This article originally appeared in issue #81 – Jan/Feb 2015 of the excellent Eclectic Horseman Magazine
Photo by Emily Kitching
That’s become all the rage now, starting the horse in the hackamore. Traditionally the vaqueros used both. It’s almost become a bit of a fad, and that’s all fine. My answer is, I’m a student of Ray Hunt and Tom Dorrance, and that’s what they did, and I think I’d be pretty self-indulgent to think that I’m going to improve on what Ray Hunt and Tom Dorrance were doing. I’m doing my best to fulfill my promise to Ray that I was going to take what he taught me and try to do it as well as I could. I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel or look like the greatest genius to come down the pike. They started in a snaffle, went to the hackamore, went to the two-rein, went to the bridle—that was the tradition that I was taught by Ray Hunt and Tom Dorrance, and I stick to that.
There’s some technicalities: snaffle bit versus a hackamore starting a horse. If your plan in starting a horse is eventually to end up to do classical movements in the bridle bit, there are things that you can do in a snaffle bit on a green horse in terms of haunches in, shoulders in, half pass, backing circles properly—all of those things, you’re combining lateral and longitudinal flexion, creating movement of the pole joint, between the pole joint and the atlas. Those sort of complex flexions are required in classical riding and typically people who now-a-days are starting horses in a hackamore, most of the movements that they ultimately end up with are fairly primitive movements. It is not classical riding.
They still may be able to stop, turn around, change leads, and may be good to work a cow, good to rope on, but in terms of the end goal, if you’re looking for true classical movement in proper form— and I’ve made a gillion hackamore horses—it is very difficult to have complex flexions as an end result if you didn’t introduce it in the snaffle.
At this stage in my life, could I get all those flexions in the hackamore now without using the snaffle? Yes, I sure could. But I’ve made a lot of hackamore horses.
There’s another price to pay if you don’t start a horse in a snaffle bit, and that is, then when you go to the two-rein, the first bit he ever has in his mouth is a bridle bit and he’ll be real busy in the mouth because that’s the first bit he ever wore. He’ll run that cricket until it makes you crazy.
Some people will say, “The sound of a horse running a cricket sounds like music to me.” Well, to me, the most beautiful song I ever heard, after I heard it 10,000 times, I hate. It’s not music, it’s agitation and trouble. You should only occasionally hear a horse run the cricket and it’s to lubricate his mouth when he’s pushing his tongue forward and back. He’s lubricating his mouth and the mouth should go quiet again. Running a cricket the entire time, you have a troubled horse; you might as well own it. So, that’s the problem if he’s never worn a snaffle bit and he just got started in a hackamore because that was the fashion of the time, the first bit he ever has is a bridle bit and it’s going to take him a long time to get quiet in the mouth as a result of that.
You can have right-to-left flexion in a horse’s neck, and you can have vertical flexion at the poll, but as far as getting the poll to roll right-to-left with the presence of vertical flexion, if you don’t get that in a snaffle, you’re probably not going to get it in a hackamore. There’s a big difference between a horse bending their neck right or left and rolling their jaw under their neck. That was the word Ray used to use, and that references the poll moving right to left while in vertical flexion. That’s classical flexion and if a person was trained to look for that, you’d see how many people don’t actually get that. In that they can separate lateral and longitudinal—that’s how you teach it, lateral first then longitudinal. Then you start to combine the two flexions while in movement. That’s something that can easily be separated for a horse because of the way a snaffle bit operates.
A lot of people who are going to start a horse in a hackamore, they’re going to be happy if he’s obedient and quiet and can turn and stop and back up and maybe lope a circle—that may be all they’re looking for. But that isn’t enough to satisfy my goals in riding.