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Not all of the farrier's work is with equines, either. Wildenstein says he treats "pigs, cows, calves, whatever," using adhesives and other materials. He has had the opportunity to trim up some grizzly bears and a tiger. He also trimmed the beak of a toucan once. When asked if he just improvises in such cases, he responds with a bemused smile, "Improvise? What do you mean? A claw is a claw; a nail is a nail. It's all keratinous tissue." Back in his shop a few weeks before his trip to England, Wildenstein is drawing a bit of a crowd while he works on Karen Trotter's Morgan, Fury. Fury has a fracture down the middle of the coffin bone in his right hind hoof, and Wildenstein has made him a shoe with a rim all around that prevents the hoof from expanding when it bears weight. In this way the hoof acts as a cast to support the fractured bone. "It has to fit so perfectly," says Trotter. "Even though it's large and heavy, this is a fine, fine piece of art." She considers and then adds, "Better than art." It is the most difficult shoe there is to make, and for this reason Wildenstein chose to make one for the fellowship examination. "If you have a therapeutic shoeing need, if you need some sort of special shoe put on a horse, Mike is the one to go to," says Fury's veterinarian, Jeff LaPoint, DVM '93 of Finger Lakes Equine Practice, who is standing by to consult. "If you have a laminitic horse, a horse that is trying to lose its hoof, this is the person to bring the horse to. I tell my clients when I send them to Mike that it's like going to the Ferrari dealer instead of your Volkswagen dealer. It's just a much higher level of analysis and fine-tuning." Wildenstein gets enough invitations to lecture that he could be on the road every weekend, but he holds to a schedule of once a month, flying all over the country. He makes at least two lecture trips to Europe every year. He has one book published and another in the works; he is co-writing it in Danish with his collaborator and translating it into English for publication here. He has served as an examiner in the U.S. and Denmark, and he has now been invited to help judge the associateship and fellowship examinations of the Worshipful Company of Farriers. He estimates that he gets 30 calls per day for consultations, whether from down the road or the other side of the world. Alumni who know him from their student days call for advice while out on calls; practitioners send him radiographs and digital images on a regular basis. "Yesterday we had a call from Brazil, about a laminitic racehorse, and another from Israel. No foreign ones today, though," he says with a smile. "Pennsylvania was the furthest away." Of the 35,000 to 40,000 farriers in the U.S., Wildenstein trains only nine per year, three at a time. He is limited by the dimensions of a shop built in 1957, a period when the horse census was at a low ebb, and designed with only one farrier and one student in mind. "I send out a lot of 'Dear John' letters," he says. He knows how it feels to get one. It took him three years to gain entrance into Cornell's program, and then only after he had given up and enrolled in a draft-horse course at the agricultural college in Truro, Nova Scotia, Canada's easternmost maritime province. He was the first American to venture that way. His instructor there recognized his ability and referred him back to Cornell, and he was promised a spot in the farriery course some months later. Following his Cornell training, Wildenstein spent several months in Connecticut with the Kriz brothers, farriers to the Budweiser Clydesdales. When spring came, he went out on his own, specializing in draft show horses and traveling the country. Six years later he moved to Denmark with his new wife, Gry, a Danish veterinarian. There he had the honor of serving as farrier to the Danish state warmblood stallions, from which their equine Olympic competitors are chosen, and had the unforgettable experience of giving a circus elephant a pedicure. He returned to the U.S. in 1991 to begin his present position at Cornell. Wildenstein got his first training from his grandfather, who had shod horses in the early 1900s. On his grandfather's farm he learned how to work with draft horses, something he still does at home on his own farm. He financed his college education by shoeing horses and by using his own draft horses to take timber out of remote wooded areas in New York and New England. He especially remembers taking horses across the ice on New Hampshire's largest lake, Winnipesaukee, to haul fallen timber off several islands.
Wildenstein's work now is all about saving horses, and he probably saves as many of them from euthanasia as he once saved people from drowning. But he emphasizes that happy endings always involve teamwork with the clinicians in the Cornell University Hospital for Animals. "It's always a group of people who make it happen," he says. He tells of one client who is still bringing her horse to him, years after the animal's laminitis was successfully treated. "Nine years ago her local veterinarians told her she needed to put the horse down," he says. "Last year she won a national championship with the horse." Alta Leuschner is another true believer. Her lovely Peruvian paso, Nina, is doing better than anyone expected after developing a disastrous case of laminitis. It has been only four months since surgeon Michael Schramme, an assistant professor in Cornell's Equine Hospital, performed a dorsal hoofwall resection, but Nina is surprisingly far along in her recovery. After Schramme removed a good part of her hoof, Wildenstein created a partial shoe designed to keep weight off the injured section and began the careful process of debridement necessary to prevent repeated abcesses from developing as the hoof gradually healed. "The day we came to Cornell and got connected with Mike was the best day of Nina's life, really," says Leuschner. "He has saved her life. Even Dr. Schramme says it's a miracle the way she has progressed." Nina's foot is still tender, and she gently registers discomfort from the concussion of the hammer strikes. Wildenstein pounds four nails as rapidly as possible and twists off their points where they protrude outward through the hoof wall. Before filing them down and nailing the next shoe, he reaches up into the paso's extravagantly long mane and begins massaging a point near the top of her head, casually conversing all the while in his usual soothing tone. The horse's head lowers and her shoulder blades droop just as surely as if she had been given a sedative. Every horse has a special spot where she likes to be petted, and Wildenstein knows Nina's. The horse relaxes, and he continues his work. When he has finished shoeing her, Wildenstein encourages everyone to go out to Nina's trailer and have a look at her magnificent tack. Hanging there awaiting her recovery are a silver-beaded bridle and a tall, shapely saddle wrapped in chased silver and hung with silver stirrups and elaborately tooled leather skirts. So much hope is invested in this horse. It could not have been placed in better hands.
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A very high level of forging ability, particularly in the area of corrective and remedial shoes, to be demonstrated by submitting a representative selection of corrective / remedial shoes that the candidate has prepared in advance and by producing within one hour a shoe according to the examiner's specifications to fit a specimen hoof;
Paton points out that Wildenstein also works in other media besides steel. "He makes braces for foals with crooked legs out of PVC pipe. He can go where knowledge of anatomy and biomechanics meet practical stuff like: How do you melt PVC? How much time do you have to move it around before it hardens? How do you make sure that it won't rub the baby's fur?"
As if dragging trees for miles across a frozen lake with heavy horses were not enough to cause nightmares, Wildenstein had previously spent two years in the Coast Guard training cold-water survival instructors in Maine. The teaching itself wasn't the hard part. "When I wasn't teaching I was jumping out of helicopters and pulling in people," he says calmly. "I worked from Long Island to the Canadian border, so anytime there was a rescue, they'd pick me up and away we'd go." He estimates that he made 200 trips per year. More often than not, those were retrieval, not rescue, missions; anyone who was already in the water was likely to die of exposure before he could get there. Still, he was able to save a good number of people by being lowered onto sinking boats and hooking their passengers to a rope suspended from the helicopter. He did this work untethered. "It makes you weird for a while," he says honestly. "It's very hard."