It’s happened a few times now. Maybe someone grabs the wrong bridle when they tack their horse up. Maybe they’ve gotten a summer rub from the bridle or the halter or the grazing muzzle and we have to change nosebands until it heals. Or maybe it’s just a stroke of strange, divine inspiration that makes me suggest an equipment change.
But for as much effort and thought as we put into the decisions about what tack we use, and making sure it fits well, sometimes the little changes can make a big difference. And for us, it seems like we more often stumble onto these discoveries by accident, rather than by calculated decision.
My go-to bit and bridle arrangement on most horses is a flash cavesson with a loose ring, lozenge-style snaffle bit. It’s what all my young horses begin their dressage careers in, and if we get a new horse in where we don’t know what they were going in before, or if they don’t come with tack, that’s where I begin.
But one time Cleo scraped her nose on something, right where the cavesson would have gone. Midgey and Allison’s horse Kiki have both done the same. And with all three, we popped a drop noseband on, so that we could keep working with some sort of noseband but while allowing the scraped-up skin to have a break.
For all three, it was a dramatic difference, especially for Allison’s Kiki. Never a fussy horse in the bridle, Kiki got instantly more stable, and more yielding all the way through her back. Cleo and Midge, too, also both loved a drop. And so that’s what they went in.
Fender briefly went in a drop as a calculated decision—sometimes horses who are fussy with the bit like the drop better—and the one time I tried Ella in a drop, she HATED it. But for those other three, it was simply chance that led us to the tack choice. It was something neither Allison nor I would have thought to try otherwise.
One time I grabbed the wrong bridle for Tres, the little PRE stallion I showed Grand Prix. The bridle I grabbed had an eggbutt snaffle instead of the loose ring. And again, Tres was not fussy or strong, but the difference between ever-so-slightly-more-stable eggbutt and loose ring, with the exact same mouthpiece, was considerable.
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And recently, the flash on Fiero’s snaffle went missing. It was quickly located, but not until after I’d ridden him without it, and found that he was much better without.
We’ve had similar happy accidents with saddles and girths. More than once we’ve tried a slightly-wider saddle than you’d think the horse would need, only to find that the horses just LOVE having the extra space to really lift and engage the back. And we had one curious horse who was perfect beginner safe, until one day his owner bought him a beautiful, brand-new, squishy, expensive and contoured-for-comfort girth. The second she put her butt in the saddle, he exploded and bucked her off. Something about the curve of the fancy schmancy girth sent him through the rafters, but his cheap-o Wintec girth was just right. Go figure.
Spurs, too. We’ve found that some mares object strongly to the little weenie rounded-edge spur, but are Little Miss Perfect when touched with a rowel. And I had a happy epiphany for a client just this week where we put her in a longer spur, because her horse is shaped a bit like an upside-down triangle—wider at the top than at the bottom—and she was having to be a contortionist to get her heel to touch his sides. The longer spur let her actually ride effectively, and use LESS spur.
We have one horse who we figured out went dramatically better if he walked outside the ring and got to stop and have a pee in the grass before he schooled. We found that out at a horse show where he stopped and peed outside the schooling ring, and then put in his best effort. A brilliant event horse I rode for a client for a while had a really hard time keeping his cool in the dressage ring if I warmed up normally, but if I got on and schooled and rode the test before the day started, and then just hopped on for ten minutes of walking before picking up the trot and heading down centerline for the actual class, he was Mr. Perfect. I came up with that idea completely on a lark, and tried it as a hail-Mary. He won the class.
At the end of the day, there’s lots of science that’s gone into what horses will and won’t like, and what equipment will help them do their jobs the best; and no matter how much research we do, we’ll never really know until we try different stuff. Sometimes, it’s better to be lucky than good!
