a barn in the northwest Las Vegas Valley. "I don't care how gentle the horse seems. One time I got bit and the horse left teeth marks. It hurt like hell."

Terrell is paid about $60,000 a year as a farrier, trained in hoof care and horseshoeing. He carries the tools of his trade, including a propane-fueled forge, nails, hammers, knives, rasps (large files) and a huge assortment of shoes, in a trailer behind his four-wheel drive Dodge Ram.

Despite the urbanization of Southern Nevada, there are plenty of horses that need something other than a Foot Locker for their shoeing needs.

Terrell says he could work sunup to sundown seven days a week, but he only works five days a week, eight hours a day, so he has energy to ride his own horses and to do some boot scootin' boogie at Stoney's Rockin' Country.

He says he's shoed horses for Wayne Newton in Nevada and for George Foreman in Texas.

Although statistics on the number of domesticated horses around Las Vegas aren't exact, Don Bamberry, a state brand inspector, says estimates of around 40,000 to 50,000 "are in the ballpark."

"Some people are just shocked that I make money at what I do," says Terrell, his Copenhagen tobacco spit blending in with the steamy horse droppings. "They don't realize a horse has to have its hooves trimmed every six or eight weeks. They seriously thought that once you put shoes on a horse it was forever."

Terrell charges about $120 to shoe a horse. He grew up in Louisiana and Texas, favoring what he calls the "cowboy life," which means understanding the ways of the West, including knowing that it's not wise to squat with your spurs on.

He came to Las Vegas for a woman and has stayed for seven years, longer than the relationship lasted.

"I reckon I've stayed because business is good," he says, lifting his straw cowboy hat to scratch his head. "To be honest with you, sir, Las Vegas is getting too damn big."

The cowboy life, he says, also means he has the freedom not to punch a time clock.

"I think it would kill me to do that," he says. "I have to make my appointments, but at least I don't have someone telling me I have to be at work at 8 and leave at 5."

It takes Terrell, who attended a farrier school in north Texas, a little more than an hour to make trims and put four shoes on a horse, an animal that commonly weighs more than 1,000 pounds. What often makes or breaks the fate of a horse are the hooves that support the columns of thin and elongated bone that are its legs. Terrell studies them intensely, making sure the horse's weight is properly supported.

"He works very well with veterinarians who take X-rays to deal with lameness," says Dr. Garth Lamb, whose veterinary practice specializes in horses. "He'll show up and we'll shoot X-rays from the side and front, and we'll decide how we should adjust the shoeing technique. For a lot of lameness work, we rely on shoers. Good ones like Jason are hard to come by."

To correct a disparity in the landing and load bearing areas of a hoof, it is common for Terrell to carefully pare the bottom of a hoof with a knife.

Lamb says he has long noted how well Terrell, a well-muscled 6 foot, 185 pounds, gets along with all kinds of horses.

"You can lose your patience with a horse and want to hit it with a hammer," Lamb says. "But he's a great horseman. He simply knows how to handle them."

Within the tightly knit horse performance community, Terrell's reputation has grown so much that a horse owner in Portland, Ore., flies him out every eight weeks to shoe horses there.

Terrell brings along a sound system that he cranks up in his trailer before he shoes horses. He knows all the words to George Jones' "He Stopped Loving Her Today" and Merle Haggard's "Okie from Muskogee."

"Music gives me peace and keeps me company, I reckon," Terrell says.

When performed correctly, shoeing a horse is painless. On Sam, Terrell trims the insensitive part of the hoof, the same area into which he will later drive nails.

Before shoeing Sam, Terrell removes the old shoe using pincers or shoe pullers and trims the hoof wall with nippers, a sharp plierslike tool.

Two steel shoes are heated in Terrell's portable forge to about 2,000 degrees and then beat into shape on an anvil, much as farriers have done for centuries.

Though the technique is old, the shoes reflect today's technical advancements, all aimed at correcting problems caused by injury, disease or conformational defects that relate to a horse's bone structure, muscle system and body proportions.

After using water to cool Sam's shoes, Terrell nails them on.

As he uses a rasp to smooth the edge of the hoof where it meets the shoe, Terrell talks with Sam.

"You're feeling better now, aren't you?" he says.

Sam proceeds to dispense a large amount of urine, and Terrell scrambles out of the way, staying dry.

"When I'm underneath them, I can feel by their muscles what they're about to do," he says.

Tom Caywood, who specializes in training Western performance horses, was one of Terrell's first customers in Nevada. He's also Sam's owner.

"Jason uses different techniques," says Caywood, who has a huge barn full of horses that Terrell shoes. "He's fixed quite a few of ours who were lame. He could figure out what caused it. He goes to clinics to find out. There's none better."

Caywood says Terrell has even taught him some new vocabulary.

"He's always talking about 'comfortability' in horses, and I never heard that before," Caywood says. "But then I heard President Bush using it, so I guess it must be a Texas thing."

Terrell may not be shoeing horses today had he had more comfortability in rodeo, which he tried after getting out of high school.

"One day I was on a buckin' horse in Texas and I got throwed and broke three ribs on a Friday," he says.

"Then on Saturday I broke two more ribs on the other side. As I was laying there, I said, 'Lord, if you'll let me get through this, I promise you I won't do this any more.' Well, the Lord let me get through it, and I haven't done it any more. I reckon I'll be a farrier for the rest of my life. I sure hope so."

Contact reporter Paul Harasim at pharasim @reviewjournal.com or (702) 387-2908.