Neat and Safe Way to Dally Your Leadrope

If you like to ride with a rope halter and lead attached to your horse, as opposed to back at the barn when you suddenly need it!, here's a neat and safe way to keep your leadrope out of your way but still handy as you ride.

I like having a leadrope to tie John to a tree when we stop, because it's strictly forbidden to tie a horse by reins -- in spite of what we all grew up seeing on TV westerns. The horse's mouth could get badly injured that way.

But for several years I struggled with the lead wrapped around the saddle horn, coming unwrapped, slithering around, and being a general pain. Then a lovely lady showed me this trick which I am passing on in case you might not have seen it already!


STEP 1:Start with this:

You have looped the lead over the saddle horn, leaving enough on the horse end for him to move freely and stretch out his neck, but not enough to get a foot or branch caught.


STEP 2: Make a loop however you like; no knot!! just a loop of rope.


STEP 3: Pull a loop of the tail end of the rope through the first loop you made, but not all the way through; stop when you have a nice little second loop, like this:


STEP 4: Repeat Step 3, as many times as it takes to get a nice chain of loops leaving a reasonable tail length. It should just be out of your way.



STEP 5: Tail through last loop.
If you just leave your "crocheted" loops hanging, they will come undone as you ride. So the last thing you do is thread the tail through the last loop, just like you do with a quick-release knot to keep your horse from untying himself.



And that's that!

Your rope is right there when you need to undo it quickly and pop a rattlesnake on the head, or whip yourself for having such an expensive hobby, or even tie your horse.



In case you are wondering how I got John to stand still for these pictures since his lead rope is obviously not attached to anything! He is eating. The Second Coming could occur, with horns and earthquakes and celestial ladies riding on bulls, and he would go. on. eating.

This part of our trail system I refer to as "The Runway" because it looks like we could just fly out into blue sky from here. It actually ends in a steep slope down to a hay field.

On today's ride 2 neat things happened:

1. We saw bear scat right in the middle of the trail; John recognized it and acted a bit nervous and wary for awhile. And:

2. We were zoomed by a huge bird - I mean wingspan of about 5 feet. It came soundlessly down from behind us and almost touched John's ears. I was too scared to notice what kind of bird it might have been. "Birdus Really Biggus" I think would be the scientific name.

Horrible No Good Very Bad Day

And I am not exaggerating. First the horsey part: I have not been to the barn to see John all week due to bad work schedule and guilt over Montana being out on his 2-week sale trial. I can't quite understand this guilt but it has sapped the fun of horses for the moment.

Anyway today, a golden afternoon and warm, I dragged out to the barn to make amends to Johnnie for the week of zero work and attention.

What do I see but a line of tree cutting trucks like this:

except there were about 7 of them, and the din they were creating was audible blocks away. The power company had decided to trim the power line of trees and branches. There was a gigantic pile of stumps and branches at the entrance to the barn, and entirely obstructing our trail exit so that was out of the question.

I got Johnnie in anyway and stupidlytried to walk him past a gigantic chipper truck in full operation: huge diesel truck engine running, chipper gnawing away on tree trunks, truck backed in so that we had to pass verrrry close to the engine or fall in a ditch.

Well, John at first said maybe and then said no way. He just suddenly turned into horsey popcorn, boing boing prance to the edge of the ditch, prance forward toward the truck cab, and I was stuck between the chipper end of the truck and the ditch, with a horse who would go neither forward nor backward, just pop around in place being as tall as possible all the while.

Fortunately the only woman on the work crew saw my dilemma and went & asked the chipper guy to turn down the machine so we could pass. He didn't want to but she made him - hurray for bossy women!!

So I did get him mud-scraped and tacked up, and by then the chipper truck was gone although many many chainsaws were still screaming all around the edge of the property. We had a ride. Not a good ride. He was stiff and distracted. While we were riding a yearling filly got loose and ran madly all around the property, which caught John's eye and made him inattentive...

The work day...let me just say that some administrators make a sadistic habit of wasting peoples' time in pointless meetings, which seem to give joy to the admins but headaches to the victims. How about convening a whole bunch of department heads and then telling them, "We don't really have any business so let's just share..." Share what? My aggravation at being brought to this meeting? My dislike of wasting time indoors on a beautiful fall day?! Grrr.

I hope you all had a great time today to balance out the cosmic harmony. Off to comfort myself with chips and peach salsa.

Bow Hunters on the Trail Gaaaaahhhh!

Well I did not get a picture because I was otherwise occupied, but they did look just like this camouflaged dude.

Yesterday I did my obligatory dressage ride on Montana, and that is the way I think of it. I'm tuned out of dressage at the moment. Dressage and I are like two relatives who are sitting across the room not speaking to each other. Maybe we will become reconciled. Maybe not.

But after that I tacked up Johnnie and took off. I am leaving out his rude behavior at the gate for another day. Let's pretend it all went swimmingly. So we are past the human zoo part of our ride, the heavily used creek trail where we see bikes, strollers, dogs of all religions, and even co-workers for heaven's sake. And we are past the rather muddy woods part of our trail, just about to pop out into the beautiful golden galloping field.

