Mark4510
Silver Member
Mar 10, 2006, 5:14 PM
Post #2 of 6
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Hi Jim,
I have never used one but have seen them demonstrated on horses and seen a video on their use.
My first thoughts are pretty standard…..any bit can be severe or soft depending on the riders hands. I have seen people bleed a horses mouth with a rubber covered snaffle as well as a poly lead rope and I have seen Benny Guitron use a really severe looking bit that the horse really loved (but few professionals have his hands and skill).
What I noticed about the bits was that, first of all, they are an aluminum or aluminum alloy. By nature, aluminum and Stainless steel are rarely the first choice of a horse. The don’t promote salivation and tend to by ‘dry’. This makes any bit harsher on the horse.
Many of the bits they sell are just knock offs of bits that are already out there. The pelhams, snaffles, elevators are all either copies of what’s out there or essentially the same but with their mouth piece. If you look at their mouthpieces you will see that they are half way between a ‘cut mouth’ and a ‘half breed’. Neither of those are bad but in combination I don’t know what it does for you. The cut mouth, assuming it is properly balance, can be a good bit as long as you are slow handed and skilled. It looks a lot like the mikmar but it’s much flatter. Half breeds have been around for ever and are great bits. Generally, they are not too rough and the generally are accepted by most horses especially if they have a nice copper roller. I guess I would not pay a premium for one of these mikmar bits made out of aluminum when you can get something closer to the original for less.
So that leaves us with the combination bits that have the nose rope. Just to be safe let me say that there are some great horseman that could probably use it with results but I sure don’t think I would be able to. Regardless of the shank length you are going to exert a tremendous amount of force on the horse if you engage that nose strap. It would sort of like someone yanking on both set ups of a ‘two rein’ rig(hackamore and bit used together to take a horse from a hackamore to the bridle).
I would be really leery of using this sort of set up myself. To me, if you attach the reins to the nose rope you are going to trap the horse with not only pressure in the mouth and the chin strap but now you are going to get him over the nose which is really sensitive. I think you run the risk of really really scaring a horse with that set up. If you attach it to the normal rein loops on the shank then I am not sure there is a ton of difference in these bits rather than others.
In the video I saw before you could see the horse sort of quickly swinging its head quickly side to side. Though I am not a real horseman that is, to me, very indicative of a horse that is trying to escape a lot of pressure. It’s the sort of thing that you see when the horse is not sure what is being asked of them and they are simply running into pressure that happens to quickly. The horse needs to learn on to respond to rein pressure on the neck and then reinforce that with pressure on the mouth.
The other thing is that some horses are naturally high headed so artificially trying to force the horses head lower is really hard for them to do and, often times, very distracting.
If your horse is running off with other bits its very likely that putting a more severe bit or bit system on them is only going to make it worse.
Maybe I am missing something so if anyone has used one successfully and ended up with a willing soft horse I would be interested in how that process works.
Regards,
mark
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