Harnessing a Draft Animal

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I’m Kurt Truax. I’m the farm manager here at Brazos de Dios, which is a working farm where Ploughshare is based. I’m also an instructor with Ploughshare. I actually learned to farm here at Brazos de Dios, and I have been managing now for the last 10 years.

In this video, I’m going to show you how to harness a draft animal. And we’re going to go over the basic parts and components of that harness. There’s different kinds of harnesses. Today, we’re just going to be using the basic farm work harness that’s used for more of your heavy type farmwork, and plowing, discing.

Well, the first thing I’d like to do is introduce my team. This is a team of Belgian mules. This is Skeeter here on the left. And we’ve got Buffy over here on the right. And the first thing we’ve got to learn, if you’re going to learn to work with a team of horses, you’re going to have to learn how to tie a horse.

And so what you do is, generally, I’ll come to this side of the hitching post. A lot of times, I’ll have four horses abreast. So you need to be out and away from your animals.

But a horse knot– it’s very simple– what you’ll do is you come around your hitching post like this. And you’re going to basically make a one and 1/2 twist in your rope. Then you’re going to come, and you’re going to form another loop here.

And you’re going to bring that to form your knot. And if you have a lot of excess slack, you can make more loops, if you have a long lead rope. Or you can just run it through like this.

And the purpose for a horse knot is that– what it is, it’s essentially a slip knot– and a horse can pull, he can jerk, he can do whatever he wants to, but it’s not going to tighten that knot.

So in a situation where there may be danger, or you need to get the horse free quickly, that’s the purpose of a horse knot. And it’s a quick, easy knot to tie and untie.

All through a horse’s life, from the time they’re born until the time they’re of working age, you’re wanting to build a relationship with these animals. And they start young. You do a form of training, called imprint training. Then you do formal training. But all through the course of their life, you’re wanting to build their trust to you and their confidence to you.

And so what I’m going to instruct and talk about right now is the purpose of brushing and currying a horse. And initially, obviously, you’re trying to clean the horse but, also, it’s a time where you have a direct contact with the animal. It’s something they actually enjoy. You know, it’s like you getting your back scratched.

But you work with the animal. You’re currying. You’re brushing them. And it’s just that relational contact. And it’s a very important step on the relational end. But then, also, it’s got some real practical purposes.

Obviously, when you take a harness, and you just throw it on top of their back, or it could be a riding horse with a saddle, if you don’t take the time to curry that animal, you can begin to develop sores, because they have a lot of dirt and dust. And when those harnesses or saddles are on those animals, it’s wearing, it’s rubbing on them, and it could actually cause you problems down the road. So there’s that purpose.

The other thing is it’s the health of the animal. These animals, when you work them day in and day out, they sweat. And so they build up the salts and things in the pores in their skin. And by currying and brushing them, it keeps their pores open so that they can sweat properly. It keeps them healthy. And so it’s a very important step as you begin to harness an animal.

You’ve got two tools here. You’ve got the curry comb, and you have the brush. And when I start currying or brushing the animal, I always start with the curry comb. And the reason for the curry comb is the horses, when they go out to pasture on a rainy day, they like to roll. They get dirty. They get muddy. And this gets the initial mud and heavier dirt and helps to get the salts off the horses’ skin.

And there’s two different sides to a curry comb as far as the teeth are concerned. You’ve got a long side here. If you look closely, the teeth are a little longer here and a little shallower here. So in the summertime, when their coats are short, you’ll go with the shorter teeth. And in the winter time, when they’re long, you can actually just pull back on this curry comb and flip it from one side to the other to adjust for that.

So what I do, when I first start currying, I like to start at the head. And I always like to work from the top down. If you work from the bottom up, and you knock some of the loose hair and stuff, it may filter down and get the horse dirty where you’ve already curried. So it’s better to work from the top of the animal down.

So I like to do them both at the same time. The brush here is used for getting a lot of the fine hair and the looser dirt off. So I’ll curry first, and then I’ll come behind with the brush and brush directly behind it, and do it at the same time as I work across the horse.

