grabbing hold of the bit

Question
Hello Lynne. this is a question on horses that GRAB HOLD OF THE BIT. none of the experts are answering this question. hope you can answer it.

Question : i work in a thoroughbred racing stable. i am aware that horses grab hold of the bit through their premolars, runway with the bit round the track wasting their energy. why do they do it especially babies? my stable jockeys keep complaining that's the horse grabbed the bit. that's the reason why they had no other option other than just sitting in the saddle patiently. please explain me what is the cause and how to fix the problem.

note : this is a sincere request not to ignore this question

Answer
Having been licensed as a trainer on the race track and will warn you that my answer contains some info that may be considered heresy to some people U.S. race trackers.

In general, horses run in the U.S. are UNTRAINED runaway rocket ships. Jockeys, are often justifiably a little afraid of all that uncontrolled power and tend to lay on the horses mouth.  What would you do if you had a sensitive mouth and a 110 pound jockey was sawing on it with a metal bit?  I am certain you have noticed that some horses naturally have lighter mouths than others.

If you look at statistics, horses that worked BUT NOT RACED in their two-year old year have less injuries as three-year olds than horses that are not worked as 2-year olds or horses that are run as 2-year olds.

My solution was to ride my horses as two year olds after cattle, on the trail, swimming and other ways to develop their muscles and minds without putting too much stress on them.  Long rides with trotting and later in the summer long SLOW gallops.  All this time I was teaching them the same thing I would teach any other horse, to give to the bit.  Now when I took the same horse to the track, they might give too much when the jockey pulled on them.  My solution was to wrap a wide snaffle in latex bandage. Now my soft mouthed horse could tolerate the jockeys unrelenting pull but was still controllable.

back when I was much younger and used to ride mornings at the track, I would occasionally draw one of those bit grabbers.  Sometimes I could finesse my way out of it...often I couldn't.  Since there is no way to get your riders to stop laying on a horse's mouth, train your horse before he goes to the track.

I understand that trainers with lots of colts don't have time to do this right.  However, ask yourself what you would say to Olympic coach who explained to you that when he was training athlete to run a mile, he planned to lock them in a closet for 23 hours a day and bring them out for about an hour and either have them walk in circles or run them through their event and then stuff them back in a closet.  I am sure you would note that an hour a day is not sufficient conditioning and in addition, the isolation of the closet would build sociopaths.

I had a Thoroughbred who won an English Pleasure class exactly one week after he won his first out by 9 1/2 lengths, one half second off the track record. The week before that race, he was camping up in the mountains with me.  He was a trained athlete, not a runaway rocket ship.