hi it's josie and today i am going to pull rebels mane my horses haven't had their manes done
for quite some time but i want to shorten them up now because hopefully we're not i'm not too
far away from heading out and competing plus it actually keeps them looking neat and tidy
personally i don't believe in pulling the old-fashioned way pulling a horse's mane
people say it doesn't hurt them every horse i've ever watched have it done they're not happy about
it so i'm not going to cause my horse any pain if i don't have to there are ways where
we can do in this day and age we don't need to pull i have a very simple method but i'm
letting you know i am no guru here and my manes are no way show perfect but i'll just give you a
few tips hopefully on how you can do them without actually having to pull them i personally only use
three instruments these days and one of them is a i've got a few different sorts here
but this is what i use for thinning the mane this one's an oster this is actually a dog one
you can get many different types of these and they are actually to help you thin the
mane out some of my horses don't need their main thin rebel has quite a thick section up
through the top of the crest there which i'll do some so i use those a pair of thinning scissors
and just a normal pair of scissors now i haven't spent a fortune on these guys i think these
cost me twenty dollars and these thinning scissors were on special i got a half price for ten dollars
so they haven't cost me the earth i also use a step a crate once upon a time i did use but i
fell off of it and it hurt me so i don't use one anymore so you'd like your mane to be just damp
you don't want it to be wet but you do want it to be damp if your horse doesn't like a spray bottle
perhaps that's something you need to work on and desensitize him to
or at the end of the day if you just need to get the job done use a damp cloth
so i don't want rebel's mane saturated but i do want it damp now i have washed his mane i always
do this with a clean mane not a dirty mane so you want to get your length correct because if you cut
too much off so sad too bad you have to wait for it to grow so go a little bit longer than
you think you want to start with but it does grow back and i have cut my horse's manes
too short so make sure you've got what you want for the forelock out the front
i don't cut a bridal path i personally hate them but some people do and if you're looking
to wonder what length i will use a comb but some people and it's a really good
spot to start with you can start from where this bit bends here now i like to
come through and literally just cut the mane off and straighten it it's going to look terrible but
that's how i like to do it everyone you'll find your own method
because it will be very uneven oh sorry rebels quite thick through there mate don't
worry about the jagged edges and if you leave too much just get a bit of a line happening
because we're going to change it all anyway
so now he looks like a little boy with a basin cut so rebel's got a bit of a thick spot through here
so i really want to thin his mane out we'll come around the other side because i need to
actually brush the mane over to the other side to use this so to thin the mane out this way
you need to brush the mane to the opposite side that the horse naturally grows and find the
thickest bits and get this little rake and you just basically come through
and it strips out some hair and thins it so when i'm in a big hurry i love
this so in the description i'll just pop a link to these so you can have a look at them
and what they are and what they're made of makes very light work of thinning a mane
so i just come back along and i keep checking it to make sure
i haven't thinned it out too much and the poor boy has no mane left
if you just pan down there you can have a look at what i've taken out with this
in precisely about three minutes i think
and now we use the thinning scissors and what we do is we just go along
good boy and i just go into the bottom of this
just keep taking little chops
just keep moving the mane around
a bit of a cowlick there for some reason
so the other way you can start to tidy this up a bit is with your scissors and short little snips
which i'm going to do because this here looks a bit longer than here so i'm just cutting in
at about i don't know just a little bit of an angle i'm not really
super duper anal about it and you can see i've actually shortened him up so
that's what happens you can end up with a really short mane which is okay
because it grows but if i had a competition next week this is it might be difficult to to plait
it up let's say because it's it's not long enough now i know that it's looking a bit jaggedy there
but that's okay because i'm gonna come back through with my thinning scissors in a minute
good boy i'm just gonna try and fix up here where this cowlick is and it does look a bit dorky
so don't cut you just cut in on a little bit of an angle
if i bring my little thinning scissors back in and just over this bit here just towards the end
that is your forelock i reckon mate
now there will be some long straggly ones here don't worry too much about them
i'll get them with the scissors when i come back
just going to go along and take any really long ones i'm not trying
to cut this blunt edge that i've done here remember i did warn you i'm no hairdressing guru
so it's just the really long ones that i'm trying to just take off you're such a good
boy rebel really aren't you except when you do that be careful you could have got a mohawk
all right
other than the fact that he's got some little
cowlicky thing going on there and he's got a little bit here where it's been rubbed out a bit
if anyone knows of any um good ways to stop that happening please let me know in the comments
so over the course of the next week as i said i will have my scissors over here when i bring him
in and i'm saddling him up and i will just go over and just nip through and take the little
stray ones off and neaten it up a little bit more but to be honest with you i'm pretty happy with
that i'm not going to any grand national just tidied his mane up a bit good boy thanks guys