Why I Taught My Horse to Chase Me with a Whip—and What It Taught Us Both

What do you do when you see someone chasing terrified horses with a whip?

If you're Mary Debono, you teach your horse to chase you with a whip—and discover something joyful in the process.

In this episode, Mary shares the surprising story of how a simple liberty game became a lesson in trust, body awareness, and learning to learn. You’ll hear how she transformed her horse Breeze’s traumatic past into a partnership built on joy and curiosity—and how their years of playful exploration allowed Breeze to learn “chase me with a whip” in five fun minutes. Literally! 

But this episode isn’t about tricks. It’s about why learning should feel good. Why change happens through connection, not correction. And why the most powerful reinforcement isn’t food—but the felt sense of safety and ease.

You’ll also learn how this approach applies to dogs, to humans, and to every movement we explore with our animals.

Resources:

📽️Video of Breeze chasing Mary with a whip  😅

🔖 Girthy Horse? Simple Steps Make Saddling a Pleasure (blog post)

💥Learn how the Feldenkrais MethodⓇ can help improve your seat, position, and balance on your horse! Free rider videos: https://www.marydebono.com/rider 💥

Want to discover how you and your horse can feel better in body and mind? Join the waitlist for our Move with Your Horse program and be the first to know when enrollment opens. Whether you're 25 or 85, this program is designed to help both you and your equine partner move more fluidly, reduce discomfort, and strengthen your connection through movement. 

Get Mary’s bestselling, award-winning book, “Grow Young with Your Dog,” for a super low price at: https://tinyurl.com/growyoungwithyourdog. Demonstration videos are included at no extra cost. ⬅️⬅️⬅️

Want to sit in a more balanced, secure way? Click here for all the details on our new series.
Effortless, Balanced Sitting: A FeldenkraisⓇ Movement Series  ⬅️⬅️⬅️

All information is for general educational purposes ONLY and doesn't constitute medical or veterinary advice or professional training advice. Please consult a qualified healthcare provider if you, your horse, or your dog are unwell or injured.  Always use extreme caution when interacting with horses and dogs.

About the Host:

Mary Debono is a pioneer in animal and human wellness, blending her expertise as an international clinician, best-selling author, and certified Feldenkrais Method® practitioner. With over three decades of experience, Mary developed Debono Moves, a groundbreaking approach that enhances the performance, well-being, and partnership of animals and their humans.

Mary's flagship online programs, "Move with Your Horse" and "Easier Movement, Happier Dogs," provide animal enthusiasts with an innovative approach that combines the concepts of Feldenkrais® with her signature hands-on work for horses and dogs. Through this transformative method, both people and their animal companions discover greater harmony, ease, and connection.

Visit https://www.marydebono.com to learn more about Mary's unique work

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Easier Movement Happier Life for you, your horses and dogs. I'm Mary Debono and today I want to share a story that may sound a little odd. It's the story of how and why I taught my horse to chase me with a whip. Yeah, that's right. So I think that's a little unusual, but kind of that's how I roll. You know, we do the non-habitual around here, the novel, the stuff that gets the attention of the nervous system.

So this episode though, isn't about teaching your horse or dogs tricks, it's about learning and why it's so important to actually refine and develop your ability to learn how to learn. So let me set the scene so my horse Breeze, so I'll even back up a little bit. I adopted Breeze many years ago. Let's see, it's been over 20 years ago now because he was a horse that nobody understood.

He was passed around from person to person and he had suffered a lot of abuse. He was a very, very sensitive quarter horse who had, like I said, I found out about so much of the abuse, you just don't even want to hear about it. And so he had a bit of distrust with certain things and I helped him get over so much. It was just incredible. And I just adored him.

He since passed away, unfortunately, when he was 28. But so, so anyway, one of the things that he really, that really bothered him was when people would, you know, use whips around their horses. Now, I never used a whip around him, but in the past people had and I, I know that they had and they used even more than whips and all kinds of terrible things. But, you know, when you're out in the world, you're sometimes exposed to people chasing horses with whips or, you know, getting them to, to do certain things, trying to force them.

