Somehow I imagined that horseshoeing went something like this. Hang around with nice looking women, eat a little watermelon, do most of the work with one hand and a slightly insincere smile. Or is it a lecherous grin? They kind of look similar.
However, truth and reality often change places, mostly because one is always more painful than the other. What I got was...
"[On the first] Friday of the class, we started working on the frozen legs. We wrapped the bloody parts in burlap and tied a string to one end. The other end was tied to a post so we could hold the leg between our legs, which sort of imitated real life conditions. Those of us with money had a heavy leather apron, those without, bloody jeans."
[We did get some real horses to work on eventually. Maggots had eaten most of the dead legs anyway.] "There were three horses and all were caked with mud or manure or both. Two immediately pissed on our dirt floor, turning in into a kind of foamy mud with little steam vents next to each submerged leg. This made it a little hard to determine [the instructor's] interpretation of proper balance -- or maybe in this case, flotation."
It took another five years for things to improve much.
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