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About the Horse's Hoof Magazine

"The Horse's Hoof" is this informational website, as well as a quarterly printed 24 page magazine, published since 2000 (available in our online store). The Horse's Hoof, both magazine and website, is a generic barefoot resource for both horseowners and professionals, created in 2000 by barefoot advocates James & Yvonne Welz. The Horse's Hoof is for everyone! We welcome and encourage all methods and theories of barefoot trimming, and support all forms of hoof care that focus on creating healthier hooves over the long-term. We advocate finding compromises to create more natural, healthier living conditions for all horses. We believe that a good system of barefoot horse care is the ultimate prevention against most serious hoof ailments that affect our domestic horses.

While barefoot can be used successfully for the rehabilitation of unhealthy feet, our main focus is on preventing unhealthy feet in the first place - through education and awareness. It is our goal that barefoot becomes a widely accepted choice for performance horses around the world, with hooves raised carefully from birth to be superior in every way. It can be done - we have that information available now, and many people are putting that to action (see the Barefoot Performance page). Using this knowledge, no horse should ever need to suffer catastrophic founder. The younger you begin a barefoot program with your horse, the better (ideally, at birth), but most horse's hooves can be significantly improved, and even become healthy enough to do whatever activity you desire. Barefoot is NOT a fad, or anything new - after all, horses were born with bare hooves. Learning to keep them that way successfully is the job of the barefoot horse owner, and we're here to help. Healthy hooves create happy horses!

The Horse's Hoof includes a wide variety of information and links throughout this website, and in our magazine. The magazine contents are mostly different from the website, though we do include some articles on here from past issues (Click here for the Contents List). You will find articles and information from and about all the leading experts in the field, including Jaime Jackson, Dr. Robert Bower, Dr. Hiltrud Strasser, Pete Ramey, KC La Pierre, and many others, as well as experiences and stories from various practitioners and owners. We include a wide variety of material, some of it contradictory, as there are many differences of opinion - and we don't personally agree with everything we publish. We encourage and promote this interchange, because we feel this is what will kick barefoot hoofcare up to the next level!

If you would like to read the personal opinions of James & Yvonne Welz, please visit our section (see left bar), in particular, Hoof Corner. Look for our separate, new "membership hoofcare educational website," Hoof Help Online (www.HoofHelpOnline.com) coming in 2010, which will provide detailed how-to trimming instructions and advice through a wide variety of media, and will present our ideas and philosophies on hoofcare that we have personally developed over the past decade.

Barefoot hoofcare is a young, developing art and science. There is so much ahead to discover. After nearly 20 years of hoof study, the leading hoof researcher in the U.S., Dr. Robert Bowker, says, "There is so much that we still don't know about the hoof!"

THH Quarterly Magazine Schedule

On the very first day of every "season," the PDF online version is released - PDF subscribers will receive an email with download instructions that very day. Then the hard copy issue ships out for printing and mailing. This usually takes a couple weeks, and then it is mailed out by bulk mail. So you can count on receiving each printed issue on the following month after the first day of every new season: 1st day of Spring is in March; Spring printed issue mails in April. 1st day of Summer is in June; Summer printed issue mails in July. 1st day of Fall is in September; Fall printed issue mails in October. 1st day of Winter is in December; Winter printed issue mails in January.