Elinor from “A Horse From Elinor” asked for some of her readers to blog about breakthroughs we had in training our horses.  Here is one from when I was a young girl with a pony.

I owned a young  shetland stallion named Trigger, whom I owned when I was age 12 to 14. Trigger loved to nip at me (though he never actually bit me) as I led him down the street.  There was no cause for it as I could see, but he just did it (I have since learned it is a stallion thing).  Anyway, I was the kind of girl who had read most of the books I could find about training horses from my school library, and somewhere along the way I read about putting black pepper in the mouth of a horse that nipped.

So I got some black pepper from the pepper shaker and put it in my pocket so I would be ready.  The next time he tried to nip me, I grabbed a fistful of the pepper out of my pocket and smeared it on his front teeth.  Boy did he make a face!  He stuck his lips up and his tongue out and didn’t like that one bit.

I only had to use the pepper treatment two or three times, when he nipped at me, before he decided he would rather not nip at me if he was going to get that horrible stuff in his mouth!