Summer, the Dragon, and the bit that started Agadors

When I bought Summer, I did not know I was buying a head-shaker. The previous owner had been honest about most things, but somehow this part did not come up.

The first time I rode her in a busy arena, she threw her head up so hard she nearly hit me in the face. The second time, she did it within ten strides of mounting. By month two I had a list of all the things that helped (riding alone, riding in a halter, leaving the noseband off, riding her one ear at a time as a joke) and a longer list of things that did not.

We called her the Dragon. It was affectionate. It was also accurate.

The vet came out. Clean bill of health. The dentist came out. Clean too. The saddle fitter came, then a chiropractor, then a different saddle fitter. They all found small things. None of the small things were the thing.

I started reading. Properly reading, not browsing forums. The Engelke and Gasse cadaver study on internal mouth dimensions. The Helsinki tongue depth data. The bit fitting course I eventually enrolled in. I learned about her hyoid, her palate, her likely tongue depth based on the breed pattern. I learned that the bit I had her in (a chunky double-jointed warmblood-marketed snaffle) was almost certainly the wrong shape for the size of her mouth.

I started ordering bits. Different mouthpieces, different cheekpieces, different thicknesses. I put one in her mouth, rode for a week, kept notes. I had no plan to start a business. I was trying to ride my horse.

The combination that finally worked was thin. 10mm thin, which felt counterintuitive because every piece of dressage advice I had absorbed by then said thicker is kinder. It was sweet iron, which she licked at in the cross-ties. It had a small copper roller in the centre of the barrel link, which gave her tongue something to do that was not bracing. The first week she wore it, she stopped tossing.

It was not just the bit. By that point I had also changed saddles, had her back worked on twice, and pulled her noseband off entirely. She was a system that needed fixing, and the bit was one of the variables. But she had been in many bits during this period, and this one was the one she settled in.

I started ordering more, in different sizes, and posting them on Facebook Marketplace to see if anyone else wanted one. They sold out within a week. Everything else I had listed (saddle pads, leg wraps, miscellaneous tack I was clearing) sat untouched. That was the signal I needed.

That bit became the CalmBlue.

Summer is still with us. She is older now, calmer in general, no longer behaves like a dragon. She still wears a CalmBlue.

What I take from all of this, when I think about how to talk to riders going through their own version of it, is this. A head-tossing horse is not a misbehaving horse. She is a horse trying to escape something she cannot escape. Sometimes the something is the bit. More often the bit is one of three or four things you need to look at, in a particular order, before you find what is actually going on. The work is patient. It is rarely a single fix.

The CalmBlue is not a miracle bit. It is the bit that suits horses with a certain anatomy and a certain kind of sensitivity. It does not solve a back problem, a dental issue, or a saddle that pinches. What it does is give a fussy tongue some room and something pleasant to do, in a thinness that fits where thicker bits cannot.

If you are reading this because your horse is tossing, the practical thing I would do first is take the noseband off for three rides and see what happens. Then book the dentist if it has been over a year. Then have the saddle and back checked. Then come to the bit conversation with better information.

That is how I got to the bit Summer wears now. It is how almost every horse-and-rider pair I work with gets there too.

Elina