So one day I was coming back from a ride and we were passing this arena and this guy was chasing his two Arabians around and he not only was just have, it didn't just have a lunge whip, but he had those big heavy duty plastic bags tied to the end of the lunge whip. So, and the horses were frantic. They were just racing around. And to me, it was such a sad sight because they were truly, they looked to me truly terrified.

This guy didn't see anything wrong with what he was doing. And I see this over and over again, people, and even not to that extreme, right, they have their lunge whip and they're cracking it and they're doing all kinds of things that just to me, seem like a slave master relationship, not a partnership with your horse. And a lot of people don't realize, like, you can use really subtle cues to interact with your horse, you know, and they just don't know.

So as I'm coming back to. To the ranch where Breeze lived, I thought, you know what? I'm going to teach Breeze how to chase me with a whip. And I had no idea how long that was going to take or anything else. I didn't even own a whip, by the way. I had to borrow somebody's dressage whip. And guess what? It took Breeze all of five minutes to learn how to chase me with a whip.

Now, with that said, I had done a lot of, you know, we had Breeze, and I had done a lot of what I call liberty play. You know, I don't call it liberty work or anything like that because it's just fun. It was just creative. It was just Breeze and I fooling around, running around together, doing things, learning different things, and just having a blast. Kind of like, was like, a lot of equine agility involved.

And like, once I taught him to. Not that he knew he was pretending to be a bull, but like in bull fighting, when a matador has the cape, I. He used to be terrified of tarps. So I started with, like, a tiny little square of a tarp, and then I gradually taught him to touch the tarp, and I would hold it in different ways, and it became such a game that he would come run.

Well, only on my cue. Okay. Only on my cue, he would come running to touch it, and we would play around. I'd move it around. It was all done very safely, by the way. Okay. And. And a friend of mine witnessed me teaching him that. And that also just took a few minutes. And she was just amazed. So let's get back to him chasing me with a whip.

Couple of things here were a bit of a challenge. He had. I had never taught him to hold anything in his mouth, and I had taught him to run next to me, not behind me. And if he was going to chase me, he needed to be behind me again. Took him five minutes to learn this. Now, the reason. Now, without going into all the details of how I taught him or how he learned, I should say, he was so smart, but all horses are smart.

We just don't know how to communicate with them as well as we could. So the reason it took him such a short period of time to learn that is because we had this whole bank of learning experiences. Together. In other words, he knew that when he was interacting with me, this was going to be fun. There was going to be something, you know, valuable in it for him.

And I'm not just talking about food. We're going to get to all that. What's reinforcing? Okay, it's not always food. But, you know, he knew that I was listening to him. And I got better and better at my mechanics, my timing, my ability to read him. For example, one of the things I taught him early on was the weight cue, meaning, you know, please stand and don't move, and.

And I'm going to do something else. I can go far away, I could run away, I could do whatever. And we always did this safely in a very large arena or something. So I was kind of perplexed because it took him a while to learn that cue. You know, I would walk away from him, and before I knew it, he was. He'd come galloping up to my side, and I was like, well, all of a sudden it dawned on me.

I don't know why it took me so long, but it did. I had taught him previous to that. I had taught him that. I did this little flick of my arm for him to come running, to come galloping up to my side. Okay, so think about that. Hold that in your mind. And then what happened was when I would be walking away, I've got that fast Bono walk, my arms would be swinging and.

And he looked at that as, oh, that's the cue to come running up to her side. So my body awareness at that moment wasn't 100%, let's just say. And once I got that, I'm like, oh, I'm inadvertently cueing him to do something else. Another example of how it's not the horse, it's us. So once I. Once I became aware of that, oh, then I. I stopped doing that.

I made sure that my arms weren't inadvertently cueing him to come running up to me, and then he was totally fine. He learned that 100 easily. Okay, now back to the whip. So I taught him to do this, to chase me with the whip. And there is a little video. It's a short little video clip, and I'll make sure to link to that so you can see this in action.

