Horses wear halters. We don’t even think about it, because a halter is such basic equipment. There is a size for every horse: foal, colt, filly, cob, full, horse, warmblood, XL, XLG, draft. The size names are brand-dependent, so it’s sometimes hard to know which will be the best fit your horse.

When I bought him, Larry was wearing a “full”-size halter. Larry is a Thoroughbred with a short, refined face, and the halter looked baggy on him.

I was planning to get him something smaller, but it wasn’t high on my priority list. I mean – what could actually go wrong?

As it turned out, a lot could go wrong. One Sunday afternoon, my barn called to tell me that Larry had just been found in his paddock with his foot caught in his halter. He was very lame.

We all know that sick feeling of trying to break the sound barrier to reach the barn. When I arrived, Larry wasn’t just lame. He was three-legged lame, barely able to put any weight on his left front foot. He’d gotten his leg caught in the halter’s gaping nose piece.

When he tried to free himself, the opposite cheek piece broke, but the crown piece didn’t. I usually use a breakaway crown piece – made of thin leather that breaks easily – but Larry had broken it the week before, so until I could go shopping, he was wearing the original plastic-lined, thick leather crown piece.

Someone had seen Larry grazing contentedly in his paddock at noon. At 3:00 pm, someone else noticed him standing awkwardly with his head down, not moving. Who knows how long he’d been trapped? I’m so grateful he didn’t panic. He waited patiently to be rescued, with his neck twisted and the halter painfully rubbing the tendons in his leg. Incredibly, the vet didn’t find any serious damage. After a week of anti-inflammatories and LLLT (low level light therapy), Larry was good as new. Needless to say, I went right out and bought a smaller, “colt”-size halter. Since that misadventure, I always keep spare breakaway crown pieces in my tack trunk.

Of course, that doesn’t help when Larry goes into Houdini mode. One day I had him in cross-ties to give him a bath. This particular barn didn’t have a proper wash stall, so cross-ties had been mounted on posts outside the barn door. I was bent over, hosing Larry’s legs, when it happened: he started to prance. His dainty Thoroughbred legs churned elegantly just in front of my nose. And suddenly, they were… gone. When I straightened, the rest of him was gone too – nothing left but his empty halter hanging in the cross-ties.

When my brain kicked back into gear, I raced around the side of the barn and saw him galloping down the lane toward the road, his tail flung up in the air like a flag. Never before had I been grateful for that annoying gate at the property entrance – the one I had to get out of my car to open so I could drive in, and back out of my car to close behind me. Larry stopped there and waited, looking very proud of himself and graciously allowing me to put his halter back on. I still don’t know how he managed to leave his halter behind like that, and he isn’t talking.

Sometimes, he had help. Specifically, help from his turnout buddy, Herald. Larry and Herald routinely spent a lot of paddock time standing on their hind legs, grabbing each other’s halters. Every once in a while, Herald would yank Larry’s halter off. Then I’d have to tromp through the paddock, hoping to tell it apart from the trampled mud and grass divets. The once-nice leather halter finally grew too mangled to be worn, so I replaced it with a silver-and-green checkered nylon halter – something colourful that would be easy to find.

But Larry and Herald weren’t going to be outsmarted. One day, the silver-and-green halter simply vanished. Even though the ground was snow-covered and it was easy to see the horses’ tracks, no amount of tromping uncovered it. I even waited till spring and tromped some more, in case the halter had been buried in the snow. But it never turned up.

I’ve had the last laugh, though. At Larry’s new stable, halters are removed for turnout. Along with the lead shanks, they’re nearly hung on a hook by the gate. Hopefully, my days of worrying about halters are over.

Who am I kidding? Horses are always finding new ways to surprise us. What would really surprise me would be Larry learning how to put the halter on by himself.