When what to John's wondering eyes did appear, but two camo guys with giant packsacks and bows and arrows! They were rustling in the shrubbery and my first thought was "Army guys out on some maneuver?" and John's first thought was "Weirdo predators who eat palominos?" He believed strongly that we should turn around and run away. I called out to the guys that they were scaring the horse and maybe if they would just come stand in the clear, he could see that they are human.

Out they came. My first sight of true bow hunters. We have an in-town bow-hunting season to control the white-tail deer population. Their bows were not what I was expecting (think of Robin Hood), but small technical looking evil machines. Their arrows were metal (steel?) and it was their huge bags that really made them odd shaped.

I have never heard John snort like that, and would not have believed such sounds could come out of an anatomically normal horse nose. We got past them at a speed which increased exponentially and I decided no galloping for us today as it might come to an ugly conclusion. So we gaited across the big field, but then had to return the same way or else trespass.

Return trip: I was nervous, John was walking on eggshells past where the predators had been hiding. I decided to sing, and the only song that came to mind was one my mother used to sing in the kitchen: "I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls".

So picture me jigging along, making up words to this 19th century favorite ('I Dre-eamt that We-e did no-ot get shot"), shaking John's bear bells with my hand for maximum racket, and poor John's ears swiveling like crazed radar screens at all this unaccustomed noise.

We saw no trace of the camo guys, but we booked so fast through the woodsy part of the ride that I thought I was going to get seasick. It was not the relaxing Sunday afternoon ride I had pictured.

Maybe dressage isn't so bad after all.

Bear in mind that I have enough blaze orange to cover both John and myself: he has a quarter sheets and leg wraps, I have a helmet cover and jacket - we could look like a big orange Hindenburg floating out in the field - but I had none of it on us yesterday. Sigh.

Trails, Horses, and Contradictions

This morning very early we trailered out to rendezvous at a favorite nearby ski-trail system which we enjoy. I am so happy: Johnny self-loads!! I learned a new technique for this and he now marches on all by his lonesome without me having to lead him and clamber out the escape door praying I don't get my foot stepped on in the process.

I'll describe the technique in a later post and try to include video, but for now: I am developing the theory of Horse Contradictions. I will not win a Nobel prize for this but bear with me.

Theory of Horse Contradictions: for every strong opinion that X will kill your horse immediately, there is an equally passionate opinion that unless you give/do to your horse X you are practically an abuser. For every opinion that X is good and perfectly safe, there is an equally passionate opinion that X is almost certain to kill both you and your horse, if not the entire equine population of your state. For every opinion that if you train your horse with X technique you are doing him a favor, there's an equally passionate opinion that you will quickly drive your horse insane with X training.

I have developed this theory out of hard struggles with equine cognitive dissonance. I now listen to everything with an open mind, but I no longer believe everything I hear about horse training and horse care, even if the person saying it has huge credibility and is obviously a horse dude/dudette of great experience. I just listen and ponder.

Example: A horseperson who has my complete and total respect for his long years of retraining problem horses (who were headed for the meat auction) to be great trail partners, really chided me for riding in tennis shoes last week.

There was a reason! I had a post-surgical wrap on my foot and no safer riding shoes would fit over it; the tennies would unlace to a great degree and voila I could ride.

However! I got the lecture and he was so sincerely worried that I think I ruined the ride for him. He says tennis shoes are terrible if you get a fall/drag situation; they adhere to the stirrup and also don't come off your foot.

So who forgot his boots and had to ride in what foot gear this morning??!!





In fairness I have to say: he took out the laces and made sure he could step out of the tennies easily. So everybody check your riding shoes, or not! Long live the contradictory horse/human relationship.

How many accidents could happen here?!

Here we see my precious horse Johnnie willing to risk his neck for a clump of tasty weeds. We were staying at a friend's house on our way to a great horse camping adventure in the Black Hills, and I was a bit less cautious then than I am now. I have learned that Johnnie is both an escape artist and somewhat accident prone and his gates etc. have to be very carefully checked and double fastened. Also, he will grab, chew, and generally raise hell with any object in his vicinity - the world is filled with toys in his opinion. This includes your jacket hanging on a rail, your water bottle, his own reins, anybody's grooming tote, etc. He unties all safety knots and wanders a short distance away from the hitching post, just to show he can.

This leads me to the subject: Pasture Accidents. He has had two serious ones, awful cuts which put his future mobility at risk (possibility of infection). One was a deep cut to the hock which if the joint had become infected, could have ended his useful life. Another was a mystery puncture/tear wound on his right haunch, about 7 inches long and with an equally long "tunnel" inside between the muscle and the skin, just as if he had sat on a metal rod. We have gone over the pastures with a fine tooth comb and in one case we found what he cut himself on - a corrugated metal facing on a run-in shed - but in the other case it is still a mystery.

It is so hard to keep horses safe! Frightening accident stories are all over the internet and they are only the tip of the iceberg of what really goes on in the horse world. Horses are far worse than toddlers in my opinion, if only because they are so freaking strong. I guess we can only pray and try to set things up for safety.