So we’ll start here. And you want to catch really just about every surface of their body. I don’t always curry down their legs. If they’re muddy, they’re dirty, I’ll do that. But we’re really trying to catch the part of the animal that the harness is going to have direct contact with. And so I’ll curry an area like this. And then I’ll go back over it then with the brush. And I’ll work it.

On a harness, you have a strap– it’s called a pull strap– that runs up underneath here, underneath the horse’s belly. So I’ll stick up in here. I’ll get that with my comb and come back over and get that out with the brush. And then I’ll continue to work across the animal. You can see the dust as it comes off the animal.

And you’ve got to be careful around an animal. If it’s a new animal, and you’re not sure– you’ve not spent a lot of time with this animal– you want to be careful. There’s sensitive spots to a horse back up in here. Horses are big. They’re living. And they can hurt you.

So there’s a lot of safety aspects of working with an animal that’s important while you’re currying. When I’m currying, a lot of times, I’ll have a direct contact. I’ll keep a hand on the horse. You know, if a horse goes to kick, or he moves on you, you have an arm that can push yourself away, keep yourself protected. We’ve got to always be careful going around the backside of an animal.

Obviously, if you’ve raised this animal, you know him. You can get more comfortable with their behaviors. But it’s always good to be cautious. Things spook horses, scare them. So a general rule, especially behind the backside of a horse– the most dangerous area– would be them kicking with their back feet. And so when you go around a horse, you either want to stay really close, so if they do go to kick at you, you’re not going to take the full brunt. Or you want to go out in the realm where you’re out of the distance of where their feet can catch you.

So you work the one side, come over here, and do the other side of their body. We’ll move this side a little quicker. Now, we’ve completed the curry and brushing. And I want to move on to the next step, and that’s to start harnessing. So let’s go on to the harness room.

The first step with harnessing is we will begin with putting on the collar of the horse. If you’ll notice the way these collars are hanging, we actually hang them upside down, just because it’s got more support when you put them up here on the rack. But what you’ll do is you’ll come and you’ll grab the collar. And we’ll bring it to the horse.

When we walk up to a horse, you never want to be abrupt. You always want to go up cautiously, talk to him, let him know you’re there. Horses sometimes are sleeping standing there. You don’t want to be real abrupt.

So when you walk up to him, just say, hello, Skeeter. Give him a little pet. We’re going to begin by putting the collar on the animal here. The collar, in and of itself, it’s not very strong. All it consists of is leather, and then it’s packed with straw.

So here in a minute, when we put the harness on, you have the hames that fit inside the collar here. And that’s what gives the collar its strength. The other purpose of the collar is to pad the animal when they’re working and leaning into it. When they begin to pull any pieces of equipment, it’s what pads their shoulder.

So we’re going to start here. First off, you have a couple snaps here that actually hold on a collar pad. Sometimes just depends on the animal. It depends on the situation. Sometimes we’ll put a collar pad in there.

The advantages to a collar pad is that in a collar, when it’s put together, it’s not always perfect. And sometimes it has a few imperfections. There’ll be a little bump in it. And sometimes those little bumps will actually put pressure on the horse’s shoulder a little bit more. And that might end up where they’ll wear a sore.

So the disadvantages sometimes is that they cause the horse to sweat more. There’s different kinds of collar pads. You have ones that are made of deer hair or made of cloth. They tend to mat up in this Texas hot, humid weather, and they tend to rub on the horse more, and you tend to wear sores. I’ve gone to using more of a nylon type that just has a foam inside. They do sweat in those, but they do a lot better, I think, in this part of the country.

So first thing here we’ll do is you’ve got to undo this pad. And you just undo one side. Another thing, just as a general rule, whether it’s a riding horse or a draft or workhorse, or mules, you always work on the left side of the animal.

So we’ll start. We’re on her left side. You unsnap the collar pad, and then you unbuckle the top of the collar. The advantage to this collar here is that it has a fair amount of adjustment. Sometimes there’s different kinds of collar tops. This one allows you to adjust to different heights.

