To speak to the current topic, re: Pulling manes as painful and barbaric or not.
You do/can teach a horse how to accept mane pulling. It’s like having their face washed or ears clipped. It’s a nice skill for a show horse to have. I learned from a great horsewoman/groom/(meth head) how to change a horse’s mind about these inconvenient parts of a show horse’s toilette. She would tease up the hair pull out a just a few, nicely separated at their roots and then instantly scratch the horse’s mane afterwards. That feels really good… worth waiting for. IME, when the horse stops having the expectation of pain and learns to look for the good scratch that follows, the meaning of mane pulling changes for him.
You can retrain older horses, even ones whom it hurts a bit. You can really do a nice job giving a green horse a skill that will help him out for the rest of his life if you teach him how to have his mane pulled before anyone else screws it up. To me, it’s part of the first round of under saddle training. Their skin and mental maturity is enough like an adult horse at that time to make that a the right developmental window for teaching mane pulling.
With respect to the horror of cutting manes for a hunter, It Ain’t So!
A jumper guy taught me how to tease and cut a mane to produce the soft edge of a pulled mane. Now, I cut and pull in combination to make a horse’s mane of even thickness all the way down….precisely because that will make a braid job look better.
Another bonus of cutting I have noticed: The hairs are all the same length. That makes braids better and the whole mane lie down better when unbraided. When you keep a mane pulled, you insure that there will always be shorter new hairs growing in. IMO, those aren’t optimal.
I can’t speak as a professional braider about working with one of my cut/pulled manes. I put braids in myself and find it easier to have a mane that ends just about at one spot; the braid doesn’t taper and taper and taper. Or rather, as someone who takes braids out, it makes a huge difference to have a braid that doesn’t taper to just a few hairs and yarn. Those braids are the biggest, hottest, tiredest, have-to-pee, just want this day to end and so does the horse, PITA ever. Makes you want to just cut the ends off. And that’s not a good way to use scissors on a mane.
