Q: I work with Ride To Walk, a therapeutic riding program serving neurologically disabled children. I am contacting you to see if you would be interested in finding some way to help us with solving problems for our therapy horses.

We are having a problem with a few of our therapy horses being very mouthy. When they are in session and have a child on their back they try and nip at their leaders. We have a hard time correcting it because of the child. We have tried spraying them with water when they nip, giving them a long lead, giving them a short lead, and overstimulating their mouth. Our leaders have horse experience, but they vary from day to day and it is hard to keep consistency.

The two horses that are the worst are Arabian crosses, and I suspect that what we do is not enough stimulation for this breed of horse. However, their fast gait is great for some of our children, so I would hate to not have them here or have to avoid getting Arabians in the future.

We ride them regularly outside of the program on our short trail and in the arena. All of our riders are not trainers, but they are under my supervision, and I try to keep the horses and riders going in the right direction. We do lots of ground work in the round pen as well. It is hard to work because most of our horses are older or have a minor lameness issue