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With motorcycle helmets there are standards and standard testing protocols.

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Motorcycle helmet testing involves taking a helmet and smashing it against concrete at 60 mph ... again and again and again ... just like a motorcycle rider cartwheeling down the freeway. There must be a different design to account for repetative blows during a single accident.

Bicycle, skateboard, and yes, horse helmets, are designed for a limited impacts (usually one). After this use (and the styrofoam has "given its life" to protect the owner ), they must be replaced. These helmets function well when used for the activities they are designed.

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I have only been unhorsed unvoluntarily twice and then as a kid.

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Quite a coincidence; me, too.

The first time dad was cutting down little post oak trees and trimming them up for fence posts to build a hog pen and I was dragging them, two at a time, with a rope looped around the saddle horn, down the road aways and across the road to where the pen would be built. I happened to be in the middle of the road when I saw a car coming so I turned the horse to get out of the road. The next thing I knew dad was picking me up out of the dirt and my horse was standing there with the saddle hanging under her belly. And that's how I learned about horses taking a deep breath and swelling up when you cinched up the saddle.

The second time, a year or so later, I had just gotten a young mare with no training at all. The guy said he'd been on her 3 times and she didn't buck. And then I had to have an emergency appendectomy one Sunday night (missed the last day of school in the 6th grade), spent 5 days in the hospital, don't remember how long before the stitches came out, but the first day the doctor said I could ride if I took it easy, I saddled her up and was going to ride down to a friend's place. It was hot summer time and that little mare did not want to head down that gravel driveway to the road; she'd turn and head back to the barn and the shade. I got her turned around headed down the driveway 3 or 4 times, but a couple of steps and she'd turn again. So I got her headed down the driveway, gave her a good kick in the ribs, and she threw me right on my head in that gravel driveway, and headed back to the barn. Now my dad had worked for a horse trainer in his younger days and he'd told me that you never whip a horse around the head and body (as I'd seen a number of people do), but if you wanted to punish a horse, to hold the bridle close to the bit and swat the horse on the front legs with the end of the reins to sting a bit and get their attention. I wasn't hurt except for the loss of a little skin in the gravel, so I jumped up, caught the horse, and proceeded to do as dad had told me, and as he had said, the horse rears and runs backwards but can't trample or kick you, and of course Mother (who didn't want me to ride anyway and had been watching out the window when I was thrown) had run out on the back porch and was screaming at the top of her lungs for me to stop.

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I have got really light in the saddle several times when a cutting horse zigged when I fully expected him to zag but managed to recover.

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I had one cousin a year old than me and his dad was a train engineer killed in a train wreck. My aunt later married a farmer; primary crop was wheat, but he also put up his own hay, had 100+ beef cattle, a dozen to 15 milk cows, hogs, chickens, etc. near Edmond, OK, but no horse. My cousin, who always had to outdo me at everything, wanted a horse, so his step dad bought a pretty quarter horse mare. First time I was there, my cousin wanted to show me his horse. He couldn't get the bridle on because that horse would hold her head higher than he could reach, so I showed him how to do it, and then showed him how to saddle her. Aaah, this was great, I knew I was really getting to him. So I hopped on her and took off across the pasture at a gallop, intending to make a wide circle and come back, but when I touched the reins to her neck, she doubled back, I dropped one rein, barely caught the saddle horn and hung on, and deflated my balloon in a hurry. I didn't know the old man had bought a well trained cow pony. All I'd had was old cheap generic horses.

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