How to Hold a Leadrope

When you're in the saddle, your critical interface to the horse lies in your seat, your legs and your hands on the reins.  How you sit and how you hold the reins matter a lot.  They affect how well you can communicate with your horse.  While there are a lot of ways to sit and to hold the reins, each way has a right and a wrong about it and if you were to look at all the various right ways you'd find they have a lot in common.  They're all trying to get the job done; to minimize problems and maximize opportunities for communication and success.

Following the same reasoning, when you're on the ground, your critical interface to your horse is the lead rope in your hand and the way you position and move your body.  A lead rope is not just for dragging your horse from his stall for saddling.  It's a tool that can let you talk to and work with your horse almost as subtly as when you are in the saddle.  It makes me crazy how many people -- even ones who take their horsemanship very seriously --  don't know the best way (or any decent way) to hold a lead rope and are not very effective at relating to their horse on the ground.

Bill Dorrance once said something like "The best way to learn about horses is to get a piece of rope with a horse on one end and you on the other and see what you can get done."

So I'm going to show you how to hold a lead rope the way I was shown.  It's the right way and it has a lot of advantages but it's not the only right way.  It is, however, the best way I know.  If you hold and use a lead rope this way, then there's a lot of effective things you can learn to do with your horse on the ground that will make you and your horse better with each other because you will both understand clearly what's being said between you.

Let's start with the observation that, when properly used, a lead rope is a double-ended tool.  With it, you can apply tension and pressure to your horse in order to communicate your intentions.  One end is attached to the horse.  This end lets you apply tension (taking slack and bumping) and pressure (pushing feel, which when done inexpertly can look like rope-wiggling).  The other end should have a leather popper on it and is also good for applying pressure (swinging the popper) and tension (opening up), though by using different techniques.

A second useful observation is that each of these techniques needs to be done with varying degrees of strength.  Sure, your goal is to be able to do them so subtly that an onlooker would not even be able to see your hand or body move.  However, a green colt with his mind set on his own agenda could also require you to exert your full body weight in a millisecond to swing his hindquarters away from you and keep yourself safe. It's important to hold your rope in a way that makes it possible to do any of these things at any time with any necessary degree of effort.  If you have to set up or switch or fumble around, you'll miss the opportunity to communicate clearly with your horse and you might even get hurt.

Which brings us to a third useful observation:  Getting dragged is the second most common form of equestrian injury next to falling out of the saddle.  So it would be wise to not loop the lead rope around your wrist or over your shoulder or around your waist or any other equivalent thing.  This is not just an issue with horses.  Sailors, tree-trimmers and machine-shop workers are also familiar with this problem.  Many years ago, a friend of mine who was an SCA knight died because he had the excess slack of his belt (which he was not wearing) tossed over his shoulders to keep it out of the way while he buffed the metal buckle on his electric buffing wheel.  The wheel caught the buckle and wound the belt around the arbor, yanking him forward and breaking his neck instantly.  I think of him every time someone leads their horse past me with the slack end of the lead rope thrown around their neck or over their shoulder and I pray that nobody slams a car door, starts a tractor or loses a plastic bag in the wind until that horse gets safely back in its stall.

With these thoughts in mind, the right way to hold a lead rope is simply this:

Notice that the thumbs are toward each other and the bottom of each fist is toward the two respective business ends of the rope, rather like the way you would hold a quarterstaff or a kayak paddle.  This is important.  Holding the rope with the business ends exiting from the bottom of your fists rather than the top provides vastly more mechanical advantage while simultaneously allowing you more control.  If you don't believe me, get your kayak paddle out and play with it for a while.

If your rope is too long and you must take care of your excess slack, carry the slack in a coil like so:

Handle it like you would the coils of your lass rope or riata.  You can transfer the coil to whichever hand is currently not operating its business-end of the lead rope.  You can also drop the coil completely when you need to give more slack to your horse.

That's it.  If it seems easy, that's because it is.

But doing it right makes a huge difference and sets you up to be safe and to be able to do a lot of advanced things in the way of communicating with and handling your horse.