Not. Not the actual training, but him just chasing me. So I wanted to make a point, and I think, you know, it got a lot of people's attention when I first, you know, put it out, you know, because how many times do you see a horse chasing a Human with a whip, you don't see it. And it's also to give people pause about what that feels like and why that's so unnecessary.

Okay. That there's a gentler, kinder, more compassionate, more partnership based way of working with your horse and how, just like when Breeze was not staying in place and like running up to my side, I didn't realize I was inadvertently cueing him to do that, but I was. So we, the more we become aware of how we're using our body and our mind, the more subtle our cues can become, the more harmony we'll have with our horses.

Okay, so now let me tell you a little bit about. More about this whole idea of why Breeze and I, you know, did that, that chasing the whip, chasing me with the whip so quickly. Like why we got that so quickly. It's that it's like, okay, think of it this way. Breeze was prime, primed to learn with me, okay. And I was primed to learn with him. And in fact, I think it's fair to say that my horse and I were primed to learn together again.

We had built a bank of experience that was positive. I just, I felt so good whenever we were doing this kind of liberty play. Like all this fun stuff just felt so good. So it was really reinforcing to me. Now, I wasn't eating treats while I was doing it, but it was reinforcing. Okay. And to this day, by the way, there's a particular moment I use as my confidence anchor that's based on one of my experiences with Breeze.

Okay. And Breeze also had this bank of positive reinforcement. And again, not only through food. Yes. For the chasing me with the whip and for other things. Yes. Yeah, I did use food. I did use food. But what I want to make the point today of, it's really about learning how to learn. And there's many, many times where I don't use any food. Okay? So, so this whole idea, this phrase, even learning to learn, it comes from Dr.

Moshe Feldenkrais, who's the originator, the founder of the Feldenkrais Method for humans. And I'm a Feldenkrais Method practitioner. I work with all kinds of people. I specialize in, in helping equestrians, you know, move better, feel better, all that good stuff. And my approach, the De Bono moves approach, that's hands on work with, with animals, is based very strongly on the Feldenkrais method. Okay? So Moshe Feldenkrais believed that any individual could develop the capacity to learn.

They could refine their ability to learn. And this isn't memorization. He's not talking about rote learning. And it's not like performance, but learning how to adapt, how to take in information and use it in an effective, efficient way. And how to sense differences. We learn by noticing differences. So in the Feldenkrais method, we talk about that a lot. And I also talk about that a lot in my hands on work with the horses, with de Bono moves.

And, you know, learning how to learn is learning how to reorganize in the face of challenge. It's neuroplasticity. It's that ability of your nervous system to learn and adapt to different circumstances, to new environments. So Moshe Feldenkrais learn, you know, taught that we improve not by striving, not by efforting our way into new habits, but by noticing, noticing differences, cultivating awareness. Just like I got that, I real.

I realized, oh, I'm cueing Breeze unintentionally, right? That was a moment of awareness. And we also learn by exploring variations, doing things non habitually, because that gets the attention of our nervous system. And the most important thing is the experiences should feel good. They should feel safe and pleasant to the nervous system. Okay, so that's exactly what Breeze and I were doing. We were, you know, he had learned to tune into my subtle cues, and those cues felt good.

In other words, the end result was always rewarding. The process itself was rewarding. And he was learning that it was rewarding to be curious, to seek out answers, to figure things out. That's learning how to learn. And me too. I was learning. I was getting better. Now, I full disclosure, I've been doing this kind of stuff with horses since I was a little kid. Like, I, you know, I taught my first horse and, you know, I was a teenager.

I didn't even use food back then either. And again, I don't always use food now either. But I taught him, just as a joke, to chase things if I asked him to, like sicum, you know, like. And he was the gentlest, sweetest horse. But it was just like a game with us, right? He would, I taught him little silly things. And anyway, so. But it was always a fun experience for both of us.