As you start in the early spring, you start with a young horse. A lot of times, necks are filled out and big. And as you begin to work that animal, their necks actually begin to shrink. And so as the season rolls on, you actually have to be able to adjust your collar. So it’s good to have a collar that is somewhat adjustable. Most of them are.

So what we’ll do here, first thing, when you go to put the collar on the animal here, like I said, it’s not very strong. It has leather, and it’s made of straw. If you spread these open too wide, you can actually break the straw inside here, and it’ll ruin the collar. So you only want to open it enough just to get around the horse or mule’s neck here.

And so we’ll come around like this. You’ll kind of support it with your chest from underneath and free your other hand up, and bring that collar pad around. And once you’ve brought this around, the first thing you’ll want to do is go ahead and buckle the collar back together before connecting the pad back to the collar.

A couple of things that we want to point out, after you put the collar on, is how they fit. It’s very important, actually, for a couple different reasons. If the collar is too big– in other words, if it’s hanging down too long here– when he goes to lean into his collar, he’s going to be pressing on the points of his shoulder, if it’s sticking down too long. And he’ll begin to wear a sore there.

The other thing is if the collar is too tight, and when he begins to lean into his collar, it’s going to choke him. So the collar’s got to fit just right. There can be a little variance, but it’s got to fit pretty good. And just as a general rule of thumb, you want to be able to fit one hand here, underneath their neck, and then you also want to be able to slide one hand comfortably alongside of his neck.

And if you go to purchase a harness for a horse, you can take those measurements. You measure from the top of the withers to the base of the neck. And most collar companies– if you go to order a harness, you call them– you give them that measurement. And then they’ll adjust it accordingly.

So I think we’ll move on now here to the harness.

We’re going to go ahead, and we’re going to take the harness here and take it out to the horse. The first thing that you’ll do is you’re going to take what we call the britchin– we’ll go over some of the parts of the harness here in a little bit– but you’ll take the britchin, and you’re going to lay it up here up on your shoulder. Just lay it up here like this. And you’re running your arm just like this harness is going to sit on top of the horse’s back.

And so then you take the hip drop assembly, and you’re going to lay it up there. You have your back pad. You’re going to lay it up there. And then you can go ahead and grab ahold of your hames. And you’re going to pull the harness off the rack.

When you walk up to the horse, like we said before, let the animal know you’re there, talk to him, say, Skeeter. Sometimes on a young horse, when you approach them with this big wad of leather, sometimes it can be kind of frightening to them. It spooks them a little bit. So just let them know you’re there.

The harness weighs about 40 pounds, so it’s got a little weight to it. And so if you’re small and younger, it might be a little harder. If you’re short, you might have to maybe have a stool or something to help you get the harness on top of the horse, especially depending on the size of the horse.

But what you want to do is you want to reach down, and you want to grab a little bit lower on your right hame so that you can get it up on top of the horse here. And as you go to put it on the horse, you’re going to give it just a little throw. And it helps you to get the harness up there. So we’ll go up. We’ll take it up.

And when you initially are putting the harness on their back, you’re just wanting to set the hames and everything right on the middle of their back initially, just til you get it up there.

So we’ll just kind of set it up here, like this, and throw it up. Then you’re going to kind of hold it. If you walk away from it, the harness is going to want to fall back on you. So you’ll kind of hold it. And as you’re keeping some pressure on there, then you’ll just start working some of the different parts over the top of her back. And then you’ll just kind of lay it there so it can sit.

And then we’ll come up here. We’re going to take the hames. And I had mentioned earlier, the hames are really kind of the skeleton structure of the collar. And they’re going to fit right inside the grooves of the collar. So we’ll go ahead. We’ll pick this up here. We’ll set it up in there.

There’s different adjustments on the hame here. You’ve got three different adjustments. Sometimes it’ll move when you’re bringing the harnesses in and out. Sometimes you might need to change collars. And so you need to have different adjustments.

And up here, on top, you have a hame strap that holds the two hames together up on top. And it has a buckle. And it’s adjustable. And then here, too, you’ve got the three adjustments on both sides.

