Knowing Your Horse Teaching Your Horse To Longe by Tommy Garland one of the most basic skills a horse can learn is how to longe, and if you train your own horse, it will be up to you to teach him. it is not difficult, but like everything in the training process, it requires patience and consistency. When teaching Arabians to longe, i use a modified rope halter, one which has knots that go over the poll, behind the ears, because horses have pressure points behind their ears. The halter will apply pressure to those points and the horse will give to the pressure a lot easier and sooner than with a regular halter. Also,
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you don’t have to tie a rope halter when putting it on; it has a loop that slips over each knot. That is how you adjust it to fit. i’ve found that this halter gets a horse real light very quickly. For a cold-blooded horse, like a draft horse, a rope halter often doesn’t work as well. For that kind of horse, who is not as sensitive, i use a regular halter with maybe a stud chain, because you have to have them at least react to something. in addition to the rope halter with the knots, i also have a 54-inch bat, which is like a crop with a wide flapper on the end (about two inches).