Horse Grooming: Mane & Tail

Video Transcript

"We're going to go now and groom the mane and the tail. With our show animals it's important that their mane and tail be in the best condition possible. Yes there are some beauty points when we go into that show rink that we want to ensure that we're not doing anything that's going to break or damage the hair as we're grooming. I honestly prefer buying a real sturdy human brush. I think that they take a lot of care to the animals hair and with that we have a short main, what we call a pulled mane. He is a hunter and so therefore we keep the mane in a short and thinner presence. That makes it easier to braid when we go to the shows as well as we can if, we don't get our fingers tangled up in it when we're using the horse as a jumping animal. We also want to go to his tail, keeping the hair smooth and tangle free daily is going to minimize the amount of work that you have to do when you get to that show. If he's not a show animal, of course we're still trying to preserve the health and good being of the animal. I often will start and just use my fingers to just gently separate if there are any large tangles and then again I'll go back to my human brush that is sturdy enough to manage. Some people will use combs, combs can be effective but we'll go ahead and start with our brush. I begin at the bottom gently taking out any small tangles, if I come upon any larger ones I'll use my fingers and at times we might use some product to help with the detangling. They make a number of horse products that you can buy that will help in the detangling process. Once we have a horse's tail that we can run our fingers through smoothly then we know we've done a pretty good job."