This summer my sister and I attended the Iowa State Horse fair, there were some AMAZING riders, and there were some REALLY BAD riders, one lady from a musical drill team was on a grey mare, and kept yanking on her face the mare kept putting her head up to avoid the bit, but the lady just kept yanking on her face, there were quite a few comments in the crowd about that, everybody felt bad for the horse. So, Roni and I attended program put on by Rich Lamb nationally known trainer who hosts "The Horse Show" on RFD TV, he has also written 2 books, Horse Smarts for the Busy Rider and Human to Horseman: a Journey of Discovery, Growth, and Celebration along with co-writing the book The Revolution in Horsemanship with Robert M. Miller about bolting, bucking, and biting. He also knows about horses not just acting out, 99% of the time they have a good reason to do so. He taught us a nice fix for biting horses. This fix is called "The three second kill."
The three second kill also follows the concept of pressure and release. So anybody who has any experience has had a time where they were holding something and weren't looking at the horse, and the horse comes up and gets their whole hand in their mouth. This is a respect/training issue, you need to do more ground work and get your horse to respect you, if your horse has a biting problem where he likes to bite a lot then you shouldn't be riding, if they don't respect you on the ground why in the world would they respect you in the saddle? Right? So this also is caused by people, people have let them bite them, and they learned its okay, they need to be taught, in the heard they are taught who they can bite and can't bite. If they bite a lower horse they are going to continue too, if they try to bite the boss mare they are going to get a swift kick. Horses learn like this, and they need to learn that its not okay to bite ANY people, this could be bad because they may learn not to bite a 15 year old who can usualy get them to stop after a few seconds, but if it were to be a younger child say 6 or 7 the horse could seriously hurt the child. So now to the method of the three second kill.
Horses are not like dogs, they don't relate past and punishment, they relate punishment(pressure) with now, the time frame for horses to relate something to an action is about 3 seconds. Humans can relate to years in the past for punishment, horses can only relate 3 seconds back for punishment. Horses do remember about bad experiences or good experiences in places or around things, but not directly and it can be quite ineffective. How to do the three second kill you may ask? When your horse bites you, convince your horse he is going to die for 3 seconds. Only 3 seconds, doing it anymore will do no good. So if you sit there holding you hand for 3 seconds then you can't do anything about it, as soon as your horse makes contact with your skin FLIP OUT, this is one of the only times I would recomend whaping your horse with a rope, not in the face, but you can bop their nose, scream yell, whap them on the but with a rope, grab a stick and yell and wave it, but after 3 seconds drop everything and go back to what you were doing. For those of you who say it is mean, think about horses in the wild, if they tried to bite the boss mare, they will at minimum get a good hard nip back, at worst chased down and beat the crap out off. Horses punish eachother, but they only do it for a few seconds, then they go back to what they were doing, they don't hold stay mad at eachother, the lower horse learned to respect the higher horse, and that is that until the lower horse tries again, maybe they will be strong enough to fight back next time. So you are working as a higher horse, you don't have to be a jerk to your horse all the time, there are many times where you can see the lower horses and the boss horse grooming eachother or feeding next to eachother, they arnt jerks all of the time, so you don't have to be either. So that is how to do the "three second kill" and if you do this consistently when your horse bites, he will eventually figure out that it isn't worth the effort and pressure you put on him when you come at him.
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