Accessories for horse bridles include tie downs, draining forks, breast collars and draw reins, most of which should only be used to experienced riders. Find bridle accessories with advice from a riding instructor in this video on equestrian living.
Oftentimes we find that we need to do something else in addition to our bits and bridles to help monitor or control the behavior of the horse. Certainly in a lot of our speed events we rely on things that we call 'tie downs', or ways that we can hold their head in a certain position. So we consider those accessories to the bits and the bridles. A very common type of tie down would be similar to this. This is made out of a material of cable, so it's a particularly assertive way to tie down a horse in competition. It would go over the horses face, much like a halter, before we put on the bridle. And then this leather strap with the hook connects down at the girth, and we set the length of this to be just right for the horse that we're riding to monitor how high their head can come up during the competition that we're involved in. That's one way. Now these can also be made out of flat leather, ways that are a little less assertive than the type that I have here to show. Another type of an accessory would be what we call, here in the Western business, as a training fork. This is made up of a leather that Ys off into two rings. You put your horses bridle on, you attach this to the girth, where there's a ring allowing for that attachment, similar to the other tie down. Then we run our bridle reins through these rings so that you can see where it would then be a configuration like that, with the bridle reins coming from the horse's bit through the rings, back to the rider's hands. This creates another kind of pressure, not just holding the head down by sheer force or pressure, but rather, the rider's hands can manipulate a little bit of how tight or how much pressure we would put on this. Depending on the length of your training fork, and these are sometimes called a 'running martingale', so, in the English world we might see this as a running martingale, but you can use them interchangeably. Sometimes these do require, though, that you have what we call a breast collar. So this goes in front of the horse's saddle, and it would be to this ring that we might attach this hook, because if it were the shorter variety of the training fork and we didn't have the length, say it was much shorter, then it would be designed to connect to your breast collar, to the ring there. So there are a lot of ways that we can utilize these accessories to our bridles. Now, besides these, there's also something that some trainers do, but I advise strongly against it for the amateur or particularly a child rider. There's something called a 'draw rein', and we can use even a nice long leather rein to create what's called a draw rein. If we took a simple bridle like this one, and we put it on our horse, we could take our rein and go through the ring and attach this to the side of the horse's saddle. Then this would come up, and come back in our hands. So you can kind of get the picture. Attached to the side of the horse, brought back up to my hands. As I pull, it draws the horse's head down into a position. The reason I caution against this is because some riders won't understand how tremendous that pressure is, how trapped a horse can feel. And until you're certain that you have the kind of horse that's going to submit to that and be good with it, it is one of those that can prompt some bad behavior. So although you'll hear draw reins, you may see them, I caution against them in the hands of amateurs or particularly children. Those are the common accessories that we might use to control the behavior of that front end of the horse, the head and neck and face and mouth region.
