This week's useful thing is the humble cable tie. What's the use of that, you may ask? All I can say is that cable ties have saved me more busted lead ropes and broken headcollars than I care to remember and more importantly have potentially stopped accidents and saved horses from injury.
Its very old-fashioned, but to have a breaking-point on a headcollar rather than on the tying end makes a big difference, particularly if you use those long, very strong lead ropes which are popular in natural horsemanship.
We all know not to tie horses without a quick release and to something which will snap if they panic, but if this is at the rope end, its perfectly possible for a horse to get loose with 6ft or 10ft of rope trailing between its legs.
If you are very unlucky, as happened to a client of mine, the rope will wrap round a rail as the horse goes past at speed and then as the rope tightens the horse will get a nasty dose of whiplash and end up with quite a serious neck problem. An even worse possibility of course is that the loose rope wraps round a leg and brings the horse down.
I know those ropes don't break because someone illicitly "borrowed" a set of long reins from me once, without permission, and used them - with a Land Rover - to pull some trees out of woodland. They reckoned the breaking strain on the rope was several tons. The same is true of course of nylon headcollars, which we all use, and rope halters, which have the added issue of being narrower so exerting more pressure if the horse gets caught suddenly by that.
Cable ties, by contrast, cost a few pence but - if you buy heavy duty ones - have a reasonable breaking strain of about 25kg - more than enough to stop them snapping if a horse is just fidgeting.
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