Saddling a horse requires providing adequate saddle pads placed correctly on the back, approaching the animal calmly and placing the saddle on the back in one motion. Soothe a horse while strapping on its saddle with advice from a riding instructor in this video on equestrian living.
We're going to consider, and with some detail, the elements of saddling your horse. We're going with our western saddle. I would like to point out a nice clean saddle pad with adequate padding. I want to place it with good consideration to the horse's withers, the bone here, and to make certain that I do have it correctly positioned. They'll often either have a leather patch here or here or maybe even both to tell you that this is the front of your saddle pad. This being a protective area, so that it doesn't wear the pad out and or chafe the horse. Then I'm going to go to retrieve my saddles. Saddles are heavy in this sport so you want to make sure that you've done everything you can to prepare for that time when you place it on the horse. I have all of my riggings strapped up here on the piece that is a keeper for that so when I go to approach the horse they're not dangling on the ground making it difficult for me as well as maybe a little bit scary for the horse all of those things. I approach him quietly ready to place it, hopefully not have to throw it hard because again we're considering the horse is used for a long time, he wants to be as comfortable as possible. Raising it up high trying to get things all to lie flat right off the bat is a nice technique. I look to make sure when I do go to strap it up it'll be right here behind his elbow not too far back and certainly not too close to pinch him. My horse is quiet, I know him well I can talk to him as I stroke him and go around the back of him. Now I come over to this side. I make sure that all of my rigging now coming down off of it's keeper is lying flat and in good shape. It's very easy for some of your billet straps with wear and tear to start wearing through. Your job in saddling is also to kind of look it over and say is my riggings still safe and is it going to be able to be tightened down because we certainly do want a tight saddle. Now everything is in place and balanced out I'm going to come on back over here. I'm going to put up my stirrup to just have out of the way, adjust any other things that I need to further. I'm always going to saddle up using the front girth first. Back cinches or what we call bucking straps need to be done second. If your horse were to get frightened or just simply pull back or shake hard, the saddle could slip off and if it were just the back cinch on, that could roll underneath your horse's belly and certainly create a lot of chaos. So we start out with the front cinch we continue to wrap our billet strap until I run out of space. That ensures me that I won't get it so tight that I can't go back and add another wrap so I can get it tight to where I need it. So here's where I feel that I've got a good spot. I'm going to pull up on it firmly and take it to that where it's tight enough at this time. Before I should mount him though, I would go back and re-tighten it because we know horses sometimes do like to what we call bloat. If he holds his breath while I'm tightening it, then before I get on I want to make sure. There's no need to do anything more than just wait for him to take a few breaths. In the old days people did some kind of assertive things to make sure that they could tighten that saddles and we know now if we just wait a few minutes and he takes a few breaths, we're going to have that opportunity to re-tighten it. I fastened my back cinch so that it has some room. I can place my fingers between the back cinch and the barrel of this horse but I don't want it too loose that he might get his foot caught in it if we were to get down and do some cow work that brought this close to his hind legs. We also want to make sure that it's not too tight because we don't intend to make this any part of this security to keep this saddle on. For me, the back cinch is pretty much just a fashion thing. So now I can bring my stirrup down, I've got my saddle in place, before I mount I would check it one more time and we'd be ready to go off to whatever we intend to do.
