Page 8 - The Pocket Guide to Equine Knots

returned and displayed a coil of ¾-inch nylon rope. “There isn’t a horse alive that can break
this stuff. You can pull a pickup out of the barrow pit with it.”

“But do we have a halter strong enough?”
“We won’t use one. We’ll tie it around her neck.” I had visions of a strangling horse, and
Elmer read my mind. “I’ll use a bowline, and that’s the only knot that won’t tighten up and
will still allow us to get it untied, no matter how hard she pulls.” I’d heard of bowlines,

probably reading of such a knot in the books in the seafaring section of the county library,
all of which I’d read. But I didn’t know how to tie one.
Elmer tied the soft, braided nylon rope around Rosie’s neck, his fingers fluid, the motion
too quick for me to follow construction of the knot. Then he led Rosie to a snubbing post in

the middle of the corral, a post made of a railroad tie set deeply into the ground. After he
tied another bowline around the post, we both stepped back. Rosie stood there a few
seconds, backed slightly until slack was gone from the rope, then exploded. Dust flew while
she snorted, strained, and repeatedly threw her weight and muscle back against the

unyielding nylon rope.
But Elmer, soft-hearted man that he was, couldn’t stand it. After fifteen or twenty
seconds, he slipped in quickly with his pocket knife and cut the rope. “I couldn’t watch her
do that. She’d have pulled every muscle in her body. You’ll have to use the hobbles, Dan.”

I watched as Elmer untied the rope from around Rosie’s neck, amazed that he could so
easily untie a knot that had just withstood repeated lunges from a heavy animal, and
amazed, too, that the noose hadn’t tightened the slightest bit. It was clear Elmer had cut the
rope only for his safety—he didn’t want to be between a thrashing animal and the snubbing

post.
No, we didn’t “cure” Rosie. Luckily, she was a sucker for hobbles, never learning to hop
or run in them as some horses do. I could slip the rawhide hobbles on her front pasterns, fix
fence or do some other chore, and she’d graze nearby, moving at most with baby steps.

But I learned to tie a bowline. Without it, how could I safely tie a horse that had lost its
halter? How could I tie a rope to the front axle of the tractor to pull it out of the mud and still
be able to untie the knot rather than ruin the rope by cutting it loose? The Rosie incident had
made it clear to me that horsemanship consists of more than handling a horse in a round

pen. Rope skills, knowledge of the sort Elmer possessed, are a side of the picture too little
taught by modern clinicians.
In this book, we’ll explore some of the ways knots can make life easier and safer in
handling horses. Instead of attempting to learn a vast quantity of them (The Ashley Book of

Knots contains some four thousand!) we’ll concentrate on some of the really useful ones,
because over the years I’ve learned that we tend to retain only the ones we use. We’ll learn
to recognize a “good” knot—a knot that holds but can be untied after pressure—and we’ll
look into the world of hitches (systems for packing items onto a horse) and splices (useful

ways of joining ropes and creating loops). After that, it’s a matter of practice, frequently
tying the knots we’ve learned and looking for more ways to apply them.
And if messing with knots creates more excuses to mess around with our horses, so be

it. It’s all to the good!