I always made sure there was no pressure. There was no, you know, this idea that he had to do something that any of my horses had to do it. It was always like this play, right? They engaged in it or they didn't. So, so, so basically you're helping the horse learn that, you know, learning isn't something to fear. And worry about making a mistake and get corrected for it.

But it's something to enjoy, and that's a big, big part of my work. I talk about how the De Bono moves approach is all about connecting rather than correcting. So, okay, so now let's step back from this whole, you know, idea of teaching a horse tricks because. Right. What, what is the function of chasing me with a whip? It's, it's just a fun experience, right? A fun learning, you know, journey.

But now, in the De Bono moves work that I do and that I teach, what we're doing is we're using our hands in very, very specific ways to improve a horse's ability to move more athletically and to feel better in body and mind at any age and at any stage of their. Of their fitness. As a matter of fact, whether they're young, whether they're really geriatric and you want them to be less stiff, you know, a little more fluid and flexible, maybe a horse has, you know, issues where their bending is not quite the same on each side, they're having difficulty, or, or, you know, whatever it happens to be.

Right. Our job as the Bono moves practitioners is to help them embody a sense of more fluidity and harmony in their body and mind and with you so that you can communicate and connect on a deeper level. And so we do that in very specific ways. So we use our hands in a way that feels good to the horse. Now, with that said, this isn't about just feeling good, because just feeling good, you could scratch them on their withers or around the tail, head, or million other places, right?

And your horse will love it. And I'm not discouraging that, but that's not part of, like, learning. What we want to do is we work with the horse. In other words, for example, if you want your horse to bend a little more easily or maybe a lot more easily, one of the things I teach is we look at all the components of bending. What does it take for the horse to bend to one side or the other?

And then we, we, we use our hands to support those areas because it's a whole body experience. Bending doesn't just happen in one section of the horse, right? It's a whole body experience. And we help them get more comfortable in that, to organize their parts more efficiently so that suddenly bending becomes easy and it feels good. So we're always very careful to tailor the experience to the horse in that moment and to have it feel enjoyable.

We want to associate the new option, the new movement, coordination, with ease and pleasure. And that's how we help rewire the nervous system. So just like we're rewiring the nervous system whenever you're teaching your horse, like if you want to teach these tricks like I've done. But the hands on work also rewires the nervous system. And the reinforcing part, the rewarding part is that sensation of this feels good, this feels safe, this feels better.

And this is a very, very important aspect. We help the horse experience feeling differently. For example, just say you have a horse that's worried about the farrier, whether their hooves get trimmed or they have shoes or whatever your situation is, but they're worried about it. They have a long history of being worried about it. And maybe even that area where the shores always come is a little bit scary for your horse.

Well, we can help them experience feeling differently in their body, in that place. Okay. And that gives them, and kind of gives their brain like an opening of, oh, I don't have to have my same habitual reactions because maybe you've, you have, you know, solved all the quote unquote reasons why your horse might have been uncomfortable with the, with the hoof trimmer before the shoe or whoever. In other words, maybe that there were some, you know, pain in the joints in the legs.

Maybe the, the hoof trimmer wasn't as careful as they could have been and they were, you know, cranking the horse's leg up or pulling it back or, you know, who knows, maybe it was something way, way in your horse's past that you don't even know what it was exactly, but the horse developed a dislike experience. Well, one of the things we can do is when they feel differently in their body, their nervous system realizes, I don't have to have the same behaviors.

It doesn't mean that it automatically changes. There's a whole process to go through. But let me give you another example. And this one also really relates to the reinforcing aspect of De Bono moves. And we're not talking about food here. Okay, I want to be clear. We're not talking about food. The reinforcement is the, the felt sensation, right? The feeling of safety and ease and comfort and pleasure.

So just say you have a horse that's girthy. Many horses are girthy. I talked about this in a previous, many, a few previous episodes that some horses are girthy, but you don't know it. They're not as obvious. Others. It's really obvious that they don't like being saddled. And what we do in De Bono moves is we actually use our hands and in very particular ways that feel really good and help the horse have more body awareness.

