Horse hoof heels are sick depending who you ask

We cover a lot of garish news stories related to horses, but have voted this as possibly the worst of the year. Of course, the year is not quite over and there are plenty of horrors to choose from.

Chad Love writing for Field & Stream states:

“I really don’t even know how to write about this. I’m flummoxed. Totally flummoxed. If I saw a woman walking toward me on the street wearing a pair of horse hooves, why, I think I’d just turn and run screaming in the opposite direction.”

And this from someone who writes about hunting and fishing.

WRITTEN BY MICHELLE MANETTI

Cross-posted from the Huffington Post

Horse Hoof Heels. Image: Huffington Post.

(March 8, 2012) — “Hoofing it” has now taken on a literal meaning, thanks to a German shoe designer and artist who practices fashion taxidermy.

Iris Schieferstein creates shoes out of the hooves of horses, stuffed doves and snake bodies (head included). The shoes have become quite controversial over the last couple of years, but supposedly they have support from the queen of extreme: Lady Gaga.

So how exactly does one make shoes out of dead animals? Well, Schieferstein first obtains carcasses from her Berlin butcher and spends a week removing any meat and bones from the animals. She then sets the skin around a shoe model, and from that point on, it’s all Schieferstein’s creativity: a zipper up the front of a horse hoof or the body of a dove atop a thin strap.

According to the Daily Mail, the designer, who has been doing this for 12 years, thinks combining fashion and taxidermy makes perfect sense:

“I love horses and I love shoes so I thought this would be perfect. Horses have a beautiful walk and I wanted to recreate that with my footwear.”

If Lady GaGa is indeed a client and wears Schieferstein animal heels in our opinion, she is sick, and I don’t mean street cred “sick”, just plain old sick.

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Photos: Huffington Post slidesown via Iris Schieferstein website.