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The SFJ sale has a few different auctioneers but there’s one that is in the habit of doing something that I feel is dirty. He’ll start off asking for an opening bid – say, $5 – then immediately jump to a higher amount – say, $10 – and ask for that instead. If you aren’t watching for it and aren’t paying very close attention and don’t already know about this practice, you’d think that he’d gotten a bid for $5 and was moving on. However, in reality he has not gotten any bids yet. A person could still get in at $5. That really winds me up.

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Steve – so if the owner bids it up and gets stuck with high bid, he pays that? To take his own animal back home?

Mitchmaine – I can understand the frustration. I once thought I was going to take home a very nice wagon at a very nice price until I found out that I was still a grand shy of the reserve. So close…. yet so far away! That was disappointing.

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I’ve only been to a couple different auctions but I do the Small Farmers Journal auction each year. If there’s a minimum on an item, you don’t typically find out about it unless there has been some interest (at least one bid) but the bidding stalls out before the minimumis reached. If the auctioneer can’t milk it up high enough to pass the minimum on the item, he’ll say that the minimum is so much and does anyone want to bid that? If they don’t and if the consigner is in the house (and if they know who the consigner is by sight), they might ask the consigner if he’ll accept the current bid. There’s a fee for the consigner to set a minimum, though, so it’s only the big items that might have one.

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All things being equal, I usually pitch a bigger fit about being casually stepped on by my big goat than by my 1700lb unshod horses. But if there’s a kerfluffle involved, things can turn bad in a hurry with the horses + feet while the goat trauma usually maxes out with a holler and some cussing.

dominiquer60 I cringed outwardly when reading your description of the caulked shoe pivoting on the top of your foot.

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The comments section on that article are maddening. But, that’s the Internet for you. Any goofball with a half-baked notion is welcome to share. :rolleyes: Oh, wait…..

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Ditto on what Carl said about not hooking a horse that won’t stand. She’s not safe and she’s not ready. You can’t rush through that part – it is essential.

If she’s turning around, it’s probably because you aren’t keeping her straight with the lines. You need practice handling the lines.

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😎 Congratulations!

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I have always heard that horses don’t shed their frogs unless there is a fungal infection involved – AKA thrush. I trim all flaps because flaps trap junk underneath them and can lead to infection.

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I know this is an ancient thread but it popped up in some Google search results for me when I was researching different improvised ways of converting team harnesses to single. Anyhow, in the interest of providing this information to others who may need to know, this type of harness (which I, too, have always called a “Y-back” harness) is designed to keep a horse cooler, use less leather and be lighter to heft and toss on the horse by eliminating the back pad. In this state, the Y-back was frequently used in the wheatlands, where they used large hitches.

The quarter straps are clipped where they are as a means of keeping them safe when not in use.

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Very nice!!

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I just did some checking-around and I guess the general consensus is that false breeching should not contact the animal until braking is required, the cart rolls up on the animal and the false breeching comes into play.

Thinking about it, I can see why this would be preferred, since the horse’s rump is going to be moving more than the shafts, which could definitely result in abrasion.

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If you can add a breeching to your harness, that would be ideal. Not sure what you have and what you don’t have, but I would guess that you are missing the entire spider (attaches to the hames, runs back to the top of the rump), britchen and crupper. As a second-best, you could put what’s called a “false breeching” on the cart. That’s where you attach the britchen directly to the cart shafts. The false breeching is slung between the shafts of the cart and made fast so that it cannot slide up or down the shafts. The traces are tightened to the point that the false breeching comes up snug against the horse’s rump.

The main drawbacks of the false breeching are:
– the necessity of securing the false breeching to the shafts in such a way that it cannot slide (a 2nd set of footman’s loops under the shafts will do the trick)
– if the horse squats down, it is theoretically possible for him to get *under* the false breeching, which can then be quite a mess
– the false breeching only works on cart shafts that are high enough to put the breeching in the correct location on the horse’s rump. If the shafts have too much downward slope, they will put a false breeching on the horse’s gaskins rather than the rump.

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Plant em and see what comes up!

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It’s back. 🙁

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Yep, that did the trick. Maybe post a sticky asking people to clear their cache to erase any vestiges of the malware.

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