About a month ago, Dr. Judy Batker from Country View Equine Clinic came out to do fall shots, and look at Siri’s eye, which had been weeping for a while (turns out the eye itself is fine, which was a HUGE relief). Fi has a snaggletooth (what I think is a baby tooth that never fell out), and I also wanted to make sure that wasn’t causing problems. Dr. Batker went to look at it, and since Fi is pretty suspicious of anyone trying to put things in her mouth (it could be Banamine!), she wasn’t super cooperative. I’d worked on a little bit of mouth handling with both my horses, but not a lot, and certainly didn’t get to the stage of having someone else do it. So, I took this as a cue to work a little more on it, and maybe by spring have a fairly complete mouth exam behavior. Or I may get distracted with any number of other things. We’ll see.
Anyhow, a few days ago it was cold, I’ve been sick with both a cold and fibro so I was highly unmotivated to do anything really involved, so I thought I’d give this a go. I’d watched Peggy Hogan do some mouth handling with Mantra, and though what I ended up doing doesn’t really look very much like that - it’s much looser and more experimental, which may or may not be ideal - it was a good thing to see first before trying this.
So, given my shaping plan format, here’s what I’m attempting:
◼ Goal: for this session, just to present my hand as a cue for the horse to place their upper lip on my thumb & forefinger, and pause any movement. Bonus if I could get a finger under the lip (which I did get, though not without movement). Eventually, I’d like to be able to touch all around the inside of the mouth, and even ask the horse to open wide enough to do a full oral exam.
◼ Prerequisites for horse: They need to know a hand target, but that it’s a different one from the nose target and the face target (which I changed from Fi to Siri, unintentionally, but glad I did because I think Siri’s is more clear).
◼ Prerequisites for human: I need to be able to accurately place my hand in the right spot, stay soft in the contact, and time the click with the horse’s stillness.
◼ Variables: I’m not super picky about where the horse’s head is when presenting the cue, and the duration of stillness asked for is variable based on what I’m feeling in my hand.
◼ Constraints: While I did go to the horse with my hand, I wasn’t going to chase them down.
◼ Setbacks: If there’s too much movement indicating discomfort, I’ll withdraw and try again, as well as ask for less of every component.
◼ Steps: Offer hand toward face with palm down, press edge of hand to teeth under upper lip, wait for stillness, try to move thumb under upper lip.
The difference between the two horses is interesting to me. Fi is a little more business-like, and Siri a little softer, however, both horses were pretty relaxed about it, even when I overstepped and got too handsy. No relationships were harmed during the course of this training!
Worth noting is that Siri wanted to crunch which is her default behavior (because it’s one of the first things I trained with R+, so let that be a cautionary tale).
