I’ve been riding horses for about a year now. I’ll talk more about how I started in a different post. For the last month, I’ve been a trainee at the farm where I ride. The work is physically draining but it’s a lot of fun. The best part is that I get to spend the day with 50+ horses, which are my favorite animal. There’s so much to learn about horse management, and so far it’s been a great experience!

One of the first things I was trained to do was how to saddle and bridle a horse. A step in bridling a horse is to slide the bit in the horse’s mouth. A bit is a metal piece that fits into a horse’s mouth and it helps the rider control the horse. I was pretty surprised that horses would comply with humans and open their mouths to be able to put the bit in. At first it was a scary thought, sticking my fingers in the mouth of an animal that weighs more than 10 times my weight (and the possibility of being bitten).  

The trick is to tickle the horse’s gum. Horses have bare gum at the back of their mouth where no teeth grow. If you stick your thumb into the side of its mouth and tickle it, the horse will actually open its mouth and you can slide the bit in. I’ve been getting more practice lately and it’s becoming less daunting. However, mishaps still happen 🙂

A couple weeks ago, I was bridling a large horse named Pepper. However, unlike most horses at the farm, his teeth extend pretty far back, so when I put my thumb in his mouth and started to tickle his gum, I felt a tooth and he bit my thumb. It wasn’t as painful as it was disgusting because of the green alfalfa (I’ll post a later blog about alfalfa grass) that he had eaten for breakfast. 

Tickling a horse’s gum was a fascinating way to convince a horse to open their mouth to stick a piece of metal behind their teeth. It’s an interesting way to get the horse to comply because there’s a certain spot where you have to stick your finger and hope that the horse will open their mouth, and sometimes it doesn’t work (and you get bitten). But it’s a kind way to get a horse to open their mouth rather than just stuffing metal and forcing the horse to chew on it. 

That reminds me a lot about humans. If I need to convince someone to do something or help me with something, I should “tickle their gum”. If I can figure out where to figuratively slide my fingers and start tickling their gum, there’s a pretty good chance that I’ll be able to convince them to do something that they would have never thought to agree with. Obviously, I’m not going to ask them to do something that’s harmful to them, because it should be to both of our benefits. But tickling a horse’s gum is a nice way to simply talk about convincing someone to agree with your point in a fun and caring way.