Horse Bits Have Been Used for Thousands of Years. Now They're Being Reconsidered.

New York Times

3 days ago

As Brendan Wise gallops his horse Villanueva Conrad over towering jumps, he could be any other show jumper in shiny tall boots and a crisply tailored competition jacket, except one thing is missing: Not only are there no reins in his hands, a part of an equestrian kit usually deemed essential for steering a horse, in fact there is no bridle on its head at all. And, most crucially for Wise, no metal bit is in the animal's mouth.
To the average rider — for whom steering a horse or controlling its velocity by gently tugging on a piece of metal between its molars is without exception the way horseback riding gets done — Wise's feats with his horse, also known as Lyric, seem an impossibility. How could he possibly control his mount without the metal bar on its gums, which for thousands of years people have used to tell horses what to do?
For Wise, the rare rider who has taken bitless riding from its humble status as a circus trick to the highest echelons of equestrian sport, his rides are part of a mission to question accepted practices.
'Do I think bits are bad? No,' Wise said in an interview in May. 'But it does raise the question of: If you can get the same results without it, then why use it?'
He and Lyric compete at the Grand Prix level, over jumps as high as 1.40 meters. He steers with only the pressure of his legs on the horse's sides and a circle of rope loosely around the horse's neck that he tugs left, right, or back to tell Lyric to slow down. While Wise is not always the winner, that's not the point.
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