Very Best Bridling Etiquite
When your horse learns that opening his mouth gets you to remove your fingers, he'll open his mouth willingly.
You don't need a short horse. You need to teach your horse to drop his head to an elevation that's comfortable for you to work.
The idea is to allow the bridle to hang vertically while you're putting it on. That way, the bit will be comfortable in the horse's mouth from the beginning.
While you hold the bridle in position with your right hand, your left index finger raises the horse's top lip. No sense going beyond this step until the horse holds his head still and relaxed.
Keep your horse's head down and his neck bent as you bring the bridle over his right ear.
Most of us can manage to bridle our riding horses, even if it doesn't look pretty. However, this article isn't simply about getting a bit into your horse's mouth - or even about solving his teeth-clenching problems - although it will do that, too. It's about taking an ordinary part of our daily interaction with our horses and making it better.
We're on a quest to help our horse develop "perfect" ground manners. Remember, a horse's performance will improve only when our expectations change.
We use "bridlework," as I term it, to communicate with the horse both from the ground and in the saddle. And even though it may seem backwards to have introduced our ground manners series last month by doing an exercise that required that our horses be bridled, only to come back to the bridling and haltering lessons here, it does, in fact, make sense to your horse.
By teaching our horse the "go forward" cue, we're now better able to explain to him where we want him to put his head. We faced his shoulder and tapped his hip with a whip to tell him that we wanted something. We may also have kissed to him to encourage our horse to move. When he did the right thing - stepping forward - we stopped tapping and kissing.
We applied our "magic formula" to teaching that cue. We had a motivator - the irritation of a tapping whip. We chose a particular part of the horse that we wanted to move - his feet. We picked a direction to have those feet move (forward), and we had a reward, which was stopping the taps.
Once the horse responded consistently to the cue, we had forward movement, which is the first word in our new language.
The second word, so to speak, had to do with controlling his hindquarters, and we applied the same magic formula. We picked a spot - his tail (or hindquarters). We picked a direction, which was away from us. We had a motivator (pressure on the rein) and a reward (release of rein pressure).
To put it into action, we asked the horse to walk forward. Then we pulled the rein, releasing it when the horse swung his hindquarters away from us and stopped his front feet. Remember the formula - motivator, spot, direction, and reward. We'll be using it for every cue we develop.
The Third Word
When the horse swung his hindquarters away, he probably bent his neck slightly, turning his nose a little toward us. If he didn't do it the first time, he was probably doing it by the 10th or 20th time because it's easier for him to bend slightly than to turn with his neck stiffened. The hips-over action set up the horse so that the third word - turning his nose in response to the rein - happened automatically.
That's how the training is going to progress. We're going to set the horse up to be doing the correct action before we introduce the cue.
Tell the horse to go forward and move his hips away from you. Immediately release the rein. Repeat the same thing from the other side.
Now go back to the first side and ask the horse to go forward again. This time, pick up the rein and put light tension on it. The horse may think that you want him to swing his hindquarters over, but you don't. Use the go forward cue to keep him moving forward as you keep pressure on the rein, but don't pull him forward. The moment he turns his nose an inch or two toward you, release the rein momentarily.
