Page 9 - The Pocket Guide to Equine Knots

1. THE SQUARE DEAL

Your first exposure to knots, to the need for tying a proper one, probably came when you
struggled as a child with tying the laces on your shoes. What you were striving for, if you
were properly taught, was a bow knot, which is merely a square knot tied with the top half-

hitch made with two bights rather than two ends. Whoa! Bights?
So, a couple of simple definitions are in order. Walk over to a coil of rope and pick up one
end with your left hand. The part to your right, still in the coil or strung out somewhere, is

called the standing part. The end in your left hand is, simply, the end. Make a loop or curve
in the rope between the end and the coil and you have what’s called a bight. Yes, loop
works, too, and we’ll use both terms.

Bight.

Rope Varieties
But before we get seriously into this business of knots, we need to look at just what sort of

material we’re using to make them, namely the rope itself. Go to a big hardware store and
have a look at what’s available. There are colored ropes, drab ropes, twisted ropes, woven
ropes—the variety seems endless.
For purposes of this book, and in my own use as a horseman, I incline toward three-
strand twisted ropes. Normally, these have been twisted clockwise, with what’s called a

right-handed “lay,” but that’s not always true. Because clockwise is the usual direction, rope
coils well in the same direction, clockwise. As a left-hander, I sometimes used to go in the
opposite direction, and it did not work very well. Finally, I figured out the problem.

Yes, there are ropes twisted the other direction, such as lariat ropes especially built for
left-handed ropers. However, off-the-shelf twisted ropes will normally be of right-handed
lay, and the only reason that’s very relevant to us is in coiling the rope.
Many useful ropes come braided, and they’re often easy on the hands and attractive in