Basic horseback riding tack and equipment consists of the saddle, breast collar, bridal, halter and lead rope. Make sure you have the proper tack and equipment when horseback riding with guidance from a Certified Horsemanship Association instructor in this video on beginning horseback riding.
Hi my name is MaryjoTurnbull and I'm here at Silver Buckle Ranch in in Brush Prairie, Washington and I'm going to talk to you guys today a little bit about some basic equipment that you need for your horse. This is one of our beginning students, Ivy and she's going to help point out some of the tack and equipment that we have on Black and we'll talk a little bit about why we use it and what is safe about the tack that we have on Black right now. So of course the very first thing we have is a western saddle and when we choose a western saddle for our horses it needs to be able to fit our horse properly. When we inspect our saddle, Ivy, we want to always check the very first thing when we do a safety check is we always want to look at the stirrup leathers which is underneath the Fender on a western saddle and we want to make sure that our holes look good, that we don't have any cuts in here, that where the stirrup leathers might break or tear apart. We want to make sure that our Blevin's Buckles are working properly and we want to make sure that our stirrup is put altogether and hanging nice and safe. So that would be part of our safety check on our saddle. We also have our cinch which is this part underneath here, the white part and this is a mohair cinch and we want it to be able to lay nice and flat underneath his belly and when we pull it up we're going to attach it to the saddle with what's called the long latigo. So we have the fender, the stirrup leathers and now we're on the long latigo and the cinch and when we inspect our log latigo we're looking for pretty much the same stuff as if we were on our stirrup leathers. We want to look for tears or rips or holes in the leather that don't look nice and safe and then we want to make sure it's not too thin and hasn't been stretched out too much. So that's our long latigo. Along with our western tack a lot of times you'll see riders use a breast collar just like this. This helps keep the saddle in place, helps keep the saddle from sliding left and right and of course underneath the saddle we have a saddle pad which there is lots of different kinds of saddle pads. This is just a real basic square saddle pad. Now along with our saddle and our cinch and our breast collar of course we need the bridal which goes on Black's head and I'm just going to show you this one. This is a basic western bridal. We call this a brow band bridal because this part of the leather comes across the brow of our horse. Other types are no brow band at all or one ear where it just kind of loops around the ear, it is just kind of for looking cool. This one has adjustments on both sides and then attached to the head stall of the bridal is what we call a junior reining bit and then of course the curb strap and this is just a real nice little bit. It is good for all kinds of horses, not a lot of pressure, not a lot of leverage and then attached to that is one of my favorite kinds of reins which we call rainbow reins and you can see, Ivy, they have different colors and so for instructors those work great because when we are riding we can instruct the student to put their hands on the yellow or the green to help them find the correct hand position with their reins. So again our basic equipment for our beginner is always going to be a saddle pad, if we are riding western our western saddle, our breast collar and our bridal. One other really really important piece of equipment of course is our halter and lead rope and every horse needs to have a halter and lead rope so we can catch him out of the pasture and bring him into the barn and when we look at our halter and our lead rope the same thing applies we always want to do a safety check. You want to make sure that all the webbing is nice and safe and that the buckles work and that the snap on the lead rope is secure and the rope is long enough that we can control our horse. So that would be all our basic equipment when we are first starting riding.
