Horse Pull

My neighbor Todd and I went to the Saline Community Fair today.  Todd’s wife Anne had planned to go, too, but was under the weather and stayed home.  That meant she missed the Big Event:  the draft horse pull.  Today’s horse pull offered six teams of two Belgian horses the opportunity to pull a sled piled with improbable numbers of thousand-pound and five-hundred-pound concrete blocks twenty-seven-and-a-half feet or as far as they could, whichever came first.

     Belgian horses are big.  Really big.  Someone asked how much the horses in one team weighed, and the answer was, “That one weighs twenty-seven hundred pounds, and that one’s twenty-four hundred pounds.”  Each horse in that team weighs more than a ton.  All of it muscle.  Furthermore, each team is resplendent in show harnesses.  Some harnresses are trimmed in chrome.  Some use three straps where one or two would do, just because the three straps look so pretty.  One team had chrome upside-down horseshoe charms, two per horse, dangling from the front of the harnesses just for decoration.

     And, speaking of horseshoes, all of the equine athletes were wearing cleated shoes, which gain them better traction.  Todd and I were extremely fortunate to be sitting among spectators who knew a lot about horse pulls.  I asked one lady if the horses wore the shoes just for competition and training, and she said yes.  But other people mentioned in conversation that these horses train every day and that there is competition year-round. 

     The question I heard asked most often today was, what do the horses do when they’re not competing?  The most common answer was logging.  Or just pulling anything that needs pulling.  “That’s what they’re bred for,” one lady said.  And a former competitor said, “Basically, they’re four-legged trucks.”  The lady who answered the shoe question, though, added that, if the horses are pulling logs in the winter, they may be fitted with snowshoes.  I looked up horse snowshoes when I got home, and they don’t look like people snowshoes.  More like horse boots.

     Before today’s competition got going, I was hoping quietly and hard that the activity wouldn’t be cruel to the animals.  The entrance of the first team dispelled my concern.  Those horses were so eager to pull!  It’s tough to settle them down enough to hook them to the sled that holds the weights.  That portion of the program is a three-human, two-horse operation. 

     Then comes the pulling.  Five out of the six teams today had been trained to throw themselves into pulling the moment they hear the hook engage with the sled.  Given their excitement level and the ambient noise, they often, it seems, think they hear the hook seat when it hasn’t, in fact, seated.  If the horses get too far from the sled, they have to be realigned with it; these horses want to go forward way more than they want to back up.

     And these puppies do not turn on a dime.  Turning a team of Belgians takes about as much room as turning a tractor, with the added degree of difficulty that you have to get buy-in from the tractor.  So the horses that false start are taken in a wide loop—in at least one instance, two loops—around the sled, getting more and more excited the closer they get to hook-up position, where the let’s-go-now dance begins again.

     The sixth team of horses had clearly been trained differently.  They were not allowed to start until given a voice command to do so.  And they didn’t get the voice command until they settled down enough to be under control.  Having the horses under control when they start is an excellent plan, as far as I’m concerned, as they throw themselves forward.  They want, with their entire being, to pull the load.

     At the beginning of the competition, the weights are modest enough that the teams pull the load easily.  In fact, it’s hard for their humans to get them to stop pulling.  The horses facing in one direction in particular seemed to want to pull right out of the fairground.  Parking a pickup truck across the line of sight to the exit put a stop to this.  That, and the increasing numbers of concrete blocks on the sled.  When the weight on the sled reached preposterous, how far the horses could pull came down to feet and inches.

     Every round, the giant horses tried with all their muscle and heart to pull a heavy load for their humans.  Every round, the weight increased.  And every round, the Belgians pranced back for the chance to do it again.

26 August 2022