[drivingpairs] hardy being hard & logging

Thank you, Cindy, for being tough, and understanding my message. It seems 
that you do have the right spirit, then do take your time and learn and study 
and be careful about what you do, and then do your single work first. Don't 
worry about multiples yet. That's a long way off. On the other hand, yes, a 
young animal can be trained to drive I believe better with an experienced 
driving animal in a pair, but again, that would need an experienced pair 
animal, an experienced pair driver and proper pair equipment. If all of that 
is not available, the starting as a single seems to be a much better 
approach.

But since you asked, yes, for logging in tandem, naturally a narrower trail 
would do, however logging work is quite involved and requires quite some 
additional knowledge as it can be very dangerous with tension on the draft 
arrangements, real physical work, skidding and rolling logs, breaking chains 
or cables, flying around with whip lash,  etc, needing a lot more knowledge 
and a lot better equipment as just a little pleasure driving around, as most 
of us do. Logging can be so dangerous that many old good reliable draft 
horses used for logging were trained to voice commands and then asked to do 
it on their own with the logger standing at a safe distance, incase anything 
broke or flew around. Logging can be very dangerous. So not only does the 
animal need much more experience, but also the driver, and you also then 
really do need very good equipment, not only from the strength of it, but 
also from the fit to not do any damage to your animals. I would suggest that 
that's all a long way off and really shouldn't be attempted with home made 
equipment nor proper instructions. 

I am not a logger, and have no own experience in that field, but I have done 
a fair amount of real drayage work with draft horses and it seems to me, when 
you really want to start logging, you are much better off restricting your 
work to working with a single animal. You need lots more knowledge for doing 
it with a pair - where with a log you don't have a fixed splinter bar, so 
uneven pull can throw the total arrangement completely out of whack and give 
you bad accidents with a heavy log, so the animals must also be VERY well 
trained to work as a very good pair (or here we can say team again, since 
that's DRAFT work)  together and with each other. I think it would take even 
more experience trying to do it with a tandem, because in a tandem, you could 
not have your leader do any pulling in any turn, he would pull the "wheeler" 
off his feet, or into the turn. So all work in turns must be easy enough to 
be done by just the "wheeler". The leader can help only on the straight, 
where the pull of both is then along a straight line, and yes, there the 
leader could do most of the work, or the wheeler could, or both, that's up to 
you and the way you handle the reins. In a tandem one can put the leader in 
or out of draft, same with the wheeler and / or with both, but again, the 
leader can never pull in turns as that would cut off your turn. (I know there 
are exceptions to this, and the VERY VERY experienced teamsters of the Borax 
40 mule hitch did have a system where all mules did pull even around corners 
with the swing mules jumping over the center pull chain, to pull to the 
outside of the turn, but I think Cindy is a long way off being able to think 
about such fancy work).  With this in mind, your turns don't need to be wider 
for the lines, they need to be wider for your log that you are pulling. With 
the tandem alone, and the leader out of draft in turns you could make in 
theory as sharp turns as with a single, but for the log pulling you probably 
need wide turns, although experienced loggers can probably also pivot a log 
around narrow turns.

So I suggest you do one step a the time and learn to drive single first. It's 
just like grammar school: When you are just learning the alphabet, there is 
no need yet to worry about how to compose a novel.

Ok, now that I know I'm ok with Cindy, let me apologize for my perhaps a bit 
"hard" posts the other night to anybody whom I might have offended with it. I 
also apologize to our list owners Helen & Joel for perhaps overstepping the 
normally expected tone on this list. Perhaps I was a bit harsh, and really 
didn't mean to, just some of the posts got to me that night and I thought I 
needed to cry out to stop what I considered unresponsible behaviour.

Happy driving, you all be SAFE and be KIND to your animals. We owe it to them 
to treat them properly and to get our own education in place before putting 
them (and others) into danger. I'm happy to see that Cindy seems to be of 
that spirit too.
Hardy
 


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