How do you keep a heel horse from stopping early?

A heel horse that stops before the heeler asks — anticipating the stop rather than waiting for the cue — creates one of the most frustrating problems in team roping because the early stop happens at the exact moment the heeler needs to be delivering, and the sudden deceleration disrupts the loop, the timing, and the angle simultaneously. Early stopping is a training problem created by repetition: the horse has made enough runs that it knows when the stop is coming and executes it on its own schedule rather than the rider's. The fix requires breaking the predictive pattern the horse has built. Vary the point in every run where the stop is asked — sometimes ask early, sometimes continue well past the normal stop point before asking, sometimes follow the steer without stopping at all. The horse that cannot predict when the stop will come learns to wait for the cue rather than anticipating it. On runs where the horse stops early, do not accept the stop: apply leg immediately and drive the horse forward past the point where it stopped, continuing the run to a different stop location. The horse must learn that stopping without being asked produces more work rather than the rest it was seeking. The early stop almost always gets worse the longer it is tolerated because each successful early stop reinforces the behavior — the horse stopped when it wanted to and nothing required it to continue. One early stop corrected immediately and consistently is far easier to address than a confirmed habit of six months. Monitoring for the early stop in practice before it becomes established in competition is the most effective prevention.