TEACH A HORSE TO SMILE! 🐴

I'm here with my buddy Legend and today I'm going to be teaching you guys a really fun trick that's really basic and that trick is teaching your horse to smile. So I'm going to demonstrate with Legend here. You ready Legend? Smile! Good boy! I'll take a quick picture of him here doing it. All right Legend, ready? Smile! Smile! Good boy! Look at those pearly whites. So this is a really easy trick to teach and I'm going to step into now showing you how to teach this to your horse at home. So the first thing we're going to need is some treats. I really like these treats, these apple snap treats. My horses really enjoy them. You can use whatever treats you like. These are by Buckeye and I love these treats because they're all natural and there's no sugar added. Hey Meg, pretty girl. So this is Meg and this will be Meg's first time learning to smile. She's never worked on this trick before so we're going to see how she does today. She's not as food motivated as Legend so it'll be interesting to see how she picks it up and if she picks it up quicker than Legend or it takes her more time. Ready to go learn something new? There we go. So I'm out in the ring with Meg. I've got my treats in my pockets here and to teach this trick, it's a really simple trick to teach, I'm just going to take one of my treats out. I'm going to take my treat and put it above her nose here and just tickle her nose a little until she lifts her lip and then give her the treat. Now when you're teaching this to your horse for the first time because we're using our treats, we want to make sure that she's still respectful so afterwards I might move her back a step. Just make sure that she's not coming into my space as I'm working on this. So again I'm going to take my treat, put it above her nose, smile, tickle her nose, good girl, and when she lifts her nose up like that I'm going to give her the treat. So now I'm going to repeat this with Meg a few times until when I lift my finger and say the word smile she starts to lift her lip up. Smile. So Meg's done this trick a few times now, she's still got a little ways to go before she responds to just my finger lifting but let's see where she's at. Smile. Smile. So you can see there she goes, good girl. So some horses when you teach this cue they're going to pick it up right away and really lift their lip high. Smile. Smile. And some horses, like with Meg there, good girl, some are not going to lift their lip quite as high at the beginning. And if you have a horse like Meg that is a little bit, she's maybe not lifting quite as high, then I'm going to practice it with her over the next week. Just do it for a couple minutes each day until I can ask her to smile from a further distance with my finger and she picks up her lip and she holds it up a little bit higher. So I hope you guys have fun teaching this trick. Keep enjoying your horses over the next week and I look forward to seeing you in the next video.