BY ANDY TAYLOR
Montgomery County Chronicle

After almost 40 years of hammering around on the hooves of horses, you could say that Dennis Ernest has developed a good dose of horse sense.

Ernest, a lifelong Caney resident, is a professional farrier — a person who applies iron shoes to horse hooves. It’s an ancient profession . . . but one that requires a unique ability to handle the feet of 1,000 pound equines.

“A weak mind and a strong back: that’s what we in the profession say is required to be a horseshoer,” said Ernest laughingly while talking to several dozen Caney Valley High School FFA students during a demonstration last Friday.

His father, the late Rex Ernest, showed Dennis the complex art of shoeing a horse when Dennis was a teenager. At age 15, Dennis went solo with his first shoe job.

“I was really nervous,” he said, recalling that first time he applied iron shoes to hooves.

An industrial engineer by training, Ernest stopped developing new gadgetry in the mid 1980s and turned his attention to caring for horses. Today, he travels across the region, where his pickup truck serves as his office. His truck bed contains a small anvil for hammering and flattening shoes. A wooden box — worn and splintered from constant use — is filled with shoes of different sizes.

But, the bulk of the work of a farrier is spent in a stooped position — with a horse leg stuck firmly between the farrier’s thighs — as he rids a horse of old shoes, files and cleans the hoof, and hammers a new shoe into place.

The job can be back-breaking labor — literally. However, Ernest said farriers get accustom to squatting in awkward positions.

It’s ironic that the very person who spends each day squatting and dipping around the feet of horses is also responsible for adjusting kinks in a horse’s frame. In recent years, Ernest has become a horse chiropractor — a new trend in equine care. Horses are no different than humans, he said. Their spine shifts constantly, sometimes causing discomfort that can lead to other problems.

“If you have a horse that ropes a 600-pound steer, that horse is going to have to go through a lot of stress to pull that steer,” he said. “That’s bound to have an effect on the horse’s spine.”

During last Friday’s demonstration, Ernest provided a demonstration of a horse adjustment. He gently felt both sides of the horse’s neck and ran his fingers down both sides of the horse’s back to find areas requiring adjustment. And, with a tug of the horse halter and a firm hand on the horse’s body, the horse’s bones began to pop and move back into place.

“Once the bones are back into place, that horse will drop his head, start to lick, and show a softer eye,” he said. “Those are the tell-tale signs that they are finally adjusted. It’s almost like they are saying ‘Thank you for adjusting me.’”

Now that he has become well versed into chiropractic medicine for horses, Ernest said he feels as if he needs to adjust horses all the time.

“When I drive along the highway and see a horse standing in a pasture, I can see automatically that it needs adjusted,” he said. “I feel like I need to jump out of my truck and run over and give it an adjustment.”

And, such innate desire to help those animals is why Ernest has developed a case of horse sense.

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