It was like he was slicing Gruyère cheese. Kevin Hinton leaned near the cow’s elevated hoof, and with an expert snip of his clippers, exposed a section of creamy white sole. It looked soft, even pliable.

“It’s not,” Hinton said, holding up the forearm-length clippers. “My clippers are just really sharp.”

Clippers aren’t terribly common among hoof trimmers these days—“bovine podiatrists,” if you want to use the technical term—but Hinton doesn’t care. It’s what he learned to use 40 years ago, when he joined his father in Oregon one summer to watch him work. The connection then was electric. Seeing his father snip and clip the overgrown hoof away from the sole made him realize he wanted to do this for the rest of his life.

And he has, more or less. Now 56 years old, Hinton works with a number of barns across the province—he can’t remember exactly how many—to check on the health of his clients’ feet.

“I consider these guys Olympic athletes,” he said. “They produce up to 100 pounds of milk a day. If everything’s not perfect—boom.”