 Here's a neat little trick I learned from one of my mentors, but all we're going to use is a lead rope. This is about an 8 foot lead rope, and I know some of you might have 12 or 15 foot lead, you don't need that big of a lead rope for this exercise, so I just want you to keep a nice little handy 8 foot rope. Rope halter is pretty good for this exercise, and I'll show you the reason why. Here's what I'm going to do. The first thing you need to do, if you have a horse's toss in your head and is worried about just being touched, you're going to have to desensitize the horse through the ears, so just rob the horse. When I bring out the other horses, and you can see how the horses are more nervous and they're worried about it, there's a process, and what we do is just desensitize them to us. Now, here's the trick. Once we've got the horse desensitized, we can rub the horse all over with the rope and our hands and stuff, and the horse is nice and calm. One other thing that we can do is put a head down cue. What is a head down cue? You know what's interesting? One time I remember this little girl. She was about 98 pounds, she was about that tall, and she was on a step ladder, and she's reaching up and trying to put a bridle in the horse's face. I said to her, I looked at her, I go, you know, can a horse eat grass off the ground? She says, yeah. I said, well, why don't you put the horses head down in the ground? She says, well, that would be nice, but I can't get the horses head down. I said, well, let's work on that, right? So here's what I did. I took my hand and I put it here on the bridge of the horse's nose, and I said, okay, let's touch, push, dig, up in the pole. This area here is called the pole, and between the ears there's a nice piece of bone right here. On either side of the bone, there's some soft tissue right here. If you zero in right here, you'll see just between the ears and the middle of the forehead here, there's some soft tissue. Now, she's pretty good at this, but not all horses are. So here's what you do. When you ever you deal with horses, horses do what? They push into pressure, don't they? So you know, we want horses to go away from pressure, not go into pressure, but when we have a horse that's nervous and worried, if we push our touch right here, they're going to go up. They're already up, right? So we've got to increase the pressure, right? So we want to ask and system in. We want to get in, explain the horse what we want and then get out, okay? So here we are right here. So I touch and did her head go down? No, I just did there. If I touch, did her head go down? No, so then I push, I put more pressure, if your head doesn't go down, I want to dig. There we go, good girl. So she put her head down. Now, not all horses are going to do that because they're going to go the other direction. So it's really important that when they go the other direction and they start to rear back on you, you follow the horse back and you continue to add pressure and you add pressure until they do what? Put their head down, okay? So pretty soon you can actually get the horse's head to do what? Go all the way to the ground. And that's pretty good right there. So if you can get these horses that are nervous and worried, put their head all the way to the ground like that, that's where you want to start doing this, okay? So again, you talk about prerequisites. Before you can ride your horse or do any kind of bridle work or before you can even launch your horse and do some of those, you kind of have, you've got to have control of that head, don't you? So this is one way of getting control of that head. Now here's the trick I want to show you. So once you've got the control of the head and that, okay? By desensitizing the horse and rubbing the horse down and getting the horse quiet and touching the ears. Once you got that, then the second thing is get that head down, cue right there. So you got that head down, cue. So there's two prerequisites, right? Get in the horse used to being handled and getting that head down. The next one is notice my forearm here or my wrist. My wrist now takes the place of those fingers. This was asking system and touch, touch dig or touch push dig, right? So now this becomes my touch push dig. See how that goes right there? I can push more, more and then her head goes down, right? So now I have my head in my hand in a position. So now, now what is this right here? I know it's a lead rope, but it's the top of the bridle, the head stall, right? So this represents the top of the head stall. So now I take my hand here, I take my, and pass it there. Now I got the top of the, this is represents. Now we're doing this because the horse doesn't take the bit yet, right? So we want to get the horse used to taking stuff in the mouth and getting used to being dealt with. So this little procedure, a little trick will help you bypass that. So come in here like this, take the rope around and then put your thumb in the horse's mouth, let the horse open its mouth and now you have the rope in their mouth. Now what do you do now? Now remember this represented one part of the head stall, right? Now this represents the other side, okay? So now we kind of faked out the horse, didn't we? Now we faked her out because why? We put something in her mouth that she was a little worried about. Now she wasn't worried about me, your horses. This is what we're trying to accomplish with your horses, okay? So if you have a horse that's a little worried about the bit and stuff, this is what we're looking for, this is one way of doing it. So you need to repeat this over and over and over again until the horse becomes desensitized to or not nervous anymore. So let's take this out now so we take off this rain here and we let her take the bit out of her mouth. You see how she tossed it out and now the other one. So again, make sure you have to get control of the head first. Once you get to control the head first, don't even try putting a bit in the horse's mouth, okay? Just work on this exercise until we have something good. Come in. This is the top of the head stall, right? If they tossed her head like that, just relax. Just kind of wait on them, come around, put your thumb in their mouth. There you go. And now you put the outside on, you put the inside on. There you go, right there. And that's a simple little technique that we can use to help our horses understand how to put a bridle in the mouth. So give me a second here. Now let's see how that works. Remember, I kept my bridle nice and quiet, not a lot of stuff in there. I just got a nice simple full cheek snaffle. Just got a brow bound here, okay? So I just come in here. Remember, same thing. Now I'm using my palm on my hand or my wrist and this is the head down cue, okay? What do I do? I pass the top of the head stall to my hand. Now I grab, I open up the bit with my middle finger and my thumb. I bring it past her nose, okay? And then I'm still getting control. Now the reason why I have it past her nose is if she was to go away from me, I can bring her back right here. So now I put my thumb just like I did before with the rope, right? I just come in here, take my nose, take my thumb, put her in the nose there. Okay, now she put it in her mouth. What do we do? Outside here, remember we did outside here first, inside here. So what you're trying to do is mimic as best you can what you did with the rope. Now, now you notice I never took the halter off. I never took the rope halter off. The reason why I never took it off, because if your horse starts tossing its head, moving all over the place, I can regain control of that horse's nose right here. Okay? Now, I'm going to show you a nice little trick. Now let's see you want to go for a trail ride. Do you want all this junk on the horse's face? Probably not, maybe I don't know, it's up to you. What I like to do is I like to take the halter off. Well, how do you take the halter off? How are you going to get it past there? You got to take, if you take the, you know, the head stall and the bit out of the horse's face, now you're going to have nothing, you can have it run away horse, right? Have no way to control the horse. So what I do, now watch very carefully. Okay? I undid, now I undid the, around the neck there. Okay? I pull it out a little bit right here. I bring it down around the nose. I put my fingers in her nose that are open up her mouth. Okay? I bring the bit, I bring the halter around in her mouth and come out like that. There you go.