Because Your Kiss Is On My List

Because Your Kiss is on My List, Of the Best Things in Life

First things first, if you didn’t read that title jamming along with Hall and Oates, we can’t be friends. As a trainer/clinician/coach, we pretty much never come across a performance horse rider who doesn’t need a little more umph from their mount at times (insert Western Pleasure joke here). In the English disciplines, you’d commonly hear a trainer yelling, “More Leg!” while sipping a mimosa, pinky out, and eating brie or caviar on an overly toasted cracker. In the Western world, you might hear a trainer mentioning to their customer, “You didn’t kick him once. I couldn’t see your legs moving at all.” Admit it. You sometimes simply run out of more leg. What to do?

One of the things that I am consistently flummoxed by when working with new customers is how silent many of them are when riding. Indeed you have two kinds of riders, those who feel like they have to give the horse a running commentary of absolutely everything, or those who get lockjaw. There is no in between. They either completely desensitize the horse to verbal cues, or never give one. I’ve yet to find a way to cue a horse that is lighter and freer for the horse than verbally. While I’m not suggesting that every cue needs its own accompanying sound, there are a few basic verbal commands that can enhance a lot. The kiss or cluck is chief among these. This will be particularly useful if you have the sort of horse that tells on your spurs with his tail.

I use the kiss/cluck to mean two specific things. First and most basically, a soft kiss is a request for their attention. It might be translated as, “Pssst! Hey!” Sometimes, a cue given isn’t responded to simply because the horse’s attention was elsewhere. For many situations a simple vocal wakeup call will bring the horse’s mind back and their responsiveness returns.

The second way that I use the kiss is to signify, “Move Your Feet, NOW!” Using the kiss this way begins when we are teaching basic forward motion during ground work. The order of cues is of paramount importance. First we position our body to open a door and close another (directional set up), then we kiss/cluck (level 1 ask), then we move our feet to add pressure (level 2 ask), then a whip aid of some kind might move subtly (level 3 ask/suggest), then our feet escalate our proximity pressure (level 4 ask/suggest), followed by more whip/flag (level 5 ask/suggest/tell), and so on. It is of equal importance that we don’t desensitize the horse to our aids by continuing to kiss/flag/whip after they have responded. 

Through good timing and escalating purposefully, it can easily be expanded to any cue when I want the horse to add a little more TRY. This applies in many situations. If they are hesitant to load in the trailer, kiss. If they aren’t stretching out into that long trot like they should, kiss. If your lead departures aren’t crisp, kiss. If the sidepass is dragging, kiss. If they aren’t backing as hard or fast as you’d like, kiss. It means “Give me MORE!”

A constant in all of my articles is the importance of timing when training a horse. Going back to that groundwork and forward motion stuff, I’ll assume you have some sort of stick/whip/rope/plastic bag on a tree limb apparatus that you use to help you get more umph and move those feet. In behavioral terms, this phase of training is called sensitizing. If you consistently kissed to the horse prior to using that training aid, that kiss would become the thing that happens before what happens happens. Kiss, and then enforce the kiss, until the enforcement has been unnecessary for a while. Horses are great at anticipation, whether you want them to be or not, and in this case, we want them to be.

I find it particularly helpful to have an escalating series of kisses/clucks in my toolbox. That means that I kiss once softly for their attention. By softly, I mean that my horse/dog can hear me, but someone 5-10 ft away wouldn’t. Hearing this, my horse’s ears should come back to me, even if he was nervous at a show and nickering to his buddy. He should prepare and know that a cue is coming when he hears that soft kiss. This means that I should be able to give that rein cue very, very softly and it will be recognized and acted upon by the horse, but relatively unseen by everyone else. Sound helpful?

I might also be in a situation where I simply need more from my horse, and, for any number of reasons, I just can’t kick him harder. Maybe, I have a horse that has been soured to leg aids and now reacts by swishing his tail like a windshield wiper. That type of horse will really benefit from having an alternate way to ask for more that doesn’t involve kicking or spurring harder. Hopefully, I have worked at home on kissing softer, then a little bit louder, now, a little bit louder  now, just a little bit louder now, hey ay a ay, and my horse knows that he’d better get to moving some feet, or else I’ll have to Shout! Pick my heels up and SHOUT!!! And again, to be clear, this way of kissing/clucking can be used in any situation. How I have my body shaped up, whether on the ground or in the saddle, is what will tell the horse how to move. The escalating kisses tell him to move, NOW.

Particularly when training young/green horses, I find this use of kissing/clucking to be invaluable. Frankly, I put it in there so strongly that I almost want the horse to get anxious if I get a few louder kisses in. This tension is what builds that motivation. It is a valuable tool to help sharpen up skills and get responses automatic, without thought, now. There is certainly a time when we need to give our horses lots of time to think. There are also times when they need to simply obey and move. All horses could use a little more Right Now in them. Whether they obey right now consistently or inconsistently is what tells us if one is broke or not yet. Indeed, as this becomes developed, a double kiss becomes my cue for a lead departure.  Not to indulge in hyperbole, but I wrote this article because your kiss, your kiss, is on my list, of the best things in life.