Brushing a horse's tail for competition means making sure that the tail is big, thick and full, and this can be thwarted by leaving the tail down when riding. Cut a horse's tail at about ankle-length with helpful advice from a reining horse trainer in this video on brushing and horse care.
Now, the horse's tail is very important, especially a horse in competition. If you're looking toward competition, they like to see nice, long, flowing free tails. Big, thick, full tails. Now, one of the things that gets in the way of a horse having a long, thick tail, is if it is long and thick and you leave it down when you ride, the horse could step on it and actually pull the hair out. When you're backing up, he could stand on his tail and while he continues to back up, just rip the hair right out of his tail. Obviously, that would thin it, that would shorten it, and that would make it not look quite so good. Now, one of the things that we do is make sure that when we cut a horse's tail off, we basically just cut it off at the bottom about right down at the ankle, right down at ankle-length. And we'll try to keep our horses' tails at that length. Now, that's something we do just before we go to the show. Up to that point, we're going to do one of two things with a horse with the tail when we get ready to ride. We'll either braid that tail. Actually, Lynn, if you wouldn't mind, go ahead and show them how you braid the tail. And it's a simple braid. Just three strands and then just weave them back and forth and put a rubber band on the end of it. And she's just going to run down through there real quick, and it's not tight. We're not pulling those strands real hard. We're just kind of braiding it down through there. Very good. Once she gets to the bottom, she's got a rubber band wrapped around her finger, and she's just going to put it on there so that...so that that braid stays in. All right. Now, that's one way to do the tail. The other way that we wanted to show you, which...you know, and this is good. I...you know, I like this. This keeps the horse's tail braided up so that, you know, it's going to stay out of the way and he won't be able to step on it. The other thing that we'll do from time to time is actually put a knot in a horse's tail. Now, the knots will actually shorten the tail, all right, for riding purposes. And all you would do is just take a strand of hair -- about that much hair right there like that. Then you just make a figure eight out of it. Hold it, Sparky. Just make a figure eight and just pull it down through there. And now, see how it got just a little figure eight knot that hangs right there? See how much shorter that strand is than the rest of it? That pulls his tail off the ground about...oh, another foot, possibly -- you know, six inches to a foot. And that gets it out of the way when we're riding. So those are the two things you can do with a horse's tail, and I'd recommend either one when you go riding.
