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An overcheck bit is a second bit that is added to one’s regular bit. You communicate and control with your regular bit. The overcheck bit is a narrow bar bit (often mullen mouth) with tiny loose rings on the end. Its sole purpose is to keep the head from being dropped past a certain point for whatever reason. The overcheck bit is attached to an overcheck strap.

Dropping a slot on your shanks for a time isn’t a failure. Think of it as going in for tutoring after school. You can always go back up the shank.

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Got a new one today, Carl and now they are playing dirty. Posing as forum administrator to lead you to an evil website. Scumbags. You’d probably better send out an APB to everyone’s PM inbox and let them know not to click on anything sent by an alleged admin that isn’t you.

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Last few summers we’ve put up the 60lb rectangular bales using a team and wagon, with a bale elevator chained alongside. Works pretty good with one person stacking and one person driving. Two people stacking on a 16ft wagon deck is even better, once you get into the swing.

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Barbed wire is for enclosing large tracts of pasture for large livestock. Two acres is kind of on the small side of what I’d consider safe to fence with barbed wire. It kind of depends on what’s going on inside those two acres. Do the animals inside get along with each other? Do they have enough food? Are they young? Old? Do they tear around or are they pretty quiet?

I don’t like seeing barbed wire separating two areas that both have animals. Visiting or bickering across a barbed wire fence is bad news.

For smaller areas (like paddocks), I like a board fence with 6″ standoffs holding two strands of hotwire – one at the top and one at about horse-knee-height. A board fence provides a psychological barrier, but mainly I like it as a very visual framework to hold up my hotwire.

For cross-fencing for rotational grazing in small-medium pastures I like hot tape and step-in posts.

If I were in your shoes, with as many animals as you have planned to put in a 2 acre pasture, I think I would maybe go with the smooth high-tensile fence and put a zap to it. I’d be a little nervous with such a mixed crowd in that size of a field.

Growing up, we had lots of barbed wire fences… miles and miles of it, and few injuries. But I think that’s the key: miles and miles of fence means acres and acres of land. It’s unlikely that an animal is going to be spending much time fiddling around near the barbed wire when he’s got so many acres at his disposal.

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I was under the impression that “Monday morning disease” was another term for tying-up, and was a nutritional disorder.

Just looked up “lymphangitis” and what I’ve read on it was pretty hand-wavey.

Have you checked his temperature?

Do you have a pair of hoof pressure testers? An abscess in a hoof can cause a horse to do all sorts of weird things to try to keep their weight off the painful foot, thus turning up with a bizarre assortment of swellings and lamenesses.

Is he kept in a stall at all? If so, is it a box stall or a tie stall?

My apologies if these questions were answered in other posts at a previous date.

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I bought some hame straps from a particular (rather prolific) company that uses inferior leather. The straps looks nice on the rack but there’s a glossy side and a matte side to the hide they use and it’s the glossy side that develops cracks in short order. Leather should be supple and should give. If it cracks, it’s not the right leather for that job.

I don’t order leather parts from that company any more.

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I find that the pigeon wing blinders don’t get snagged as easily and therefore last longer. I like em, even if it does leave me open for ribbing about “going mule”.

My favorite type of bridle is a split-face bridle with a non-adjustable ring crown (custom-sized to fit my horses), pigeon wing blinders, with a separate strap stitched to the crown to hold the sidecheck loops. Bit loops so I can use a military elbow bit if I choose, since the cheek pieces are usually too wide to use any kind of bit other than a ring bit. No noseband. Maybe a few brass spots…

Shoutout to Samson Harness, BTW.

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Mine get a jab with this and that, as the occasion warrants. They know when they’ve done wrong and take their “licks”. Definitely not half-dead.

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Used Harness 101 (if I may be so bold)

I am a frugal person. I have never yet bought a new harness, though I’ve been on the cusp many times. The learning curve for buying used leather tack can be pretty steep and pretty expensive in the long run. A hidden weak spot in a leather strap can ruin your day in a hurry. And usually these things don’t show themselves until you are already in the middle of something unpleasant. A broken hame strap or breast strap at the wrong moment can wreck a wagon, a horse or a teamster.

I don’t recommend that a person just starting out with driving/working horses get a used harness. However, things being what they are, that’s who usually buys them. I recognize that and with it in mind, offer up this advice:

Make sure what you are buying is made of real whole leather and not “chopped, formed and pressed leather” which is to real leather as Spam is to a filet mignon. Technically both made of meat, but…

When you are checking the leather, the weakest point is usually right under a conway buckle that hasn’t been moved in some time. If the hardware is iron-based and not bronze or brass, it will corrode. The corrosion traps moisture against the harness and rots it out in astoundingly little time. Check anywhere it looks like the hardware spent a substantial amount of time at one size setting and check any sharp bends, such as where the back straps pass through the ring on the hames.

I’m handy with a stitching awl and don’t mind making a few repairs, depending on the price and overall condition of the harness. However, deal-breakers for me are: tugs not in excellent condition, back straps and spider not in excellent condition, particularly the hip straps, which are a common weak point, and the leather that holds the rings on the ends of the britchen. Anymore, I don’t like mending any of the spider because I don’t want any splices mucking things up.

If you want to make your own repairs, invest in one of those stitching awls with the spool of waxed thread that stashes in the handle, and a plain awl for making the hole that the needle goes through. I don’t like making the hole with the needle that comes in the stitching awl. I have a single-prong awl and also one that makes four holes in a row. Get a skiver so you can make nice smooth beveled splices that won’t be as prone to catching on things. I don’t much like rivets in general, but they can be handy if you need to tack something together quickly and sturdily in a hurry. You can always stitch it later. You will want #9 copper rivets and burrs. Set of hole punches (I don’t have use for those revolving ones). Rivet set for your #9 rivets.

