Riverrose28 said:
I did train one of our stallions to smile when the judge asked to see teeth, It was so cute, the judges got a big kick out of it in the ring. I only want to teach her to bow, not to do any thing dangerous to herself or to me. From the responses, I'm sorry I asked. I'll figure it out on my own. she is my heart horse and we are very attached. thought it might be cute. But never mind! Thank you for the responses.
I'm sorry you had such a bad day!
No one here meant to make you feel bad, only offered sound advice on things to watch for when teaching tricks. I'm very careful what cues I use because I've got a lot of "buttons" installed on my gelding at this point and I don't want him accidentally doing something at the wrong time. If I stand in a certain position and happen to glance at his foreleg he'll either bow, lay down or start to Spanish Walk.
Thankfully he only does this for me and only when I let him know we're doing a trick work session but it would be very inconvenient if he decided to, say, lay down when I tightened his girth in harness or Spanish Walked when I want him to set up for halter.
He's hyper-alert to my body language when we're working as I am to his, so it's easy to stop him if I don't want him to do something because I see it coming and tell him to knock it off.
I did teach this horse to rear because my vet/chiropractor thought it might strengthen his stifles but I knew the horse extremely well, introduced it as just another sort of movement (we already moved forward, backwards, sideways, down, and we simply added "up") and was extremely firm that he was only to do it when clearly asked for the behavior. The only problem we had was instead of strengthening his stifles, overdoing it in the name of PT ruined his already-weak back and I will bear the guilt of that for the rest of my life.
But what you are asking for is a completely different matter and, as someone else said, easy-peasy to teach!
I actually haven't had much luck with that trick yet but that's because Kody doesn't like going to his knees and I made the mistake of teaching "lay down" before bow and now he won't stop halfway.
(See? Dumb Human Tricks! Hehe) It's the only one my elderly Arab ever learned and he could bring me to tears by offering his arthritic version of it in his last several years.
It was the only trick he knew so when he'd see me doing all this stuff with Kody and praising him so much, he'd look at me with hope in his eyes and point that stiff old foreleg and duck his head behind his knee and then look at me all bright-eyed and ask for his goodie. Who could resist??
I taught him by having him follow a carrot down and frankly that works very well as long as you're always going to have a carrot handy when you ask. Kody I taught to lean back off a hand cue without moving his feet, taught him to pick up one foreleg, then combined those cues so he'd lean back with one foreleg up. He's simply never gotten that last step of putting the knee on the ground but frankly I haven't worked very hard at it. Same deal with Turbo. I think for your purposes I'd just use the carrot and touch her foreleg with a whip to ask her to pick it up.
Try the Trickonometry book- it's got some pretty good ideas on how to break things down into small steps!
Leia
