Staying Safe on (and around) Your Horse

 In This Chapter

• Knowing what to wear
• Being safe on the ground
• Keeping yourself and other riders secure

Horses are a real joy to be around, but the fact is, they’re much bigger than you are. The average horse weighs almost ten times as much as the average human female. Consequently, humans have to be careful around horses to make sure that equine bulk doesn’t end up somehow becoming a liability to the human body.

In this chapter, we give you the details you need to be safe around horses, regardless of whether you’re on the ground, in the saddle, alone, or with other riders. This chapter also gives you tips about how to keep your horse safe from himself, too!

Dressing the Right Way

Believe it or not, the clothing you wear around horses and your safety go hand in hand. Wearing — or not wearing — something when handling these cumbersome beasts can mean the difference between an ambulance ride to the emergency room and going to bed that night unscathed. We cover helmets, pants, footwear, and jewelry in the following sections. Be sure to check out Chapter Getting into Gear with Horse Equipment for additional info on what to wear when you’re around horses.

Wearing a safety helmet

Remember

Probably the most important part of your equestrian wardrobe is the safety helmet, because it protects your skull and brain. A safety helmet can protect you in the following ways:

- On the ground: If you’re planning to be around a horse that is known for being difficult to handle in certain situations (freaks out while loading in a trailer, has a deadly fear of clippers, needs to be given some bad-tasting medicine), wearing a helmet is a wise precaution.

- In the saddle: The fall from a horse’s back is not a short one, and it can take place at a high speed. In far too many instances, helmetless riders have fallen off their horses, hit their heads on a hard surface, and sustained permanent brain damage. Wearing a safety helmet designed specifically for equestrians can protect the most important part of your body — your brain.

Remember

Wearing a safety helmet is especially important for children. Their heads tend to be more breakable than those of adults.

Putting on the proper pants

The same people who ride around in tennis shoes usually ride in shorts, too, and that’s something we don’t recommend. In fact, we’re not really sure how people can stand riding in shorts. Bare skin has to rub against a leather saddle only for a few minutes to make you realize that shorts and riding don’t go together. An occasional bareback rider can get away with riding in shorts, although that rider’s skin doesn’t stand a chance should he or she take a spill.

Tip

Your discipline determines the type of pants you should wear when you’re riding. English riders wear riding tights or breeches. If you’re riding western, wear jeans. No matter what, closely fitted pants are best to prevent chaffing when you ride. For the greatest comfort, buy pants made specifically for riding.

Stepping into safe footwear

Remember

You should always wear protective footwear whenever you’re around horses. Always wear heavy leather boots whether you’re planning to ride your horse or just going for a simple grooming session. Follow these rules to keep your tootsies safe:

- Wear heavy boots when working with a horse on the ground. Heavy boots are the footwear of choice for horse handlers, for good reason. Sooner or later, if you spend enough time around horses, one of these hulks is going to step on your foot. When he does, you’ll have a few hundred pounds of pressure on your foot, conveniently punctuated with a weighty metal shoe. If you’re wearing tennis shoes or sandals when that happens, you’ll be walking around with a cane for quite a while. We recommend wearing equestrian boots, which are heavier than your average shoe, for maximum protection.

- Wear riding shoes or boots when you’re in the saddle. You may’ve seen people wearing tennis shoes while riding — a major no-no in our opinion. Riding shoes or boots are made especially for equestrians. They’re the safest form of footwear to don when riding. One reason: Riding shoes and boots have a heel that keeps your foot from sliding through the stirrup and trapping your leg — an important factor if you happen to fall from your horse.

Protecting Yourself on the Ground

You may not believe it, but the majority of your time around horses is spent on the ground and not on the horse’s back. You’ll groom, feed, and clean up your steed on a regular basis. All this time spent in close proximity to your horse means greater odds that an accident will occur when on the ground. That is one reason why ground safety is so important with horses.

Another reason is that when you’re on the ground, you’re vulnerable to being stepped on, kicked, or knocked down. Sure, if something goes wrong while you’re riding, the ground is at least a five-foot plunge away. But when you’re handling a horse from terra firma, more stuff can happen besides falling.

In the following sections, we cover how to stay safe when you’re cleaning a horse’s hooves, moving around a horse in close quarters, leading a horse, and tying a horse. We also give you a few warning signs that a horse is about to make a sudden move. Check out Chapter Working with Your Horse from the Ground for more info about handling a horse from the ground.

Caring for a horse’s hooves

Horse people always are fussing with their horses’ feet. Horses constantly are getting their feet cleaned, their fetlock (or ankle) hair clipped, or their hooves brushed with hoof polish.

