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Mechanical Hackamore/Gag BitsI don’t even know where to start on this “inhumane gimmick.” Mechanical hackamores are something I would like to see in a museum someday, referred to as horse tool used by people who didn’t know better. This device has no place in any tack room The word Hackamore comes from the Spanish haqima/jaqima which around our place refers to a bosal/mecate setup. The mechanical hackamore works by applying pressure across the bridge of the nose. Horses noses are regularly broken with these shameful devices. One thing you hear mentioned about the mechanical hackamore, is that it helps give you control at top speed. If you’ve looked around our website much, you can probably guess what I think about that. The Gag Bit hopefully would be right beside the mechanical hackamore in that museum we mentioned earlier. By the time a person was enough of an artist to use the gag bit, they would no doubt have the skill to deem it unnecessary! Hopefully. Once a person understands how this bit works, they usually don’t want to mess with it. The gag bit involves a sliding mouthpiece that is able to move up into the horse’s mouth using the poll as leverage. Used a lot in speed competition events for “control” at high-speed turns, supposedly it helps with head position and breaking at the poll. A lot of the time you see them combined with a tie down. I’m not here to criticize or anything. I just prefer to do things a different way. If a horse and person were trained correctly, they probably wouldn’t use these types of things. Often, mechanical hackamores, gag bits and other gimmicks are employed out of frustration, which is something we hope to avoid around horses
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