It's a Tongue Thing

It’s a Tongue Thing

There are many likable things about Koa, a three-year-old Arabian gelding I work with; he comes when I whistle; he hangs around the gate after our workouts like he’d like to go for coffee with me or something; and he licks his lips, yawns and stretches protruding the most comically long, pink, snakey tongue ever--it’s more bovine than equine.  His ‘relaxed and happy’ is so very obvious.

But he’s got other oral fixations that are my bane.  The little nipper is a quite a nipper so I called my friend and mentor Penny Stone http://www.wholehorsepower.com/ to see if she could help.  The first thing Penny did was to switch my negative button to the positive position. Instead of pushing his nose away with a stern “no, don’t bite me” as I tend to do, she pressed his face away gently with the knuckle of one finger and said calmly “stay in your own space”.  Penny likes that I talk to him a lot, but said to do so by stating positively what I want, showing him how to do the right thing and then rewarding him, rather than always identifying the thing that I don’t like.  Attitude Adjustment 101.

Another mouth thing he does is when I ask him to back he raises his head, drops his back, and tries to catch the lead rope or snap in his teeth rather than backing nice and straight and without silliness.  It didn’t even occur to me that he needed actual step-by-step backing lessons.  He would go backwards so I thought he knew the drill, but Penny proved to me that the nervous reaction of going for the snap probably was an I-don’t-really-know-what-you-want-reaction rather than just being naughty.  A couple of minutes of gentle refining and finessing on how to move one leg at a time--first the back left, then the front right, then the back right, etc.--did the trick.  The light bulb moment occurred, he backed nicely, (thank you very much), stood calmly and shazam the tongue came out.