You want to be sure, once they’re sized in, that everything is adjusted the same. You don’t want to be in the middle little slot here on this side and be on the lower one on the other side, because the hames will be offset. And so when they go to pull, it’s going to tend to wear a sore, because it’s not pulling evenly.

On the hames, you want to make sure that it fits inside the collar just so. If it’s too short– see, the hames sit right in the contour of the collar here– if it’s too short, it’s going to tend to sit up like that, and you’re going to see a gap here. And that’s not seated right. And what that’s telling you is that the tugs are going to tend to be sitting up too high, so it’s not going to be pulling right.

If it’s too long, you’re going to see the buckle of the hame hanging down too low. So you want it to sit just so. And so that’s why, when we talked earlier, we had these different adjustments to be able to put your hames just right inside the collar there.

So once you know that it’s fitting properly, we’re going to go to the hame strap. And that’s going to attach to the lower part of the hames. You have two little buckles that the hame strap goes through. And one’s already attached on the one side. And you put it through here on this side. And once you run it through this first buckle here, you’re going to want to kind of set the hames in place.

You’ll do a little downward pressure, kind of seats the hames there. And you hold tension there. And then you’re going to run it through the buckle of the hame strap. And you’ll do it again. You’ll want to hold some downward pressure.

The reason, when you attach the hames here to the collar, you want them to be tight enough where they don’t slide. And because different situations– you’re hooked to a wagon, you have forward pressure from the wagon that can actually pop that hame off the collar– so it’s very important that you make sure it’s seated and it’s tight.

So you hold that down with pressure. And then you’re going to pull it to you here a little bit. And then you’ll put it in the proper hole, that seems good there in the hame strap. So once you’ve tightened it and buckled the hame strap down, you want to reach up, grab ahold of the collar, grab ahold of the hame. And if you make that hame slide inside the collar there, it’s too loose. But if it’s tight, and you can’t get it to move, then you’re good to go.

Next step here, we’re going to reach over and grab ahold of our breast strap. It has a snap here. You’re going to bring it around. You want to watch. This particular one has a swivel. Some of them are just a fixed snap. And so you’ve got to make sure. You don’t want to go up there, and you don’t want to twist it. You want to make sure everything’s straight.

So you have these little hame rings that hang down. One’s on her right side. And then this one’s hanging over on the left side. And you want to come over here and snap on to that little ring in there. Then you have your pull strap. We snap that into here, so when we put the harness away, it’s not dragging on the ground. It keeps it up off the ground. So we’re going to unbuckle the pull strap. Go ahead and let that drop down there.

Now we’ll go ahead and move here onto the back of the horse. We’re going to take what we call the britchin. That’s going to fit behind her hindquarters here. You’re going to grab ahold of the britchin here. And you’re going to drag it. And drag it back. Kind of pull it in here. Be sure your back pad is sitting right there up on top.

Once you’ve pulled the britchin here to the back, you’ve got to take their tail, pull it off to the side. You don’t want to yank it out. Just pull it off to the side, and bring it outside of the britchin. After you’ve pulled the britchin down here, your harness has got to be adjusted just so. And on a britchin, you don’t want the britchin to sit up here too high.

When an animal’s hitched to a wagon, the purpose of the britchin and some of the stuff underneath the horse, it serves as the brakes that the animal will use to stop an implement– you know, a wagon, a plow, anything that’s going to have a tongue that they’re attached to– so it’s got to sit just so.

So if it’s sitting too high, and they go to stop, well, they’re going to have this pressure that’s going to cause the britchin to ride up. If it’s too low, if it hangs way down, like when you’re coming down a hill, it’s going to put too much pressure down here on their legs, and it’s going to make it very uncomfortable for them to walk.

So you’ve got to watch for that. And then we’re going go ahead and move them back up to the front of the horse here. And we’re going to take the pull strap, which is going to run right here between the animal’s legs.

Once again, we want to emphasize safety. You’ve got a live, living animal. You don’t want to put yourself in any kind of harm’s way. So really, you want to be working more on your feet. You don’t want to find yourself kneeling down. You just want to be cautious, because you’ve got animals, different things may happen, stung by a bee, all manner of things. So always keep safety in mind.