The human urge when performing these hoof-related tasks (covered in Chapter Keeping Your Horse Clean and Pretty) is to kneel down on the ground next to the hoof. After all, from this vantage point, you can get your work done much more efficiently. The problem, though, is that kneeling close to a horse’s feet puts you in a dangerous position from which you can’t easily retreat. If the horse suddenly moves to the side, he’ll likely step on you. If something scares him, you can even be trampled.

Remember

When you’re fiddling with a horse’s hoof, bend or crouch instead of kneeling. By bending or crouching, you keep your feet beneath you, enabling you to move quickly if the horse’s body comes your way.

Remember: Don’t hold the hoof by the tip; doing so won’t give you enough control if the horse tries to pull the leg away from you. If you hold the hoof only by the tip, you can easily lose your grip on the hoof and drop it on your own foot! Instead, keep your hand under the hoof or under the pastern (the area between the hoof and the ankle). Check out Chapter Understanding Horses from Head to Hoof for information about horse and hoof anatomy.

Warning!

Keep your head out of the field of motion of the horse’s leg; don’t put your head in an area where the horse can inadvertently conk you if he quickly jerks up his leg to remove a fly or reacts to the tickle of clippers. As a child, one of your authors (okay, it was me, Audrey) stuck her head behind a horse’s foreleg while clipping a fetlock and received a lump on her forehead roughly the size of Nevada.

Being in close quarters with a horse

When you find yourself in close quarters with a horse, the reality of the horse’s mass becomes much more apparent. Your comparatively minute human form can easily be squashed if a horse pins you up against a wall.

Horses that are well trained know not to encroach on a human’s space. With these horses, you can merely push on the too-close body and cluck your tongue to get the horse to move over and give you some breathing room. Unfortunately, not all horses have learned this lesson, which is why you don’t need to take chances with your well-being by being in a position that enables a horse to pen you in.

Remember

Follow these simple rules to keep yourself out of harm’s way in close quarters:

- Never wedge yourself between a horse and an unmovable object. Find a way to move the horse if you don’t have enough room to gain access to that side of the horse.

- Never enter a box stall with a strange horse without finding out whether the animal is okay with your presence. Nothing is more terrifying than finding yourself inside a small space with a horse who hates you. If the horse pins his ears back, rushes at you, or turns his rear end toward you, stay away!

- Never stand directly behind a horse (especially one you don’t know). Although occurrences are rare, horses occasionally kick out at people walking or standing behind them, causing serious injury to the kick’s victim.

If you need to pass close behind a strange horse, make sure that the horse knows you’re there, and pass very close to the horse’s body, nearly touching it. That way, if the horse tries to kick, you’ll make contact only with the point of the hock (or elbow of the back leg) and not the full-force of the hoof.

- Make sure that the horse sees you: When you approach a horse that is loose in a stall, speak to the animal first so that it turns around and looks at you before you enter the stall. Gauge the horse’s body language to make sure that it is calm and receptive to your approach. (Read on, or see Chapter Understanding Horses from Head to Hoof, to find out more about how to read equine body language.)

Recognizing some dangerous horse moves

Remember

Horses typically make maneuvers that put the humans in jeopardy — although to be fair to the horses, the poor creatures rarely mean to do so. Regardless of whether the move is accidental, you still need to know what to watch out for. Being forewarned about the following moves, you stand a better chance of getting out of the way in time:

- Head jerks: If a horse wants you to get away from his head, he jerks it upward and sometimes to the side at the same time.

- Swinging body: Remember these key points about equine physics: When a horse’s front end moves to the left (he pivots on his front hooves), the back end concurrently moves to the right, and vice versa.

- Sideways moves: If a horse is afraid of something on his right-hand side, he will leap to the left, and vice versa.

- Forward we go: If something spooks a horse from behind, the horse moves forward — rapidly.

- Backward ho: If you approach a horse from the front, holding something he wants to avoid (medication, dewormer, or a frightening object, for example), he will throw up his head, place all of his weight on his haunches, and back up at significant speed. If this happens, don’t pull back on the lead rope because doing so only excites the horse more and causes further backing up. Just relax, hold the scary object behind your back, talk softly to the horse, and give the big guy a chance to settle down.

Leading a horse

Leading sounds simple enough — just walk with the lead rope and the horse follows, right? Well, yeah, but what happens if something scares the horse from behind? If you’re directly in front of the horse, you’re going to get trampled.

