Breathe… Early and Often!

The value of cultivating this habit can hardly be over stated. It is the easiest most powerful tool that you have to help your animal relax and YOU too!

If you are nervous in a plane or behind the wheel or learning a new sport it is almost inevitable that you will unconsciously hold your breath. This leads to other physical manifestations. Your muscles tighten and you are less able to keep your balance. While this might not crucial if you are learning to play tennis or are a passenger in a plane, or even driving a car holding your breath really gets in the way of your performance when you are handling an animal. It compromises your balance and that in important BUT holding your breath also encourages the animal to hold his breath. When animals hold their breath they hold tension in their bodies as well and after a minute or so they must do something to release it. Often this comes as a rear, kick, spin, or spit. If you do nothing more complicated than take a breath you can prevent these behaviors. Following is a list of instances when you are likely to hold your breath. Knowing this you can train yourself to replace the breath holding behavior with deep breathing.

• When you are just putting the halter over the nose
• Just as you are about to put the needle into the skin
• When the judge walks up to you in the show ring
• When you find yourself behind an animal in a packed catch pen
• Just as you bring the rope over the head when you use the wand and catch rope technique
• Just as you approach the animal with the intention to land on the midline
• of the neck when you use the midline catch
• When you get ready to push medication into the mouth
• When you unbuckle the halter and get ready to let a difficult animal go
• Just as you leave the catch pen teaching an untrained animal to lead
• When posing an animal for photographs
• Putting the ropes on during shearing
• When herding animals through a gate when you think they may not go

You get the picture. You can probably add to the list based on your own experience. Knowing that you have the tendency to hold your breath is more than half of the solution! Writing breathe on your hand when you work or wearing a colorful wrist band that will remind you to breathe are all good strategies to exchange and old habit for a new one.

Learning to breathe when the tendency is to hold the breath takes practice. Practicing yoga or other martial arts such as Tai Chi can help you retrain yourself to breath when you begin to feel tension in your body and this new habit will show itself when the same thing happens when you are working with animals.