FIXING/UNDOING MISTAKES Do not worry about "ruining" your horses. But if a bad habit is picked up, don't worry--you haven't "ruined" your horses. But you WILL have to take measures to extinguish dangerous behaviors. People generally start off their horses, not deliberately, mind you, with tricks that when taught at the beginning with food rewards, tend to become nuisance or even dangerous. That is EXACTLY why you should beginn with simple, fun, innocuous tricks that won't pose a danger to the horse or to his handlers. HOW So, how do you undo what you have taught? First of all, instead of simply rewarding a nautral behavior or shapeing it, It takes a REALLY good horse trainer to figure out how to do that--as you progress along in my training program, you will see that many of the movements/tricks to teach are not natural at all to the horse. So WE must figure out how to appropriately cue our horses. Your fix right now? Simply ignore the undesirable behavior--rearing, extending the leg for "shaking,"--and tell the horse something like, "Nope--no good." Instead, begin teaching him the beginning tricks offered and reward those. Pretty soon, you will have a big repertoire of tricks to reward, and the nuisance ones should disappear because you will not reinforce them. You want him to associate a specific place as the classroom. Let's say you taught your horse a trick that is now dangerous, if you begin teaching him tricks in a DIFFERENT location other than the area where the trick was learned, this will make him associate THAT place as his "classroom." Moreover, you are better off in a non-distracting place AWAY FROM OTHER HORSES! A handler cannot have a horse's full attention on him when the horse has other horses around him. TEACH YOUR HORSE BY HIMSELF! It is best to teach a horse in a large stall in the beginning--the perfect place for learning in the winter! Yes, while horses do mimic each other, remember they learn the bad as well as the good (like cribbing!). You will get much better results, and it will be fairer to the horse to teach him by himself, where he doesn't have to "worry" about other horses--his attention can be completely focused on you. Patience is the name of the game. It is very true-- there are no rewards for hurrying. Hold off on other tricks first, like the bowing, and gain your horses' trust by teaching the simple tricks first. It's important they do basic's before moving on to the more complicated moves. (Remember those building blocks?)