Remember

Horse people have discovered that leading a horse from his left side, just at the shoulder, considerably reduces your chances of being stepped on or run over. If you lead a horse in this way, the worst thing your horse can do is step on your foot, and that’s much better than being trampled, don’t you think? (See Chapter Working with Your Horse from the Ground for an illustration showing the correct way to lead your horse.)

Tip

Here are some other points to remember when leading a horse:

- Never wrap the lead line around your hand or hold the loops of the lead rope. If the horse pulls back or takes off, you’ll get dragged along on a rough ride. Instead, hold the part of the rope near the horse’s head in your right hand and the loose end in your left hand.

- Hold the lead rope close to the halter. Doing so gives you better control over the horse’s head and prevents you and the horse from tripping over slack in the line.

- Never lead a horse with your hand in his halter. If the horse pulls back or runs away, your hand can get caught and you can be dragged.

Moving around a tied horse

Remember

Many horses feel vulnerable when they’re tied to a hitching post or crossties. Something about having their heads restrained can really set them off. Chapter Working with Your Horse from the Ground has even more details about tying up horses and dealing with bad behavior, but to avoid accidents, follow these basic rules of safety around tied horses:

- Use a short tie. Whoever came up with the phrase “enough rope to hang himself” must have known a horse. If you tie a horse up at a hitching post with too much slack in the lead rope, the horse inevitably gets a foot hung up in the rope or ends up with the rope over his neck. Always tie a horse with a short rope (12 inches of slack is a good length) so he can’t get himself into trouble.

- Use safety restraints: When tying a horse to a hitching post or horse trailer, always use a safety knot. A safety knot enables you to quickly release a panicking horse’s lead rope. If you’re cross-tying your horse, use quick-release snaps on crossties and light ropes that break easily if the horse pulls back.

- Never duck underneath a horse’s neck to get to the other side (even though you may be tempted to and even if you’ve seen other horsepeople doing it). Instead, take the long way and walk around the horse’s front or back. Many horses don’t mind a human walking under their necks, but enough do that you can end up with a panicked horse and a seriously injured human.

- Use the frontal approach. All horses have a propensity for freaking out and pulling back when they’re tied. If you’ve ever seen a horse throw all his weight on his hindquarters and rip a hitching post out of the ground, then you know that pulling back is a terrifying and dangerous habit. Some horses do it routinely, but others need serious provocation before pulling this stunt.

To avoid instigating a horse to pull back, always be slow and quiet when approaching from the front. If you need to move toward the horse with an object in your hand, watch the horse’s body language carefully to determine whether the horse is scared and a pullback is imminent (see Chapter Understanding Horses from Head to Hoof for details on equine body language).

Being Secure in the Saddle

You can have plenty of fun riding a horse, but you need to keep safety in mind at all times if you’re going to continue to have fun. Getting hurt is a sure way to ruin the party.

When riding, several different safety angles come into play, such as checking your tack and knowing the etiquette for riding with other people. Remembering all the stuff in the following sections may take some concentration at first, but in time, it will become second nature. (Be sure to flip to Chapter Taking Control in the Saddle for general information about maintaining control while you’re riding.)

Inspecting your tack first

Having quality tack (riding equipment) in good condition is pretty important if you want to have a safe horseback ride. Just like the timing belt in your car’s engine, tack can break at the most inopportune times if you don’t regularly inspect it.

Before every ride, do a cursory inspection of your tack to make sure that no accidents are waiting to happen. See Chapter Getting into Gear with Horse Equipment for details on the following items:

- The bridle: Check it to make sure that all the buckles are tightly fastened and all the pieces are securely attached. Check the stitching to make sure it’s secure, too.

- The girth: On English saddles, inspect the buckles on both sides to make sure they’re securely fastened. On western saddles, be sure that the left latigo strap is snugly tied to the saddle’s D-ring, and the right latigo is securely buckled to the cinch.

- The stirrups: On English saddles, check to make sure that the stirrup leathers are securely buckled and positioned on the stirrup bar. For western saddles, inspect the stirrup buckle to make sure that it isn’t loose.

Tip

If you ride English, run your stirrup irons up the leathers so the irons are flush with the saddle skirt after you dismount from your horse. Doing so keeps your irons from catching on anything and from banging around on your horse.

Riding by yourself

Remember

Riding alone can be a peaceful and relaxing experience. However, to ensure your safety when you’re out on your own, follow these precautions:

- If you’ll be out on the trail, make sure that someone knows where you are going and when you plan to return.

- Carry a cell phone with you. Keep the cell phone on your body, not attached to your saddle. That way, if you and your horse part ways, you still have a way to call for help.

