Not Sure How Good This Will Work, But Hey, I'm Tryin'

Hey My Cowfolk-To-Be,
     Today, Christy taught me how exactly a horse bit works in controlling your horse. I tried to get pictures, but they didn't come out very well, so please bare with me.
     Christy has this really cool looking metal horse head that she uses to teach her riding students about several things, including how a bit and bridal work. ( <-- That's it with a bridal on.)
 Like I said, these pictures are really hard to tell what's going on. But here is the bit inside the metal horse mouth. Notice how the bit arches up into the horses mouth. This lightly touches the soft palette on the roof of the horse's mouth. By pulling on the reins, the bit applies pressure to the soft palette, and the head is directed either left or right. This pressure encourages the horse to be submissive to the turning of his head, so he goes in a new direction.

 Different bits have different pressure ratios. The bit that started my adventure, the one that Strolling Jim used back in the 1930's, has a 1:1 pressure ratio. This means that for every one pound of pressure you pull on the reins, it apples one pound of pressure to the horse's mouth.

Here is another picture of the bit in the metal horse mouth. The top lip cuts across the top of the picture, and the bottom lip is the part is the semi-circle toward the bottom of the picture. You can sort of see how the bit goes into the mouth and touches what would be the roof of the mouth. Once again, I apologize for the bad pictures.

How the Horses have Devoloped

Howdy ya'll! (I'm sounding more cowgirl, right?)
     Over the years, like anything else, the breed of walking horses has developed. What makes a good walking horse has gotten more specific, as the industry has grown.
The biggest difference in these two horses (Strolling Jim first, then Gen's Armed & Dangerous, the 1994 Grand World Champion) is their stance. Jim's legs pretty much go straight down from his body. Armed's back legs go out at much more of an angle. This is called "parking out," and it is a posture designed to accent the horses good features. Because Armed is parked out, the muscles in his front shoulders and chest are accented. When parked out, horses hold their heads much higher. This obviously makes them look taller, and it once again accents their chest muscles. Since the back legs are not directly under the horse, the horse appears much longer. Armed's tail is also much longer. The only real purpose of this is simply for looks.

Strolling Jim

     The first ever Tennessee Walking Horse National Celebration was won by Strolling Jim in 1939. His owner was Col. C. H. Bacon (which is an awesome name) and his trainer was Floyd Carothers. He was originally a work horse and had worked on several farms before he began his career as a show horse. before being crowned World Grand Champion, he won twelve consecutive sweepstakes classes in different horse shows throughout the south. He also used the horse bit that started my adventure to become a cowgirl who knows what she's talking about.
     There is an annual 40 mile run in Wartrace, TN (near Shelbyville, where the Celebration is held). This doesn't really relate to anything, but I thought it was interesting.
     There isn't much else interesting I can find about good ole' Jim, other than his tombstone, but oh well. I guess that's all have to say about him.
Cowgirl Out.

My (wrong) Attempt at Thinking Like a Cowgirl

Hello all,

     This post upsets me a little, but only because my attempt failed. My sculpture teacher gave us an assignment to pick a somewhat common object and to create a model of what it may have looked like several decades ago. The example he used was a watch. Now, a watch looks rather modern (then he showed us his hi-tech waterproof fancy watch). A hundred years ago, a watch would have looked quite different. He wanted us to really get into character to do this. We had to research a person who may have created our object in the past, and really come up with reasoning for the decisions we made about our object. 

     Since my current mission in life is to become a cowgirl, I wanted to make this project related to walking horses. The object I chose was a pair of stirrups. I thought about the first Celebration taking place in 1939. This was a hard time for farmers and other in agricultural fields, because of the Great Depression. If your stirrups broke, you were just out of luck if you couldn't afford new ones. If I was a cowgirl working on a farm, and I needed new stirrups, I would cowgirl up, and make them myself.

     I started looking up pictures of stirrups, and there are about a million different kinds. That did not make my project easy, because I didn't know what kind of stirrups to make. My logic is that if I live on a farm during the depression, I'm going to make something functional. So I made the simplest, functional stirrups I think of. This is what I came up with (It's bigger than the picture looks). I left all my edges rough, because if I'm working on a farm, I don't really care what it looks like, I care that it works. 

     I showed my project to Christy, and she told me that even the simplest of all stirrups had a loop at the top for the leather strap of the saddle to go through. So even though I was wrong, I learned that all stirrups have a place for the saddle strap to go through. This gets me one more step closer to being a cowgirl, a very small step, but I'll take it! And I got a good grade for my project, which is also important.
     Even though I was wrong, Christy let me try it out. I didn't like it, purely because I didn't feel like it was going to hold my weight for me to climb on, but it did work!

Cowgirl out.