My New ASMR: Hoof-Cleaning Videos

In the world of ten-second viral videos and TikToks on 2x speed, I’m slowing down a bit more and watching several-minute-long epics online. My latest obsession? Nate the Hoof Guy, a bovine podiatrist who films hoof trimming and cleaning videos and uploads them on YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok.

His videos start off pretty routinely. An anonymous hand, his, gestures at a zoomed-in, mud-soaked hoof. After cleaning off the muddy outer layer, Nate Ranallo grabs his knife and starts scraping away at the creamy-white hoof sole, trimming layer by layer of the “forbidden parmesan,” as he jokingly calls the shavings. His Bob Ross-like, Wisconsin-accented narration softly and patiently explains his technique, but instead of “happy little trees,” he’s identifying white line defects, embedded stones, or digital dermatitis. I’ll admit it: Nate the Hoof Guy gets pretty gross. Like “eruptions of pus coming out of a hoof” gross.

“It appears like we’ve got a white line lesion, so let’s keep going and figure out what we got,” he says in one video. (It’s a small stone embedded in the hoof, and I feel instant relief when I watch him dislodge it.)

“When you see pressure like this, you know it’s going to be a geyser,” he says in another. (This one’s a build-up of pus as the cow’s body fights some type of infection.)

“If you’re watching this over a meal, I suggest you don’t,” he says in a third. (You get the idea.)

Think of those repulsively alluring pimple-popping videos that gained traction on social media in the late 2010s. In the chronology of Internet grossness, Dr. Pimple Popper was the gateway drug to Nate the Hoof Guy. His channel is objectively much more obscene, however, with cleaning videos showing everything from healthy hoof maintenance to bubbling, draining pus to necrosis.

I have no business caring about hooves or livestock in general—I’m from the suburbs and live in the city now. The last time I even touched a cow was years ago, in college, at a vet school presentation that I stumbled upon. Now, I see cows only at a distance when driving past roadside farms. I can’t envision a future where I’d need to know anything bovine-related. But there’s something about these hoof-trimming videos that keeps me coming back.

Writing this feels like I’m outing myself, but I’m not the only one. Nate the Hoof Guy has nearly 3 million followers on Facebook, where his videos got 215 million views in a single month. His YouTube page has 1.74 million subscribers, and some of his videos there have up to 56 million views.

The video titles are salacious, borderline pornographic at times. “There’s FLUID HIDING DEEP Inside,” “It Was OOZING BEFORE I EVEN STARTED,” and “You NEVER WANT TO FIND THIS in a COW’S FOOT” are three videos that I have clicked on purely because of their titles. It reads like clickbait, sure, but the videos are nothing like others in my feed.

Social media has forced us to find our niche, our brand. But the pendulum has swung to create a beige monoculture to the tune of the same rotating trending audios. I’ve lost an appetite for inauthentic charisma and formulaic slop. Nate the Hoof Guy’s videos are refreshingly anachronistic. They have the same cadence as job orientation training videos. They’re slow, informational, and quiet, often with long stretches of silence.

Video after video, however, I’m actually learning. In the way that Grey’s Anatomy aficionados feel like they’re secondhand doctors by memorizing and quoting the show, I feel like I’m a farmhand’s apprentice.

Recently, I went to a party and met someone who grew up on a cattle farm. “Were they pasture cows? Was digital dermatitis a real issue on the farm? Does the pus really smell as bad as they say it does?” I asked, basically foaming at the mouth. “Uh…what?” she responded.

In his videos, Nate teaches us hoof anatomy, why he’s angling his cuts in certain ways, and what hoof separation looks like. He also encourages his viewers to ask questions for him to answer either in the comments or in later videos. In the comments sections, many joke about how they find themselves glued to the screen at 2 A.M., somehow not feeling their stomach turn at the sight of infection. Others share that they don’t know how this kind of video showed up on their algorithm, and they especially don’t know how they watched it to the end. (Nate sells T-shirts that read, “I love hoof videos and I don’t know why.”)

Because these objectively nasty videos are becoming so popular online, researchers have begun studying the neurological reasons why they’re so attractive in the first place. It does seem paradoxical, after all. In a study published in Discover Psychology last year, researchers found traits typically associated with those who enjoy this kind of video: female sex and higher levels of morbid curiosity and benign masochism (the same trait that gets people to like spicy food).

Well, in my case, check, check, and check.

I fully know that these videos are gross and cause others to squirm. Disgust is a fundamental emotion that prevents us from getting sick or harmed. Charles Darwin wrote that that grossed-out feeling likely saved our ancestors’ lives: repulsion prevented them from eating rotten food that would have killed them. But I can cognitively distance myself from threat and instead pursue pure fascination for how bovine bodies function. To me, this is meditation.

What draws me to these videos, beyond the obvious satisfaction of that morbid curiosity and benign masochism, is that I know these cows are going to be OK. They’re in gentle, benevolent hands. I tend to spiral into hopelessness when it comes to the injustices in the world, where it seems like aggression and dominance—traits that are completely antithetical to my core personality—are the only way to survive. I need to know that things can get better. I want to know that they will. Nate the Hoof Guy is proof that sick and infected things can heal with some gentle care.