Rural Heritage June/July 2026

Once he has his team in position, with the tongue between them, Donn loops his lines and puts them over the hames where they can be reached quickly.

STEPS TO HOOKING UP SAFELY AND EFFECTIVELY EVERY TIME

not the horse. The horse and I were not prepared, which is my responsibility. This is where your good judgment must come into play. Every horse's harness should be properly adjusted to fit that horse before it is paired with another horse to make a team. Failure to do this correctly sometimes leads to attempts to compensate for a poorly adjusted harness while hooking up, and this can result in an avoidable accident. In a western britchen style harness, the quarter straps and pole strap coming between the front legs should be checked and adjusted to the correct length before the animal is ever matched up with a teammate or hooked to any vehicle. When pulling forward on the breast strap snap, it should form a straight line from the top of the hames all the way down through the hames to the snap. Don’t be tempted later to adjust this, when something else in the hitch doesn’t seem right.

Step 1. Getting your team on either side of the pole. The goal here is to easily step one horse of the pair over the pole and stop quickly so you don’t need to back up much. It is a trick and, as such, it requires practice. The horses sometimes make a game of it; first no one goes over the pole and the next time we both do! After one or two tries, get them into position any way you can. I don’t want them thinking this game can go on forever. Many folks use a butt rope connecting the harness together at the britchen, and that might make this step easier. In backing any distance without a butt rope you need to be careful that the horses’ butts don’t spread too much. I prefer to work without a butt rope except when training some very green horses, and sometimes I might just give a horse a quick pull on the britchen to remind them not to spread apart.

Rural Heritage

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