Hoof trimming used to be a niche trade, done out of sight and well away from any spotlight. Today it is one of the hottest categories on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. Videos of a big man in an apron working an angle grinder against a cow's leg pull tens of millions of views.

And you do not have to look as far as Scotland for it. It is happening in Poland too.

HOOFJOB — hoof trimming out of Greater Poland

Mateusz Urycki runs HOOFJOB: hoof trimming and the treatment of lameness in cattle. He works across the Greater Poland, Kuyavian-Pomeranian and Łódź regions, based in Lichen Stary. Alongside the work at the crush he runs the most active Polish account devoted to hoof trimming: over 60,000 Instagram followers and more than three hundred posts published (as of September 2026).

You will find him here:

Instagram — @hoofjob.kr
Threads — @hoofjob.kr
Facebook — HOOFJOB

What sets his material apart is the absence of staging. There is no set and there are no arranged shots — it is a real working day: a specific cow, a specific lesion, a specific procedure. The hashtags he posts under — #korekcjaracic, #hooftrimmer, #cowcare — double as a map of what people in this niche are actually searching for.

Which is exactly why it works better than plenty of productions with a budget behind them. Nobody in Polish social media had done this at this scale before.

Why people watch this at all

For anyone in the trade, trimming is just Tuesday. For the average viewer it is a spectacle. Four things make it one.

The "oddly satisfying" effect

The internet has an enormous appetite for content that is oddly satisfying. A precise cut, sheets of dead horn peeling away, clean tissue appearing from under a layer of muck — the human brain finds all of it soothing. The scraping sound, the hum of the grinder and the visual order emerging from chaos sit squarely in ASMR territory.

Relief you can see

People like watching things balanced on the edge between disgust and fascination. Trimming clips often show an abscess being opened or dermatitis being treated. The moment pressure is released from a diseased claw gives the viewer a vicarious sense of relief.

A hero and an instant payoff

Most of these videos follow the same shape, and it is a very old one:

Setup: the cow is lame and in pain.
Action: the trimmer finds the cause — a stone driven into the white line, say.
Resolution: the problem is removed, a bandage or block goes on.
Ending: the cow walks away sound.

The trimmer becomes the person who brings immediate relief to a victim that cannot speak. In an age where most problems have no simple fix, that is strong currency.

A window into an unknown world

For most of the public, milk comes from a carton. Trimming videos are a genuine shock. The comments are full of surprise: "I had no idea cows get pedicures." Creators who explain what they are doing and why build the most loyal audience of all.

Where each platform works

Every platform runs on a different logic, and the same footage performs completely differently across them.

Instagram is the natural home for this niche right now. Reels reward short, vivid action with a legible before and after, while the profile grid works as a portfolio a farmer scrolls before picking up the phone. This is where HOOFJOB lives.

TikTok rewards the first two seconds. The hashtags #hooftrimming and #cowpedicure have billions of views between them, but the audience is the most random of the lot — plenty of reach, few farmers.

YouTube is the opposite: longer form, a viewer who chose the subject deliberately, and videos that keep working for years. Explaining wins here; showing off does not.

Threads and Facebook sit closest to the actual market. Less spectacle, more conversation — comments, questions about specific cases, messages from farmers nearby. This is usually where the phone calls come from.

Abroad

Outside Poland the best-known names are The Hoof GP (Graeme Parker) from northern Scotland, with over three million subscribers and storytelling at documentary level, and Nate the Hoof Guy from the United States, with close to two million subscribers and a very technical, unusually calm approach.

They proved this niche has an audience measured in millions — but they speak English, to the whole world. Sixty thousand followers on a Polish-language account about hoof trimming is a different scale and a different kind of value: it is an audience that can actually pick up the phone and call.

What it means if you do this for a living

This trend has done more for the trade than years of information campaigns:

Respect. People are starting to see trimmers as specialists rather than as manual labour.
Farmer awareness. Farmers watch these videos too, and they come away understanding why prevention is cheaper than treatment.
Clients. A social media profile has become for a trimmer what a business card and a neighbour's recommendation used to be.

Before you start filming

A few things worth settling before the phone comes out:

The farmer's consent. The shed, the animals and the ear tag numbers are his business. Agree it once, at the start of the working relationship, not mid-procedure.
Ear tag numbers in frame. Blur them or frame them out, unless the farmer has explicitly said he does not mind.
A steady shot before you start. The best material has a clear "before". Without it there is no "after".
Never film at the cow's expense. If setting up the shot adds time in the crush, the shot loses.

And then it still has to be written down

A video shows one procedure. The value to the farmer only appears once those individual procedures add up to a herd's history: which animals keep coming back with the same problem, whether there is less lameness than six months ago, what actually worked.

So this is how we see it at Cownt: every visit to a shed produces material as valuable as those videos — only in numbers. Not every trim will go viral, but every trim is worth recording, for the herd and for your own business.

Follow HOOFJOB

The best way to see what this article is about is to look at the source:

Millions of views from a cattle shed. Why the internet fell for hoof trimming