Bubba was always chewing Mail Pouch tobacco. He was also a horse trainer, cuttin’ horse to be exact. It was ‘long about the middle sixties that he got this little cow bred mare in for training. The owner wanted her shown in the cutting at the Fat Stock Show in Houston, as it was called in them days.

Well, after starting the mare on cattle for a month or so, she commenced having a problem. She was “charging.“ She would keep creeping forward into a cow she was working, one of the cardinal sins of contest cutting. So Bubba made him a device to stop that. It consisted of a lightweight chain they went over the mare’s head, passing down through the bridle to a ring on the breast collar, and up to the saddle horn. He called it his “brain chain.” When she went to chargin’ cattle he’d bump the chain and she’d back off. But, right before he bumped it he’d spit tobacco right between her ears. It got so that if he spit, she quit, even without the chain after a while.
Well he went to Houston and entered the cuttin’, and of course right in the middle of the second cow, on a really good run, he felt her starting to charge. Bubba spit between her ears and she jumped back like she’d been shocked. He won the cutting, but the judge came to him afterwards and said

“Bubba, I give it to ya, ‘cause it was a good run. But ya did somethin’. I didn’t see what ye did, but I know you did somethin’. But if I ever find out what ye done, I’ll wring yore neck! “

There’s a lot of money to be made in the equestrian market by coming up with a new improved piece of ironmongery for a horse’s mouth. The balance is between severity and effectiveness. Some hold that only a snaffle bit and noseband are humane, everything else is gimmickry. Others are convinced that all problems stem from having metal in the horse’s mouth and advocate bitless bridles. There are many ways to reinforce the power of a bit for a horse that doesn’t want to “give” to it, longer shanks, gag bits, tougher curb straps and chains. They all work, but the main thing that makes anything work is how it is handled. The horse learns to respond to the bit or noseband by operant conditioning. If the hands handling this bridal ask and release when a response is made, the horse will learn to hunt for the release. Really, it’s the way any device is handled that makes it humane or inhumane. It’s like my mother-in-law says about car wrecks:

“They are all equipment failure; they’re caused by the nut behind the wheel!”

There’s an old pop song that goes “we live in two different worlds.” I often feel that way about horseback riding. The one world, the cow-horse world that I grew up in, is a place where reins are held in the left hand while the right-hand opened the gates, shook hands with friends, coiled a lariat rope, and waved to people driving by on the paved road. In the other world, I ride with people wearing helmets and gloves and riding breeches who always ride with the rein in each hand. The cowboys and horse trainers would do that on a young horse, they called it “Plow reining” but when a horse got educated enough to use doing ranch work, the reins were always in only one hand, usually the left. I got to thinking that two-handed must be the European way to ride. Then I saw Reiner Klimke riding in an old film carrying a double bridle in one hand and dressage whip held straight up in the other. Now we see Portuguese and Spanish working equitation riders with the reins in the left-hand, as they work with their Lance called a “garrocha.”

An old man offered his horse to a young person to ride one time, the kid picked up the reins in two hands. After a bit the kids comment was “he seems confused!” The old man said

“heck, he ain’t confused, it’s just he ain’t been plow reined since a two-year-old, he’s insulted!”