Rural Heritage April/May 2026

will look where it is going just as any other horse would. You will not see it looking back at you (or your equipment) any more than any other horse. If you or I are walking through the woods, we need to watch in front of us in order to know where to place our feet. Horses do the same thing, especially when they are not concerned about what is behind them. This has been my experience with blinderless horses. The first thing you will notice when you take blinders off a horse that is used to wearing them is that they will look at you with one eye or the other. Can they get used to it and break that habit? Some can and some can’t. I have taken blinders off several horses that were started or trained or working with them. It has been a mixed bag of results. In most cases, if a horse is already working well with blinders, there is little or no benefit to taking them off, and it is likely those horses will work worse without them. I have had no problems driving horses with blinders and horses without them together and have almost always had one or two blindered horses in the hitch each year. Why even bother trying to take them off you might ask? Over the years, I have also worked with, bought

the exposure are the key. For the blinderless horse, you just have to include the things it will see behind it to the sounds and motions it will experience. In the “Training Duke” series of articles, you saw where we had Duke driving single walking right behind the sled while Sire Red Oak pulled it single. We only did this once for a few minutes (15 at most) prior to hooking him up to the sled alongside Red, but he likely saw other teams pulling this implement near his paddock over time. Remember, it was his demeanor that told us he was ready for this, and that would be just as true if he were wearing blinders at that time. While Duke had seen many horses working on a forecart and may have even been ponied alongside at some point, no extra time was given to letting him follow it around before he was hooked to it without blinders. Again, this was our decision based on what Duke had already shown us, and our choices for another horse might have been quite different. How do I determine how successful I think an individual horse is doing without blinders? A good work horse trained from the beginning without blinders

Cortland Fire Department fire horse, one of the influences for the bridles I wanted was the fire horses found across the country at the begining of the 20th century.

Rural Heritage

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