Every Horse Regardless of Breed or Age may Benefit From Hobble Breaking

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Every Horse Regardless of Breed or Age may Benefit From Hobble Breaking
Hobble breaking might even save your horses life
Submitted by P. D. Jones, 1/11/2009

Video:

Around a year ago I made a video on hobbling horses and put it on youtube. At the time I thought that probably 3-4 hundred people might see it and I might help them understand how and why every horse should be hobble broke.

Imagine my surprise when it started getting hundreds of views a day and then thousands a day and today has 1,734,329 views, still getting 4-5 thousand views a day.

But the real surprise came with the number of people that commented and seemed to think I was just about the meanest guy in the world! I expected this from people who had no experience with anything other than a cat, but many were horse owners!

I think every horse of any breed or age should be hobble broke & here's a few reasons why:

First, anytime you get a horse giving to pressure & not fighting it is a great thing, and it makes a lot of farriers pretty happy to have horses that are used to having their legs fooled with and restrained.

Second, it can be kind of handy when there is no place to tie or out camping, etc.

Third and most important, it just might save your horse from getting crippled or killed if it ever gets a leg hung up sometime. Very few horses go through life without getting caught in something at some time.

The simple fact is that horses just ain't the smartest critters on earth and will fight pain and not give to it. If you get tangled up in some wire you will stop when you feel pain and slowly untangle yourself. A horse will struggle and fight until something gives and it's usually the horse. You have a huge vet bill and maybe a horse crippled for life and in many cases a dead horse.

By hobble breaking your horse it is having it's legs restrained for the first time in a small safe pen in soft hobbles with you right there watching instead of out somewhere in the middle of the night in something that will damn sure hurt it.

People ask me if they remember it; they sure do. Many times I've found one with a leg stuck through wire or caught in a downed tree etc. I know of many people that have found their hobble broke horses in some kind of trap, just waiting for someone to come turn them loose.

Regular hobbles you can buy are better than not doing it but are really usually shorter than I like for breaking them. With their legs too close together they learn to hop around and cover a lot of ground, but with longer hobbles they will try to walk and just learn to take little careful steps to get around.

The colts in this video were just haltered for the first time the day before and were a bit unusual in their lack of fighting them but not much. On an older, wilder horse it will usually throw a fit for maybe a minute, then just stop and think a minute or so, and then real quick make a few more jumps trying to escape, quit again for a minute and then just shuffle off to eat hay or something.

This is something I've done with hundreds of horses of all ages and breeds over the years and have never so much as put a scratch on one. In short, I think it is foolish and irresponsible not to hobble break every horse. The hobbles I use are just lengths of plastic baler twine that are knotted on both ends. For weanlings I like them around 3ft-4 inches long with the knots tied in them, and around 4ft-4 inches with the knots for bigger horses.

When you are cutting the strings the knots will make them shorter than you think so it is better to cut them long, tie the knots, and cut off any excess. Don't try to use too many strings as it will make them to bulky and hard to get tight enough to stay on.

You can see in the photos about how thick I make them and how they are put on. This is something you don't have to be some kind of horse expert to do. If you have a kind of safe pen and a basic understanding of horses you will see that it is safe and easy to do, and you'll probably have some stories to tell in the future about how this very simple thing saved your horse from getting in a bad wreck.

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