Splint boots can be put on a horse's front legs to protect them from causing bruises when one leg connects with another. Discover how to put a splint boot on a horse with helpful advice from a reining horse trainer in this video on splint boots for horses and protective gear.
The last thing we are going to put on this horse before we go out and start working with him, we are going to put some protective equipment on. These are splint boots. Just a nice splint boot, there's a lot of different companies that make good splint boots. These are the ones I like. Just a nice rubber splint boot made by Davis. Now there are going to go on his front legs to protect himself from one leg hitting into the other one and causing some of those bruises, bumps and swelling that we talked about earlier. So we can prevent that with a nice set of boots. Now these will go on in a certain way. I'm going to lay this one on top of the saddle. That will go on the other leg. But I'll show you how to put it on this leg. Now I'm going to pull the first strap loose and it will be the top strap. That's the one I start with. Now I'm going to rub down his legs so that he knows I'm here. Alright. Now that he knows I'm here, I'm going to put the wide part of the boot to the inside, and that's going to be the protection for him. And this strap goes through that buckle and then pulls forward like this, so the straps will lay backwards against the horse like that. Make sure your straps are always going to the back. Alright, now that the top one is done, I'm going to do the middle one and this doesn't have to be tight. But I do want it to be snug. I don't want them slipping down and falling down around his ankle when I ride. And then we'll do the bottom one. Now it all fits there just exactly where I want it to on his leg and he's got protection, now so that when we go ride, this horse no matter what moves I ask him to make, he's at least protected from himself, should he make some big fancy move. Alright. Now there's some other boots that I might use on this horse as well depending on what I am doing. If I am going to do some real stopping of this horse or I'm going to ask him to really cease his forward motion and get his back legs in the ground and do a sliding stop for example, I would put these on. And these are called skid boots. Obviously, because when the horse is skidding you want to protect him from basically a rug burn or you know, that sand, that real abrasive sand taking the hair off of his back legs. So we'll put these on to protect that. Now there's a left and a right boot. Now again we were talking about how the straps will go from front to back on the splint boots up front. I'll do the same thing behind. I'll lay that one up there so that it's ready when I go to the other side. Now this boot again Velcro or they come with buckles you know there's all kinds of different types of skid boots. These are the kind I like. Now here's the way this is going to work. This strap is still going to go from front to back, now we just have a little flap that closes over it. It does go from back to front. But the initial strap is going to be from front to back. Again you want to make sure that the horse knows you are there and start up high. Let my hand just run down his leg so that he knows I'm here. You don't just want to reach at his leg with a boot, with your hands and surprise him with it because, boy that will, you know that could be kind of dangerous. There's that front to back. Now I'm going to just lay that over it. Pull it down a little bit and I do the top one first and then I make sure this cup lays right in underneath that ankle, very nicely. And I'm going to take this strap front to back, lay it there. Put my closure there, now that horse is wearing skid boots and I can go run and stop him now and I know that he'll be safe. He won't burn himself or create an injury there. Now the other boot that I'm going to put on not on every horse but on some horses, it just depends that if I got a horse that has proven to me that he has a tendency to want to try to bump himself around the coronet band right above his hoof, right along his hairline, you know that can create a bit of an injury too. That will make a horse a little bit sore. I'll put a bell boot on him if I notice that they are really bumping themselves in that area. And the bell boots go on very, very easily. They just wrap around back to front just like everything else. You put that on and now he's protected from that shoe, his other foot, anything that would, might hit him right in that coronet band that would cause him an injury. Even the bulbs of his heels he can reach up with the back leg and actually catch that heel, that just gives me some protection there to eliminate another injury, or potential for an injury.
