More on Ground Driving

I received a couple of questions on ground driving and thought I would answer them here to clear up any questions from the previous article on ground driving.


Yes, Jack, I think this is something you can do with your colt prior to your first ride. I would make sure your colt was giving to lateral pressure or following your reins or lead line when you ask him to tip his head to one side and the other. The pressure or pull coming from the driving lines, run through the stirrups to either a bosal or halter is going to be different as it comes narrower angle than when you are using a lead line and standing at the horse's shoulder asking him to give to the pressure because you are normally pulling at a much greater angle in a more lateral manner giving the horse a clearly signal.

Lynn asked is she would be able to use her  driving lines just by attaching them to the bottom part of the bosal? Or should be get smaller diameter bosal like I was using in the video? 

I wrote Lynn separately but did not include any pictures. Sometimes bosals are fairly thick where the bolt or other snap on driving/lunge lines can't connect to them,.....at least the size bolt snaps I use on the lunge lines/driving lines that I make.  So I was throwing feed yesterday morning, thinking about how I would connect driving lines to one of my thicker bosals, when I had what people back east call an epiphany. It's not like I get these often. In fact, I clearly remember my last epiphany when I caught my wife's favorite oven mitt on fire and my epiphany was that "I'm in big trouble."   I ended up blaming it on the cat (believe me - he deserved it) and everything was okay. But back to driving lines,....... I thought of making a small set of slobber straps to go around the bosal where I could connect the bolt snap of the driving lines to.   About 30 minutes later, using some scrap leather, I came up with the connectors in the picture above where you can see the bolt snap on the white driving line is connected to the mini slobber strap around the bosal just above the heel knot.        

As far as tying up the reins, if I had mecate reins, I would loop the reins part of the mecate around the saddle horn, then tie the lead line portion of the mecate around the horn. I use a clove hitch knot for this and snug it down.    

This keeps the rein portion of the mecate from bouncing over the saddle horn and becoming a problem such as the horse stepping through it.

If using spilt reins, I just tie the reins in a square know around the horn.  The picture at right is how I had the reins secured in the ground driving video.
 
However, if you were ground driving with as halter just remove the lead line.