They can start to use their parts more efficiently. And so now they can round their back more easily, engage the hind end, they can carry you more comfortably. And at the same time you're attacking them up, Believe it or not, I have a whole process about this. But you're attacking them up as they're experiencing this feel good sensation. Right. And now suddenly the tack becomes associated with feeling good rather than something they have to guard against.

Right. They have to like tighten their abdominals and what people call blowing up with air, which isn't really that, but they're no longer bracing. So you're starting your ride on this, this foundation of feeling really good together. And you, because some of the, a lot of the work we do involves you being very aware of your, of your body and how you use it. You actually become a better rider too, a more comfortable rider and more balanced.

So all kinds of cool stuff. But this, this is key. This is key is you want to associate the process with ease and pleasure. Okay? So this is helping rewire the horse's brain, rewire their nervous system, so now they can have different responses to these experiences. So, you know, so again, I want to emphasize I'm not relying on food to be the reinforcer when we're using the Bono moves.

We are using the process itself to be the reinforcer. And I'll, you know, I'm going to link to a couple of things here for you. I'm going to link to that little short video of breeze chasing me with the whip because you might get a kick out of it. And I'm going to link to a blog post. It's my most popular blog post and it's about the step by step process I had that I did used to help a horse was very girthy become not girthy at all.

And actually to enjoy being tacked up and to improve his movement, comfort and, and well being all at the same time. So pretty cool stuff. And you know, before we close, I want to say this approach works with dogs as well, you know, so you, if you've been listening to the podcast for any length of time, you know that I'm also a huge dog person, a cat per.

I'm an every animal person, right. I'm an equal opportunity, you know, Debona, moose practitioner here. So I work with humans, I work with horses, dogs, cats, the occasional iguana, rabbit, et cetera, domestic rats. The whole, the whole nine yards. And you know, so, so if you want to help your dog regain mobility after an injury or maybe they have age related stiffness or anything like that, the same approach applies to them that you're, you create using very gentle, you know, hands on work.

You're creating a learning environment for them. Just like with the horses. We're creating a learning environment for the dogs. Okay. And yeah, so, so just to wrap up, you know, when Breeze was chasing me with that whip, it wasn't a stunt. It wasn't like I didn't want him to be like a circus horse to me was more like a celebration of our partnership. Right. It was like a visible metaphor for how far we've come and how much we enjoyed learning with each other and truly partnering with each other.

And it's a reminder that when you help your horse learn, you know, amazing things are possible and you can have so much fun and it just brings up this wellspring of joy. It's just really, really just, just very cool. So I encourage you to play around with this and, and, and even before you do that, maybe just stop and pause and think about it for a moment. Think about, how does your horse or dog experience learning with you?

Is it safe? Do they have a voice in it? You know, do they have a choice in what you're doing? Is it fun for both of you? Are you smiling when you're doing it? Are you laughing? You know, it's, you know, think about that. Think about that. Think about the amount of joy you both experience. Of course, you'll have to, like, imagine what your horse has experienced. But if you know your horse well, you know when they're happy or not.

One of the most striking things I have to say was before Breeze and I partnered up, before I adopted him, you know, I knew him before I adopted him, and he had this terrible reputation of being belligerent and stubborn. People had a really, really hard time with him. And after we partnered and I started listening to him, I cannot tell you how many times people would stop me and say, how do you get your horse to be so enthusiastic?

Now I thought that was funny because they'd use the word get, like, as if I him be enthusiastic. The truth is, I didn't make him do anything right. We had a partnership. I appreciated him. I loved him. We're going to start crying now as I'm talking about Breeze, but because, you know, I miss him every day. But we just, we learned how to learn together and we had fun doing it and I wish the same for you.

So please feel free to email Email me at any time. Maryarydebono.com Tell me what you love doing with your horse, what you feel your horse loves doing with you, and how you know, maybe there's a particular issue that can be improved by learning de Bono moves and being able to have more fun and mobility with your horse. So thank you so much for listening. I so appreciate you and I look forward to talking to you again soon.

Bye for now.