It’s 8:18 a.m. as Stanley Vasques drives his maroon Ford short bed truck up the winding road toward Keapana country. Vasques steps down and begins to set up his workspace as one of a handful of farriers working on Kaua‘i.
A farrier specializes in hoof care on horses. The skills required include trimming and rasping the horses hooves and custom fitting the shoes.
Vasques sets up his temporary workshop by pulling up a custom steel sidewall on his truck cab providing shade and a place to store his tools. Next he sets up his anvil on a stand and pulls equipment from the truck.
This morning Vasques is welcomed by ranch hand Cris Schump, who is leading a solid black quarter horse mix and a buckskin stallion for their quarterly set of horse shoes.
“Stanley is a genuine treasure on Kaua‘i and we feel lucky to have him working on our horses,” Schunp said as she tied off the first horse.
Vasques didn’t start out as a farrier though.
In 1968 he rode up Waimea Canyon to go hunting with friends but stones on the trail made it impossible for the horse to continue without shoes.
“Back then, nevah had anybody to shoe da hosses,” he said.
So Vasques enrolled in Blacksmith school in Oklahoma.
“At first I wasn’t sure about leaving fo’ school, but my wife encourage me and give me the confidence to go,” he said.
His business took off as soon as he returned.
“Nevah get welders in the old days so blacksmiths would work metal into just about anything,” he said. “Tony Arruda was the last Blacksmith for Lihu‘e plantation and he used to shoe the race horses for the racetrack at Wailua. Back then he tried to explain horse shoeing to me but it’s hard to understand until you go school.”
At the school Vasques and his class were assigned their own forge and every morning a truck rolled in with horses to shoe.
“It’s so important to shoe a horse correctly, because you can mess that horse up,” he said. “You look at the angle of the shoulder, the hoof and the bone and dress the hoof to the right angle. After I dress the hoof, I work the iron shoe so it fits correctly and then nail it to the hoof.”
Shoeing horses is not a dangerous job, however the job is not wholly without risk. This is where the expression “horse sense” comes into play.
“Anyone can learn how for shoe a horse, but they also need to know the animal,” Vasques said. “I was lucky ‘cause my father had horses and I was raised with them so I can feel the animal before it moves.”
