I'm glad that Jay (and Larry) set this straight already. Dear friends, it all depends where you are coming from! With carriage horses two horses next to each other are a Pair, and four horses are a Team (or a Four-in-Hand). But with draft horses two horses are a Team and four horses are a 4-up! So it all depends were you are coming from and to call two horses a team is not wrong, only it's draft horse language, that's all. So to be precise, to call two carriage horses a team, yes that's wrong, they are a Pair, but to call two draft horses a team is absolutely correct. And Ken is a draft horse man, and since we were talking reins, hey, they are used by both Worlds, so naturally Ken was talking Draft Horses and thus was quite correct in his language. Further on the reins, Kathy, read Ken's post again carefully: What Ken wrote was that the outside rein is the longer one, and the coupling rein the shorter one, and indeed he is right, the outside rein is the long piece of leather, the coupling rein is the short piece of leather which is buckled onto the long draft rein. That's what he meant. And what you meant, was that however, the short coupling rein is buckled to the long draft rein in a way, that when laying things out, indeed the total distance from your hand to the front is longer on the coupling rein (and must be so, as that has to cross over to the other horse, so has to have a longer distance), nevertheless, the actual piece of leather is shorter there. :-) And when you went on to talking about having the horses on the inside or outside of the reins, that had nothing to do with the above. That's applicaple only to leader reins, where indeed carriage drivers with a "four-in-hand" = driving with all four reins in ONE hand (Achenbach style) have the leader reins running around the outside of the wheeler heads (having the Roger rings on the outside), as that way in a turn when taking a loop with the inside leader rein, the outside leader rein running the long distance around the wheelers head will shorten itself automatically by that long arch around the outside, thus we get our leaders automatically out of draft which we need as otherwise the leaders would pull the pole over. Drafthorse people however in often much longer multiple hitches and driving two handed often prefer to run the leader reins on the inside of the wheeler (and / or swing team) heads, so that they have less chance of having the leader reins get caught and hung up on any outside object. At least that's what I have been told. But perhaps Ken can jump in and explain to us, why draft people prefer to run the leader reins on the insides when they do that. So friends, let's be careful before we call somebody "wrong", when he is just coming from a different World. The Brits don't drive on the "wrong" side of the road either, they just drive on the left where we drive on the right. That's all. :-) I admit that it can be confusing at times, but that's not because they are wrong, that's just because we may not understand their way and / or may not be open minded enough to see it from their perspective. Let's be open minded, we can only learn from other views too. Hardy _________________________________________________________ To Unsubscribe, change to Digest or Vacation mode go to: http://www.drivingpairs.com/dpmem.html `````````````````````````````````````````````````````````