So you’ll take the pull strap. It’s running between her front legs. Then you’re going to reach up under here, and you’re going to grab ahold of what we call the belly band. Now, like on a riding horse, which we’d call the cinch like on a saddle, it would be very tight. But on a harness, you actually want it loose. And you want to have about a couple inches of play off their belly. Because you want this strap to be able to freely move.

So you bring the belly band around. You have a buckle. You bring that up, and you adjust it accordingly. So once you get the belly band buckle attached here, we’re going to keep continuing to move on here to the back of the horse.

Then you’re going to take your pull strap here. And then you’re going to grab ahold of your quarter straps. Quarter straps are coming off of your britchin. You have a snap here.

If you’ll notice, here on the snap, you have a smooth side. And then you have the part that, actually, you’ll snap on to whatever you’re attaching it. You want to make sure that the smooth side is facing the horse. When they’re pulling a wagon, they stop. They get a lot of pressure that comes up underneath their belly. If this part of the snap is closest to the horse, it’ll wear a sore. So you want to make sure that smooth part here is closer to their belly.

So you’ll pull the pull strap up. You take your snap. You’re going to snap it here. And you’ll reach over here on the other side. You have another one just like it. Same thing. Make sure you leave the smooth side facing the animal.

You’ll come up, and we’ll snap here. And the thing you want to watch for is that once the quarter straps are in place, you don’t want to be too close to the horse, and you don’t want it hanging down too low. If it’s too close, or they don’t have enough play when they go to stop, it’s just going to be real tight on the animal. As you can see, I’ll take the pull strap. You can see how this moves. And this is the braking system.

When you’re attached to a piece of equipment, you have a neck yoke here in the front. And they stand on either side of a tongue. They go to stop. The wagon wants to continue to move. It’s going to have this motion. So if it’s too tight, it’s going to put too much pressure. And if it’s too loose, it’s not going to stop it quickly enough.

And then, too, sometimes an animal, when they’re standing at a feeder and they’re swatting at flies, sometimes they can get their feet hung up in the quarter straps. So you don’t want it hanging down too low.

When I started out harnessing, you know, you look at all the buckles and all the parts. You think, man, this is complicated. Well, it really isn’t. It consists of two buckles. You’ve got a buckle here, a buckle here, and you have three snaps. You’ve got the snap here in the front of horse. And you’ve got two more snaps here. And it’s simple.

So now we have completed the harnessing here. And now we’re going to move on. And the last thing is to put on the bridle and the drive lines. So we have different parts here to the bridle. You have your bit. We use a snaffle bit most of the time. This particular one is twisted. It just has a little bit more control, because it is twisted for different animals.

We use different bits for different purposes. But you also have your blinders here, that are going to fit around the back side of the horse’s eyes. Their eyes are more to the side of their head, so their peripheral vision is very, very good. I mean, they can see a long ways around them.

And the purpose for your blinders, really, is to keep their attention and their focus on their work. Sometimes you’re driving along. A gust of wind comes along, blows your hat off. It could be something that could startle them. Especially when they’re young and learning, you really want them focused on their work. And so that’s why we use the blinders.

On a mule, they’re actually called pigeon wings. And not only are they here, but they come up on over the top of their eye, also. And a mule tends to want to look around a lot more. And it just keeps everything covered so that they keep their attention on their work.

Horses have teeth here in the front of their mouth. And they also have teeth here in the back of their mouth. So when you put the bit into the horse’s mouth, there’s a spot in here that doesn’t have any teeth. That’s where your bit sits when you put it in their mouth there.

So I’ve seen a lot of different people try to put bridles on different ways. A good trained horse, generally, they’re just going to keep your head there. They’re going to accept the bit. But sometimes in training, they’re learning. They don’t always want to. Their head will be moving around.

So you don’t want to walk up and try to put the bit in here like this. For one, you’re going to be trying to hit a moving target sometimes. So what I do is, I’ll take the bridle, and I’ll kind of lay it up here with one hand up here on top. That frees this other hand up. And some horses will take the bit. They’ll just take it right in. Some horses don’t. And so you need to be able to free this hand up to be able to guide the bit into her mouth.