Some things I will not mend and only make or purchase new, but are not deal-breakers: hame straps, quarter straps and breast straps. I usually expect to replace hame straps and quarter straps and keep that in mind when deciding what I am willing to pay for a used harness. If the breast strap looks at all sketchy, I replace it as well.

Don’t gloss over the bridles. My mares have smaller, more refined heads and many “draft size” bridles can’t be easily adjusted to fit them. Due to the design, there’s only so many holes you can punch. In particular, I dislike the bridles that require a bit loop strap to attach the bit to the bridle, as they never fit my mares. If they fit your horse’s heads, however, they can be a more frugal design as you can replace a bit loop much more cheaply than the entire cheekpiece, which usually includes the blinders. Make sure the crown of the bridle is in good shape. Check the little straps that the throatlatch buckles to. Those can become weakened, particularly if the sidecheck loop is attached to it, and the throatlatch is what keeps the bridle on the head. Depending on the design of the bridle, the entire crown piece might need to be replaced if the throatlatch billet gives way and you aren’t handy with an awl.

A lot of the older harnesses you find at auction were made to fit the old farm chunk mixed breed all-purpose horses. They typically took about a 21″ hame and weighed about 1400 pounds. If you swap out the hames for something larger and let the straps all the way out, you can often fit them on today’s larger drafts, but I find that the britchen is always too small, often about 48″ from ring to ring. I like a britchen that is about 56″. A too-small britchen means that your quarter straps will likely chafe the loin.

Look for previous repairs. I don’t like seeing rivets that go all the way through the belly band, the britchen or the back band because I don’t want rivets touching my horse at any of those points.

This might not be the right thread for this, but it seemed like a good opportunity. Hopefully others will add to it. Or maybe it should be its own thread.

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When mine are in the stalls, they don’t get fed till they are as far away from me as a stall will allow, with their head at or below wither height. When they are loose in the pasture or corral, no one gets food till everyone is as far away as I tell them to be, which varies according to their attitudes. Food is a great motivator.

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Just an idea: goats don’t necessarily need another goat for a companion. They aren’t very bigoted when it comes to their friends. I have one wether who buddied up with our dog for several months till we got more goats. Another of my wethers really enjoys the company of the horses.

I think the main thing to remember is that most of them require a companion at all times. If you have two goats and you take one out and leave the other at home, the goat that goes with you will probably be pretty content… because he has you for company. The one left at home, however, will probably NOT be happy. Now you are up to three goats!

An unhappy goat is a LOUD goat, and one determined to rejoin his buddies. Goats are tremendous jumpers and can even do ninja-like manouvers such as bouncing off one wall in order to leap over an adjacent one. They can and will climb mesh fences. They will endure the zap of a hot fence to drag themselves under a low wire. About the only way to keep a goat in his enclosure is to make sure he is content there.

All that being said, I love my goats. One of my wethers is a pack goat and the other is in harness training. My goal is to get both of them going in harness and find or make a small garden plow and cultivator scaled for the goats to pull. I have found a few places that are able to make me a collar for my goats.

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I used the rubber-palmed Kinco gloves for many years but finally gave em up for good. I loved how they worked and wore, but hated the rank smell they quickly developed (and transferred to my hands). Last five or six years I’ve been using leather gloves exclusively (Costco has been carrying some Wells Lamonts that I like) but when used in wet conditions (which is 6 months out of the year for me, unless I get lucky and we freeze up for a while in the winter) they can get slick in a hurry. Also have found that whatever they use to tan their leather gets transferred to my own hide when the gloves are wet. Tarnishes my silver wedding ring and pickles my skin, making my fingers more prone to cracking and splitting in the cold. Once I get a crack in the side of my forefinger or thumb, I have a heck of a time getting rid of it. Like a quarter crack for people. Sometimes I’ll have one from November till after spring plowing is done! I have yet to find glove Nirvana.

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Oh, sorry. Your first post said, “my old mare has always been prone to scratchin her neck and rump.” so I misunderstood.

When did the scratching of neck and rump first start?

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Let me make sure I understand…

She has always been somewhat itchy on her neck and rump but now it’s the worst it’s ever been and the skin is all bumpy, like marbles under the skin?

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It is my opinion that the teamster should train himself. He should develop and hone his skills to be able to communicate more effectively with horses, rather than rely on training the horses to learn a more “human” method of communication. Any allegations of abuse aside, I believe this is simply a more efficient way of approaching the “language barrier” problem between horses and humans.

If you are going to work more than one team of horses during your lifetime, I think you will be weeks and months ahead of schedule per horse if you use the “train thyself” approach. If you work many horses during your lifetime, this will add up to years of saved time.

Think of the self-training as an investment, or resources spent on “R&D” (research and development). Sure, the initial time outlay might be a bit more “expensive” in the beginning with the first team or two, but with each subsequent team of horses you train, the time-cost per team will go down because you will be getting better and better at it.

If you take the “train the horses” approach and focus on teaching the horses to communicate in a more human manner, you definitely can get to the same place in the end as with a team of horses worked/trained by a teamster to has invested in training himself to communicate in a more equine manner.

But if you give those two types of trainers/teamsters five teams apiece, the trainer/teamster who has trained himself first will have five safe and useable teams much sooner than the teamster who must train his horses to understand human methods of communication.

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