How to braid and wrap your horse’s tail

How to braid and wrap your horse’s tail is a recurring theme. Sometimes it’s about braiding for shows. Sometimes it’s about wrapping. Over a month ago there was a question on one of the Facebook pages I follow (World Wide Equine Chat) about how to wrap tails up. I mentioned that one of my preferred methods was with bed sheets. I was asked for details and said I would write a blog about it and share.

Of course, it’s taken me weeks. But here it is, finally.

See my later post on How to braid a ribbon into your horse’s tail.

How to braid and wrap your horse’s tail: The bed sheet method, illustrated.

I do not use this anymore, mainly because I am not showing and can’t be bothered to wrap tails. I must have done up my mare’s tail at some point a few years ago, though, because I had a sheet prepared:

I use whatever old sheet I have on hand. The important thing is to cut it so you have enough sheet in each strip to wrap fully around the segment of tail. Thicker tails require broader strips. Thinner sheets are easier to manage, but break (and wear out) more easily.

But do I want the sheet to break?

An issue that crops up is what if my horse catches the wrapped tail in a tree or fence? You might and heard and seen horror stories on the Internet that demonstrate the dangers of tail-wrapping.

Yes, a wrapped tail, just like an unwrapped tail, can catch on things and probably will. If you wrap the tail up in a sheet or vetrap or bailing twine, then it’s going to be stronger and harder to break off in pieces. You might lost the entire tail instead of just a few hairs. Yes, the entire tail could come off. (It can also be chewed off by other horses.) I suppose a horse could also drag around an entire tree or piece of fencing (and panic) if such a thing got caught in a wrapped tail.

I wouldn’t turn a horse out on wooded acreage with its tail wrapped. But then, if your horse is being a regular forest horse, it probably doesn’t need its tail in any particular length or shape.

If your horse spends most of its day in a stall or in groomed paddocks, its tail is probably safe wrapped any which way.

Back to how to braid and wrap that tail (if you want to)

The idea of using bed sheets is simply to wrap each of the three strands of the braid in an individual strip of sheet.

The beginning is very fiddly, as you will see in the video below. This sheet tended to bunch up, so I had to spread it out and wrap the tail repeatedly.

It’s tempting to be sloppy, as I have in the picture to the right. If you are going to double the braided tail up, it’s not as important (because the exposed bits will be somewhat protected). But I prefer to get it right.

Once you’ve got the top done properly, the rest is easy:

How to tie up the tail

Once you have braided the sheets well past the last of the tail, you can tie it up. I used to do this complicated thing where I would leave sheet at the bottom and them cut it in smaller strips. It served as a sort of fly swatch, similar to the kind you can do with bailing twine. Unless you have a reason to make sure the tail isn’t too low to the ground, it doesn’t really matter. I do generally like to leave something for them to swish flies with in the summer.

The most secure way to tie it up is to pass the ends through the loops of the braid. I didn’t do that here, but if I were to put the knot in the middle of the braid, I would. If I were going to leave the tail braided. I took this off as soon as I finished the video. Shopcat doesn’t need his tail up!

Video:

(I was going to narrate, but it’s fairly obvious what I am doing…)