So we’ll get it started. Skeeter here, she just took the bit. And that’s what you want or hope to expect. Sometimes they don’t. They’ll keep their mouths tight and closed. And so you take your finger, and just kind of stick it here in the corner of their mouth. It gets them to open it up just enough to be able to slip the bit in there.

Once it comes in, you want to kind of keep a tension. And you’re going to reach up then over here. And you’re going to pull her ears through. And then you want to set it on their head there.

A couple things to look for especially when you’re adjusting the bridle. Same thing first with the blinders. You want to make sure that they’re fitting right around the backside of their eye. You don’t want it sitting up too high, and you don’t want it hanging down too low. If it’s hanging down too low here, she can still see.

And so it needs to sit just perfectly right behind her eye, evenly, same length down on the lower side of her eye and the same length on the top side of her eye. And make sure it’s adjusted on both sides.

With the bit, you don’t want the bit too tight. We generally look for a double crease here in the corner of their mouth. You’ll have a crease and a crease. You don’t want it too tight, where it’s cinched up and pulling on their mouth. For one, it’s not comfortable. The more it stays there, it’ll actually make them hard-mouthed. It’ll begin to callus that more.

The other thing you don’t want is for it to sit too far down inside their mouth. So when you go to drive, it’s going to take longer for the response, and then they’ll they tend to get their tongue stuck on the top side of the bit versus underneath. So it’s important that that bit fits just right.

So now that you’ve placed it, everything sits just so. On the bridle, you want to make sure that you just have enough slack to be able to slide a hand comfortably under here.

You don’t want it too tight. And you don’t want it too loose. You want it tight enough so that they can’t pull it off. But you don’t want it so tight that it’s choking them. So you want to be able to run a hand comfortably around their neck there.

Now we’re going to go ahead and harness the second mule. When you’re first learning, I think it’s a good practice to go ahead and take the collar out and put it on, come get your harness, put it on so it’s not confusing. But once you get faster and wanting to get the horse harnessed quickly, I’d do it all at one time.

So you’ll remember, we pull the britchin up here, your hip drop assembly, the back pads. You grab ahold of the hames here, and go on out. So before we put the collar on, you’ll go ahead and just put the harness right up on top of her back.

We’ll set it up on the middle of her back just like we did before. Step her back away from the hitching post. Take the collar here, and unbuckle it. Take your back pad off.

We put the collar pad around here. Then buckle the collar back together. Attach the pad. And then we’ll go ahead and seat the hames. I want to remember to check for the adjustments, make sure everything is adjusted evenly, make sure those hames are seated properly inside the collar.

We’ll go ahead and we’ll pull the britchin down there. You’ll go and do your pull strap, belly band, quarter straps. And there you go.

Now that we’ve got her harness, we can continue. We’re going to go ahead and put her bridle on. And then we’ll go ahead and set up both sets of drive lines and show you how those go together.

OK, we’ve got both mules harnessed now. We’ve put their bridles– they’re all in place– now we’re going to go ahead and finish up by hooking up the drive lines.

A couple things to keep in mind here about the drive lines. One, as least contact with the ground as possible. You’ve got manures. Sometimes it’s muddy. And you’re wanting to preserve the harness. And so keeping from that contact is going to help preserve it.

So another thing I want to show you here is that, if you’ll notice, I’ve got two buckles. Those are going to attach to the horses’ bits. I’ll show you that here in a minute. You have another buckle here. One of these lines are continuous. They run from that buckle all the way through this buckle. And then it’s going to go back to where you’re actually going to hold on to the lines to drive the horses or mules.

And then you’ve got the other part of the line here that has a buckle. And it actually is just spliced on. If you’ll look closely here, it loops there and is actually stitched. So that’s your spliced line.

Thing to remember is that your continuous line is always going to go to the outside of your team. So with this drive line, this continuous line will stay on the outside of Skeeter here. And we put the other drive line on, and the continuous line’s going to go to the outside of Buffy.

