GREENFIELD — When Greenfield resident Chris Sabin first laid eyes on Rare Exception, a then 14-year-old gelding at the Cheshire Fair horse show, he saw untapped potential.
The problem was immediately apparent to Sabin, who works as a farrier, trimming and shoeing horses’ hooves.
“I saw this horse performing and he looked lame. He was bobbing his head up and down and being the farrier that I am, I was looking at his feet and I saw that his feet looked incorrect,” he recalled. “He was extremely dominant on one side and it looked like the farrier, to me, wasn’t helping the horse.”
After the show was over, Sabin asked if Rare Exception, whose barn name is Rex, was for sale, and ended up buying him a month later, working on his hooves until they matched up.
Now, two years have passed and in that time, Rare Exception has won blue ribbons around the northeast, qualified to go to the World’s Championship Horse Show in Louisville, Ky., and tripled in value.
“Now he’s a happy camper, he does his job well,” Sabin said. “I said if I ever see an American Saddlebred that’s a fixer upper, sort of like people flipping houses, and I could afford to buy it and do it, I should do it. When I saw him and saw his situation with his feet and knew I could afford to do it, that’s why I did it.”
It’s successes like these that Sabin said make him love his job.
“They say no hoof, no horse, and that is the truth,” he said. “I put 110 percent into it and want that horse to be as comfortable as it can be.”
Sabin’s love for horses began when he was 8 years old. His aunt had bought a horse for her daughter, and in order to afford to keep it, began working for a professional trainer in Whately.
“I would go and help her out every weekend and every summer vacation, any spare time I had,” Sabin said.
In exchange, he would get riding lessons and began showing the horse in western pleasure. After high school, Sabin went on to become a full-time professional trainer and worked for a stable in Richmond for three years, training top Morgan horses that competed across the Northeast.
From there he left to work on his own for several years, and a client of his bought a 2-year-old gelding named Salem Shazam, which went on to win its class by unanimous decision in the 1990 Morgan World’s Championships in Oklahoma City. Sabin said he had the top farrier in the northeast working for him at the time, but the following year the farrier changed something in the horse’s shoeing and when they returned to Oklahoma City, Salem Shazam didn’t even get a ribbon.
“We were both very shell-shocked,” Sabin said.
He learned from his veterinarian that the farrier had incorrectly placed a wedge in the horse’s hind foot, which impeded its performance, and from there took a strong interest in becoming a farrier.
A number of years later, after working for another stable in New Hampshire and leaving the industry for a period of time after his aunt died, Sabin decided to enroll in a 21-week program at the Kentucky Horseshoeing School. There, the students learned on dead legs from a slaughterhouse, which were delivered to the school every Thursday.
“You would go and pick out your legs the night before and let them thaw out, and then you could trim the hoof and shoe the hoof and pull the shoe off the hoof,” Sabin said. “Some of the students there would grab these perfectly well-manicured hooves where you didn’t have to do much work to them. I would grab some gnarly, club footed, long, distorted hooves.”
“I was there to learn, not to just make it easy,” he added.
The program also required learning the anatomy of the legs from the shoulder and hip down, including the different tendons, ligaments and bones.
Sabin’s son Alex, now 8, was born just after he got home and through his connections in the industry, Sabin was able to start shoeing several friends’ horses.
“It eventually grew enough where now it’s my full time job,” he said.
Today, he works on 65 to 70 horses in a two-hour radius of Greenfield, and said he’s still taking new clients. Sabin trims and shoes all disciplines and breeds of horse and works out of an enclosed trailer he can tow wherever the job takes him.
Last August, Sabin took a trip to Louisville with his son and girlfriend to show Rare Exception in the World’s Championship Horse Show, which he said has always been on his bucket list. Although they didn’t get a ribbon, he said they had a good go. Now his son has also taken an interest in horses, and showed Rare Exception in his first practice show two weeks ago. He plans to show him next month at the Eastern States Exposition.
“It’s definitely a family affair,” Sabin said.
Sabin’s business can be found on Facebook www.facebook.com/ChrisSabinFarrier.
You can reach Aviva Luttrell at:
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