Gaited Horses and Shoeing

A gaited horse should be shod or trimmed if barefoot,  like a regular horse pertaining to angles. Many people do use the shoeing to make their gait changed. They change angles if pacey or trotty, and a heavy shoe will cause the horse to lift it's leg higher. Therefore change the foot fall of the gait. So many use this to get the gait instead of properly training the horse to gait which is a much longer process. If the horse is well trained and talented, it will gait with shoes or without shoes. If it was not trained to gait correctly or you do not know how to ride a gaited horse, then when you change the shoes or angles, the horse may change his gait.

The only special things I do with shoeing, is to change the shoe shape if the horse tends to trip and to use studs if riding on the road so the horse does not slip and fall.

Watch the videos below and you can see what the different weight of shoe does to the horses gait.

This is Cash with a lite shod shoe- so a heavier shoe, before I bought him for a client.

When the shoes came off, he was a very pacey horse, so I  retrained him to gait with a regular shoe, no extra weight.

Now this is him 9 years later, barefoot. He has had some time off, so got out of shape and pacey, as they have to be in condition to gait well. So now barefoot he still can gait nicely and does not any special gimmicks. He was pacey when brought back in to me and this is just after 2 weeks of retraining.

This video shows the horse's movement with different weights of the horse's shoe. If you have an ex-show horse, you can see what he may have had done to train him to gait. If you are deciding to show, you can see what they are looking for in the certain classes. I do not agree with heavy shoes or heavy weights to make the horse gait, but  I still believe it is important to see especially when you are looking to buy a horse. Why ? Because this will help you to recognize when the horse has a heavy shoe on to help him gait.