On the other hand, they're still bad.

Don’t hands matter anymore?

     In the process of learning how to ride, (and the way I ride to this day), I learned the ‘correct way’ to hold the reins.

     This being: The reins enter one’s palms between the pinky and ring finger, in contact with the hand itself. The rein continues up through the palm and exits forward (i.e., towards the horse’s neck), with the thumb  up and flat on the rein.   One held/holds the reins as if they were eggs. Space between the hands in a straight line from the bit to one’s elbows, which are tucked neatly alongside one’s ribs. The height should be no more than a few inches...one very good teacher told me to hold my hands only as high as an extended pinky could touch the withers.  

     Paying attention to what they’re doing has helped me develop what I’ve been complimented on as being ‘good” ‘soft’ ‘following’ hands.

    What inspired this particular post was seeing a photo of a Western Equitation rider with her hands waving about at shoulder height...HER shoulder height. Ah ha, said my now chained anti-Western Equitation demon, another way I can show how superior ‘english’ or ‘dressage’ is to WE.

     But I have learned to keep her muzzled before I shoot off my mouth, so I did a lot of Google Image searching with the search term “hands on reins’.  As hands are always connected to the rider’s arms, every photo had an example.

   What I found is depressing.

     It’s not just Western Equitation riders who don’t seem to know how to hold the reins. It seems NOBODY-not Western, not English, not dressage, certainly not jumpers or jockeys-holds the reins the ‘’’correct’’’ way. I looked at a LOT of photos, from all over the horse riding spectrum, and saw all sorts of styles. I could forgive beginners or horse husbands or kids, but I saw FEI riders making the same mistakes.

  Here is a sample of the rogue's gallery:

     I was amazed at the many ways riders hold the reins. Some hold the reins with palm up, or palms down, or out to the sides. Some were pinching a rein between thumb and forefinger, some as if holding a serving tray, many of the Western Equitation dangling them a foot or more above the neck. One or two pictured women holding the reins as if they were live snakes.

 

    I am including a picture (below) said to be from “Vogue”... a magazine that is published, it seems solely to market stuff to rich women. Look at this photo. I'd originally intended it to be an example of VERY bad hands, but it was just so full of 'wrong' I couldn't believe it. There are so many things wrong about this bimbo on horseback you just KNOW she’s never been on a horse in her life. I’m almost afraid for her...her boots, her bare knees, she’s bouncing up and down without a helmet. If she had pockets her hands would be in them, reins and all. But I must say that is one gorgeous horse. Not HERS, mind you.

 

    I even watch the riders in my own barn. Only one person other than me seems to be paying attention to how she holds her reins. I can’t bear to watch our Barnlord give a riding lesson, as she advocates holding the reins up in the air.

    Yes, I did find some hands that were correct. Finding a photo of ‘good hands’ was far more difficult than I would have ever dreamed.

    This rider’s hands are pretty much exactly what I’ve learned from good books.

But the vast majority of pictures of hands on the reins show them to be anything but correct.

    Which begs the question: is the way one holds the reins that important?

    I confess I am not experienced enough to be able to state conclusively that it is.

   Perhaps I’m looking at it the wrong way. Perhaps I’m speaking only from fairly recently acquired ‘experience’, and the horses I’ve ridden since doing so number equal two.

   Maybe I’m missing something. Because I found this:

   This single hand, apparently that of an older man, is riding in a bosal. I know nothing about this specific bridle/ reins, so I don’t know if this hold is correct or not.

   Somehow, though, I get the feeling that his hand is gentle. How a man’s hands can appear to be sensitive and giving, I don’t know. It just looks to be kind and respectful. It even appears as if he is also holding a rope. One doesn’t think of a roper having good hands. Yet, this is a gentle, giving hand. 

   Maybe it’s me, then? Am I too anal? Are sloppy hands okay now?

They can hear us think, you know

Here’s the real scenario:

Last fall, Matt, our farrier, came to shoe and trim two horses: Raven, and Laddie.

You know who Raven is, and he is always well behaved when anyone does anything to him, be it farrier work, floating, etc. 

Laddie is the newest horse in the barn. He is an immense, 17.2 hand Thoroughbred. I believe he’s about 16 years old and is/was an eventer.

O, Laddie’s owner, had seen Matt work on Raven in the past and decided she wanted him to do Laddie. 

Matt –who, like me, is beginning to feel his age and is trying to cut down his workload-asked her how she came to contract him to shoe Laddie. She said Barnlord had told her about his work. I admit, Matt is probably the best farrier I’ve ever been lucky to have.  

Laddie began to act up almost immediately. Tossing his head, flicking the tools out of Matt’s hands, tried to back up, etc.  He has white line disease in his hind feet and acted as if the methylene blue (that purple stuff that has a staining radius of fifty feet) hurt. 