- Stay on marked trails and make certain that you have a map or know your way around.

Flip to Chapter Taking Control in the Saddle for additional safety info.

Riding with other horse folks

Riding is most fun when done in groups. Cruising the trail with your friends or riding around an arena with a buddy or two can be a blast. In situations where horses are kept at boarding stables and boarders share riding facilities, riding in groups is not usually a choice; it’s mandatory simply because everyone is forced to use the same arenas and trails at the same time.

Riders must take certain safety precautions when they’re around other riders and horses. Following the rules in the next two sections helps keep you and your fellow equestrians safe and makes you a popular person around the barn!

Adhering to arena etiquette

Riding is a dignified hobby, and riders are expected to behave a certain way when they’re astride a horse. Nearly all of these expected behaviors are related to safety, and they keep you in good stead with the other riders and their horses.

Follow these guidelines when riding in an arena with other riders:

- Slow going: When a cowboy wants to go for a ride in the movies, he simply leaps onto his horse and gallops off in a flurry. In the real world, equestrians don’t behave that way unless they want to do harm to their horses and incur the wrath of everyone around them.

When you first mount your horse, walk slowly to the riding arena. Don’t trot or canter through the aisles of the stable, and don’t stress your horse by tearing off into a gallop from a standstill. This behavior labels you as a yahoo and puts you and your horse in all kinds of physical danger.

- Stay back: When you’re riding in a head-to-tail situation, such as around the perimeter of an arena, keep your horse several feet away from the horse in front of you. Most horses tolerate other horses behind them, but some won’t. As a result, crowding can end up with your horse being kicked and even seriously hurt.

Protocol

If you have a horse who kicks when other horses get too close, tie a red ribbon at the base of your horse’s tail to warn other riders at horse shows, organized trail rides, or other events. Likewise, when you see a horse with a red ribbon on another horse’s tail, stay back! The ribbon is a warning that your horse may be kicked if you get too close.

- Rear approach: If you’re approaching a horse from behind while in the arena, do not run your horse up behind that rider. If you do, the rider’s horse almost certainly will spook or take off, and you can be the cause of a serious accident. Instead, if you’re trotting or cantering and going to pass another rider from the rear while that rider is at the walk (her horse is walking), give the rider and horse a wide berth so you don’t upset the horse.

- Passing: When riding in an arena, you’re bound to find yourself going in one direction while one or more riders are traveling the opposite way. When passing one another in a riding arena, riders use the left-shoulder-to-left-shoulder rule. When riders pass one another in opposite directions, their left shoulders pass each other. To accomplish this feat, you may need to stay close to the rail so the approaching rider passes you on your left. Or, you may need to stay to the inside or middle of the arena, away from the rail, so that an approaching rider passes you to the left. (To understand left-shoulder-to-left-shoulder passing, see Figure 17-1.)

Tip

horse and the left-shoulder rule won’t work for some reason, you can call “inside” or “outside” to the other rider to indicate which direction you plan to go.

- Be quiet: Again, the movies come to mind. Yelling, hollering, and yee-hawing while on horseback is fine for actors in westerns, but in real life, doing so frightens your horse, annoys others, and makes you look like a dope.

Protocol

The only exception to this rule is when you’re riding in gymkhana or some other competitive speed event where such vocalizations are considered acceptable because they encourage the horse to go faster (see Chapter Competing on Horseback for more details about such events).

Figure 17-1: Two riders pass left-shoulder-to-left-shoulder in an arena.

Staying safe on the trail

Trail riders also need to follow these rules of safety and etiquette while enjoying the wide-open spaces:

- Approaching: When approaching another rider, if you are trotting or loping, slow to a walk and maintain your slow pace until you’re well past the other horse.

- Passing: When passing another rider on the trail, do so at a walk. Many horses can become out of control when they hear or see a horse trotting or loping up behind them. Make sure the rider ahead of you knows where you are and is okay with you passing, especially on narrow trails.

- Spooking horses: If you see another rider in trouble ahead of you on the trail, either offer to help (if you can) or stop and wait until that person has his or her horse under control before you proceed.

- Be quiet: When passing another rider, avoid yelling or doing anything that may spook the other horse.

- Blind curves: When riding on narrow trails in high brush, go slowly around blind curves. This rule is for your safety as well as the safety of others, because a hiker, a mountain biker, or another rider may be approaching from the opposite direction.

- Dismounted riders: Don’t try to ride past someone who is attempting to mount a horse. Stop and wait until the rider is safely in the saddle before proceeding.

 by Audrey Pavia with Janice Posnikoff,DVM