Your splice line always goes to the inside. So first thing that I’ll do is I’ll go ahead and take that splice line, and we’ll just lay it up there. Then you take the rest of your drive line that you’re going to be holding onto when you go to drive the animal. Just take that, kind of split it in half, and you just want to lay it up there on top of the horse’s back.

Now we’ll take the continuous line. And the first thing we’re going to do is take this buckle, and we’re going to come through the hame ring. The purpose of the hame ring is this is what gives you your leverage. When you go to pull and drive the animal, it gives you the leverage that you need.

If the hame ring’s not in there, and it’s just hanging loose, you don’t have the same pulling power, and it’s more direct, more concentrated, to the bit. So it’s important. You’ll notice the difference if you forget to put it in the hame ring here.

So you just take your buckle. You’ll run it through here. And you’re going come on down here to Skeeter’s bit. And you’re going to go ahead and attach the buckle to the bit. You always want to attach it to the back side here of the bit. But you don’t want to attach it to the front.

When you go to pull on the lines, if it’s in the front, it’s going to cause that bit to twist. And that becomes very uncomfortable for the horse or the mule that you’re driving.

So you’ll go ahead, and you’ll attach here. And go ahead and buckle it. You want to try to always have the buckle facing out, just for the convenience of buckling and unbuckling. So we’ve finished this side. Now we’re going to go ahead and move on over here into the middle of the animals.

We’re going to come here now to the middle of the team. And we’re going to reach in here and grab ahold of the inside drive line, that spliced line that we’ve been talking about. Now each drive line will go through– like Skeeter’s line here– it’s going to go through both of her hame rings.

So on the continuous line, went through this hame ring, came down to her bit. Now we’re going to take the inside line and come also through Skeeter’s hame ring. But the difference here is that we’re going to cross over. And if you’ll think about it, when you’re back there driving the team, and you pull your left drive line, as you begin to pull, this one line is going to pull on the outside of Skeeter’s bit. And then it’s also going to be pulling on the inside of Buffy’s bit to help them to turn.

All right. So we’re going to cross over here now. And we’re going to come to her bit. Remember, we’re not going to attach it to the front of the bit. We’re going to attach it from behind. Once again, keep the buckle facing out for the convenience of buckling and unbuckling. And we’ll go ahead and attach this.

All right, so we’ve got this line in here. This is complete. Now I’m going to go ahead and just quickly attach the other drive line. So we’ll go ahead and attach the continuous line here outside of Buffy over here.

Then we’re going to bring her up here, grab this inside line, put it through her hame ring, and then we’ll go ahead and cross over and attach it here to Skeeter’s bit. And I think we’re complete here. We’ve got everything attached and put together.

We’re not going to test you on this. But we want to go ahead and just do a quick walk through and talk about the main components of the harness. We’ll start here at the front. All right, we talked about the bridle. We have the drive lines. We’ve got the collar. We’ve got the hames here that fit inside the collar. We have what we call the pull strap. The breath strap is here. The pull strap is attached. It runs between the horse’s legs.

You have the tug here, which is a very important part of the harness. This is what the horses are going to pull. I’ll go ahead and unbuckle it here. But your tug, obviously, it’s mainly leather– multiply-spliced pieces of leather together– that comes back to your trace chains. And this is what’s going to hook up to any piece of equipment that you’re going to be pulling, whether it’s a plow, or a disc, or a wagon, or a cultivator.

And you have multiple chains here, so you can adjust according to the different implement that you’re hooking up to. We have the back pad that supports a lot of the harness. It’s a big pad, and It’s positioned right on their back. You have your belly band here that helps to hold up your pull strap.

Go on back here. You’ve got your quarter straps here that are attached to the pull strap. Up on top here, we call this the hip drop assembly. And they have a little pad up here. And then it goes ahead and drops on down to your britchin.

That’s it. It’s not complicated. But those are the basic parts. Well, this brings us to the completion of our harnessing here. We’ve learned how to put the harnesses on. We’ve learned all the basic components. And now our next step is to go ahead and learn how to drive. So here we go. OK. Ready? Back.

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