What Does Holistic Mean?
The term "holistic" is heard more and more today. But what does it mean? To understand that, let's first look at what would be termed "conventional." Conventional is what you're probably used to in all phases of dealing with horses, whether from the standpoint of health care, hoof care, or training and horsemanship. It's important to realize that conventional includes not only farriery and horseshoes but also the natural hoof care movement. Conventional operates on the principle of "reductionism," which means that the whole is the sum of the individual parts. In order to understand something, you break it down into parts and then understand the parts ... and from this understanding of the parts, you have an understanding of the whole. If you need to understand something better, you break it down into smaller parts. This is the approach of experimental science, and science has developed ways of breaking things down into very small parts in an effort to better understand the whole. Reductionism depends on looking and measuring, whether that looking is with the eyes, with an electron microscope, an MRI, or whatever.
In contrast with reductionism, "holistic" means that the whole is greater than the sum of the individual parts. The holistic principle says that the individual parts all working together create a "synergy" which is more than just the sum of the parts. In order to understand something better, you have to try to understand the synergy, and not the individual parts, because the synergy is only present in the whole, not in the individual parts. It is this synergy that is most important, and the parts themselves are only important as they contribute to the synergy. This synergy is influenced not only by the parts of the whole, but also by influences coming from outside the whole. Holistic doesn't say that the parts aren't important or that much can't be gained from looking, but holistic goes beyond just looking and measuring.
To understand this better, let's look at an example from food--a pound cake. A pound cake is basically just eggs, butter, milk, sugar, and flour. But when it's all mixed together and baked, something happens. It's transformed into something different, something more than just eggs, butter, milk, sugar, and flour--it becomes a pound cake. It is the synergy of all the ingredients plus the action of the baking process that makes something which is very different than just a simple mixture of the ingredients. If all you thought about were the ingredients, you would never understand what a pound cake is
Now let's look at hoof care. Farriers and natural hoof care practitioners alike are fixated on the parts of the hoof. They want to make the parts of the hoof look a certain way. Farriers and natural hoof care practitioners are all about doing something to the parts of the hoof--with nippers and rasps and hoof knives and shoes and nails and glue, etc. The result is that they try to make hooves fit their pattern. Farriers will have one pattern they force hooves into, while natural hoof care practitioners will have another. And in both cases, the pattern was developed by looking at and studying the parts of the hoof. Farriery and natural hoof care are about doing something to the parts of the hoof...they just disagree about what needs to be done.
True holistic horse care takes another approach. In the case of hoof care, it recognizes that the hooves are a reflection of ALL the influences on the horse. This includes not only the parts of the hoof but also the rest of the horse's body, the environment the horse lives in, what the horse eats, how the horse is used, how the horse was raised, what the horse is exposed to, and it also includes the mental state of the horse...everything which influences the horse. All these things are important because they influence the synergy of hoof function--they can either support it or be detrimental to it. Holistic recognizes the presence and importance of things that can't be seen and measured. True holistic hoof care realizes that trying to force hooves to fit a certain pattern may prevent the synergy of hoof function from coming into play ... and it trusts in natural forces to shape each individual hoof on each individual horse in each individual environment so that everything works together to form the synergy of hoof function.
