How to Teach Your Horse to Open His Mouth

To teach a horse to open his mouth, give the animal a piece of carrot, let the horse lick your hand and get the horse comfortable with human fingers in his mouth. Make sure a horse is comfortable with mouth examinations with helpful advice in this video on training horses.

Hi. I'm Rick Gore out here at the Travis Equestrian Center. Today we are going to talk about how to get your horse to open his mouth. This can be helpful in a lot of ways because if he has a tooth, an abscess, he gets something caught in his mouth, or if the vet wants to check him out or when you're worming your horse, you are going to need him to open his mouth. So, the best way to get him to open his mouth is to break off a piece of carrot and give it to him. He loves that. Ok? So, you have to be comfortable around your horse's mouth when he's chewing and eating, otherwise you're not going to be able to do this. So, if you're kind of nervous about the teeth and you're nervous about getting bit, this is going to be hard to do. So, once you get comfortable where the horse can lick you and kind of put his mouth on you and you know he's not going to bite you, you want to start manipulating his lips. Maybe stick your finger under his front lip there and massage his gum. Ok? Now you see he's getting used to that. Again, I'm not worried about him biting me because I need to know how to keep my fingers out of his teeth so I don't get bit. Now, when you put a bit on a horse, which I don't use bits, but if you use a bit, you know it goes right in here between the bars and there's no teeth right there. So, when you stick a finger right here, a horse naturally wants to open his mouth. So, all I'm going to do is put the top of my thumb on the top of the roof of his mouth and his mouth is going to open. And since he did that good, I'm going to go ahead and release. So, he's getting used to my fingers going into his mouth. If I just try to do this right away and continue to do it, without giving him any release, he's not going to do it and he's going to want to fight me. So, I'm going to stick my finger in his mouth, he's going to open his mouth and I'm going to move it out. Good boy. So, he gave me that. So this time, I'm going to hold it a little bit longer. I'm going to stick it in there and hold it. His mouth is open. He's working, he's getting my finger out of his mouth. He's saying, "Get your finger out". And now I'm going to go ahead and take it out. Once I get him to open it that way, I'm going to try to reach in and get his tongue. Now when you grab your horse's tongue, again, make sure your hand is clean. You don't want to be cleaning out a stall and stick your dirty hand in there. Good boy. So, I'm going to go ahead and open up this jaw. And as he opens his mouth, I'm going to reach in, grab his tongue, which he doesn't like. And I'm going to pull it off to the side here. Now he won't bite down on his own tongue because I'm holding his tongue out. Now, he's going to get relaxed and loose and then I'm going to let him go and give him some release because he let me have his tongue. That was uncomfortable. So, now he's licking, he knows that it's ok. I'm going to go ahead and give him a little carrot since he's being a good boy. Hopefully, he won't eat me here. So, once you get a horse's tongue out of his mouth, you can pretty much do anything on the inside of his mouth, because again, he's not going to bite down. So, again, I'm going to reach up here, stick my thumb on the roof of his mouth. He's going to open his mouth. I'm going to reach in here and grab his tongue. I'm going to pull it out to the side, tell him to relax and now that I'm holding his tongue, I can go ahead and feel his teeth. I can look at his gums. I can do whatever I need to do. I can give him a wormer, etc. But by holding his tongue out, "Good boy, I know, you're a good boy," by holding his tongue out, you get him to keep his mouth open. And the more you do this, the more you get comfortable with your horse, the more the horse gets comfortable with your fingers in his mouth and worming, vet checks and all kind of other things become a lot easier. So that's basically how you're going to get your horse to trust you to stick fingers and keep his mouth open for you.