All right, welcome back, and in this lecture we're gonna talk about
just some individual pieces of equipment, and was one that people had requested.
So, you know, trying to decide what to cover,
I just figured I wanted to cover some of the basics.
So if you kind of know all about horse equipment,
you can probably just skip this lecture.
But if you're not too sure you may listen to this kind of short lecture on
different types of equipment, and their names and proper names.
And for people that don't know, the major piece of equipment
that everybody uses, or every barn should have is a good halter.
And this is really what we use to, you know, lead the animal not only for
health inspections, but for grooming and other things.
So, a good halter is, or a bunch of halters every barn should have.
Now, there's different types of halters.
There's these leather halters which are a little bit more expensive.
What's nice about them is they do, they can break.
So if an animal has a halter on for any length of time, and
gets their head stuck somewhere.
They may be able to have an easier time breaking it.
One of the things that we talk about here in Florida,
we're worried about hurricanes and stuff.
So I always tell people if you do ever have to leave your animal,
leave a leather halter on, not this nylon halter that doesn't have as much give,
cuz if they get caught on a fence or something, they can break it.
But I have seen a horse break a nylon halter.
That's not to say that it doesn't happen.
I have seen one refuse, lay down until the halter broke, got up and walked away.
And then the other kind of halter you might hear about is a Johnson Rope.
It's just kind of like a rope, a little rope halter.
And it's amazing, once you get these animals trained to be haltered,
that Johnson Rope doesn't put a lot of pressure on their face but
you can lead them around everywhere.
Horses are amazing, they're really, really amazing.
Why do we use halters?
Again, that's to handle the animal and then also anytime we're working around
them and you want to tie them to a solid object, you wanna have them in a halter.
Now I will say, we're not gonna cover it in this lecture but
you can definitely look online for it.
Whenever you tie a horse, you wanna use a quick slip knot,
meaning it's a knot that you can quickly pull the rope and
untie them in case they get into a wreck or something's going on.
So you never wanna tie them in a solid, solid knot.
So if something happened, you couldn't get in there quickly and release them.
So just a note.
Okay, the other piece of equipment that attaches to a halter is the lead shank or
lead rope.
And you can either have, cotton, nylon, leather type ropes.
And they either will be a direct chain that attaches right there, or you can
get these chain extensions that you may see here on this leather halter there.
Now the chain extensions you can run up over the nose like that.
Some people run them in the mouth almost like a bit and then some
people may actually run them across the gums, which you know again, if you're
trying to control an animal, you have to be really careful with these change.
You can injury them.
Be very, very careful.
Especially leading stallions,
something you want to use to keep them mindful of you.
I've handled plenty of stallions and sometimes they need just a little bit of
a reminder of whose in charge without harming them.
You know, saying that.
Now, the next piece of equipment I wanted to talk about was the bridals.
And there's really two types.
There's the western type and the English type.
So we'll kind of differentiate between the two.
But basically they each have three basic parts.
So the first is the headstall.
So here you can see the headstall here and also in this English bridal type.
There's the bit that goes in the mouth and then there's the reins.
So, here's the reins here.
Here's the reins here.
And we'll kinda talk a little bit about the differences with them.
Now, this is primarily used for communication between you and
the horse when you're riding them.
Okay, so whenever you're on top of the horse, using to guide them,
this is one of the ways that we communicate.
Now, there's other ways, especially with riding, your body position and weight, and
stuff like that.
But just understand that the bridle is one primary source of communication.
Now, let's first talk about the western style bridles and
some of the style differences that you see out there.
One of the easy ones is just the different headstall types.
So, here you can see a split here, so it covers both ears in that top image.
Here is just a single ear.
And then, here's a conventional where you have the brow band and
then also up over behind the ears.
So, those are three different headstall types that we see in Western bridles.