As the process wore on, Laddie got worse and worse. He literally yanked his feet out of Matt’s hands, reared, kicked and tried to bolt. What should have taken no more than half an hour took twice that.

Matt later told me that afterward, he felt as if he’d been hit by a pair of linebackers..and Matt is a big, bear of a man, a burly cowboy/farrier, tough as nails. 

Yesterday, I walked into the barn. The barnlord’s farrier, Bob, was shoeing and trimming a big bay horse. 

Barnlord was holding his lead rope. The horse had his head down and was half asleep. It took me a couple seconds to realize it was Laddie.

“Holy cow, what did you do, sedate him?”

“No.”

Laddie was acting like any good horse, calm, patient, willing to accept anything Bob did to him.

What was the difference?

No, it wasn’t the farriers. 

It was the owner.

O wasn’t present for the trimming this time. 

O is the 22 year old daughter of some very wealthy, upper crust blue bloods back somewhere in New England (on the US East Coast.)

She drives a Mercedes. She bought a truck and a  horse trailer when she got here.  Her parents are paying her way through college. They paid to ship Laddie out here to the West Coast (something that is NOT cheap). They are paying for her rented HOUSE, and the barnlord sends all bills to the parents, not O.

O has very obviously lived a life of ease. She’s accustomed to “people”...a nice way of saying servants or employees..taking orders from her and doing things that she is too high society to do. 

She demonstrates no sense of responsibility. She is passive-aggressive-sometimes arrogantly insisting she knows everything about horses, and other times, completely ignoring the needs of her horse. Laddie was on the point of foundering and barnlord insisted O call a vet. O refused. He’s done this before, she said, all he needs stall rest. She wrapped some vet wrap around his fore pasterns as if that would fix it. 

Barnlord got pissed, and after O left, she called a vet, who got to the barn in time to prevent any damage. 

She billed O’s parents. She also, later, told O that she is NOT O’s servant, that O needs to accept responsibility for her horse. O...ignored her. 

O doesn’t really like Laddie, by the way. She’s taken him out eventing precisely once since she got to the barn last year. Laddie’s blanket is in tatters. She doesn’t care. She can easily afford a new one, but, she doesn’t care. 

And that’s the point.

We humans project energy without knowing. Horses pick up on it. You can’t lie to a horse. If you have had an argument with your husband, and are still stewing about it, you’re mentally broadcasting it to every living being in the  barn. 

 I think we humans are immune to it. We have to be, we’d go insane if we heard every other humans thoughts. But animals aren’t immune. They HAVE to hear in order to survive. Most dogs easily prove it. How many times have you experienced or  heard "my dog knows when I'm coming home."?  I think dogs are smart enough to know you’re not pissed at them, but horses aren’t. All they ‘hear’ is that you are angry, aggressive, and scary.

As well, if you don’t particularly like the horse, he’s going to pick up on that, too. He’s had prior experiences with unfriendly humans broadcasting their non-physical aggression, and he knows, now, that some humans are things to be feared.

It’s not just horses that ‘hear’ our thoughts. Wild animals are especially sensitive. 

We feed the wild birds. The deer have learned that there’s free food under the feeders. We have a group of six or seven black-tailed deer (depending on how many fawns the does produced last spring) that live on my property. If I walk out to the feeders and look hard at the deer, as if sizing them up for an attack, they bolt. If I merely glance at them, AND allow the damned earworm in my head to play or...if I mentally do my times tables (“2 times 3 is 6, 2 times 7 is 14”), they not only are unafraid, they come closer, waiting for me to dump the feed so they can feast.

(Excuse me while I boast...I no longer need to do that. They are accustomed to us trudging through the rain and snow with a pair of feed buckets that they barely wait for us to spread the feed before they’re in it. )

When Matt was there to shoe Laddie, O was supposed to handle her horse. While she did so, he began to act up. She slapped at Laddie, cussed him out, shrieked at him, and literally drove him crazy. He kept pulling his feet out of Matt's hands, making it almost impossible to nail a shoe on.

When a 17.2 horse rears and waves his size 3 hooves around your ears, it turns into a dangerous situation. 

Matt, being the conscientious man he is, carried on, but when he was finished he told her straight up, “don’t call me again. I’m never touching this horse again.”

O got pissed. She didn’t say anything but later, Barnlord said O complained to her about Matt being “incompetent’. 

I had left by then so I didn’t hear it. Which is okay, because Matt would rather she think him incompetent than risk getting hurt by her horse. 

When Bob came out to shoe Laddie, O...who had promised to be there but then decided to skip it, there was just me, Barnlord and Bob.  No one slapped Laddie. No one shrieked at him. Barnlord held the lead and expected Laddie to mind his manners like the good horse he is. She and the farrier had a long conversation about something other than the horse in front of them, and Laddie dropped his head and half slept,  as ho hum as Raven always is. 

They hear us and react. Keep a rein on your emotions.