Mind Your Manners
April 14, 2009
Your actions may encourage your horse’s food aggressive behavior.
Stop your horse's aggressive behavior and gain better horsemanship skills at QuarterFest.
By AQHA Professional Horsewoman Julie Goodnight
Is your horse cranky at feed time? Does he pin his ears, bare his teeth and stomp his feet? Or worse, does he grab the hay out of your arms and shove you aside?
If your horse has bad manners at feed time, he might be displaying aggressive and dominant behavior because he thinks his actions are making you feed him, says AQHA Professional Horsewoman Julie Goodnight of Salida, Colorado. While this kind of behavior can be dangerous, it can also erode your authority with the horse and make him difficult to handle in other situations.
Horses establish dominance in the herd, in part, by controlling the feed. The dominant horse can take away the feed of a more subordinate horse. If your horse comes to believe his antics are making you surrender the feed to him, in his mind, that means he’s dominant, Julie says.
Dominance issues can also rear their ugly head when you go to load your horse in a trailer. Follow the tips in AQHA’s Horse Trailer Loading Tips FREE report to eliminate the headaches associated with trailering an unwilling loader.
“If your horse has bad feed-time manners, take a training flag with you and wave it at him. Once he backs up and looks at you with his ears forward, throw him the feed and walk away,” she says.
Horses develop this kind of bad behavior from anxiety over their feed and because they have been inadvertently rewarded for bad behavior, she explains.
In the wild, horses eat small amounts all day long, constantly roaming to find suitable forage. In domestication, we have confined horses and generally feed them in two rations of very concentrated feed, leaving them to go for long periods without eating. For this reason, horses can have a lot of anxiety around feed time.
“In acting out his anxiety, your horse one day arbitrarily displayed some emotional behavior, like pinning his ears or stomping his feet,” Julie says. “Then someone came along and fed him, and he made an association between his bad behavior and getting fed. So the next day, he tried it again, and lo and behold, he got fed again!
It’s easy to accidentally reinforce unwanted behaviors in your horse. Look to trusty AQHA professionals to help keep you on the right track. Use AQHA’s Horse Trailer Loading Tips FREE report to load your horse and trailer him to QuarterFest in Murfreesboro, Tennessee May 1-3. You can participate in great clinics under the guidance of Julie Goodnight herself!
“Remember, he doesn’t understand the human world and your plans and routine. He not only believes his antics are causing you to feed him, but he also thinks he’s taking the food away from you, and in his world, that makes him dominant.
“Whatever your horse is doing at the moment you release him (or reward him) is what you are training him to do. That’s why timing is such a critical part of horse training. If you just take a few moments to back the horse up and wait for him to display respectful behavior before giving him the feed, his bad manners will disappear, and he will become more respectful of you as his leader.”
More ‘Good nights’ Available at AQHA’s QuarterFest
If you like what you read, you’re going to love what you can see at QuarterFest: a three-day celebration of America’s Horse May 1-3 in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
Julie Goodnight is just one of many top-notch clinicians coming to share their training techniques with you. Julie will be giving clinics on the fundamentals of natural riding, advanced horsemanship and improving your horse under saddle. Plus, she will give a demo on common equitation challenges and their solutions. Get your ticket today and plan to be at QuarterFest, either with your horse or your notebook.
Cap it all off with exciting entertainment for the whole family at the QuarterFest Extravaganza on Friday and Saturday night!
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April 14th, 2009 at 12:55 pm
Sometimes even horses fed as a group in a pasture will eat quickly and chase others from their rations if not fed far eough from each other. They should be monitored when doing this.
April 23rd, 2009 at 2:12 pm
My AQHA 7 year old mare is very well trained – we do the ranch versatility shows and have done quite well – problem?? She kicks the heck out of the horse trailer. The entire time she is in there
she kicks. I have to keep a thick rubber pad on the wall behind her. I am so scared she will break or injure her leg. What can I do??
April 23rd, 2009 at 4:40 pm
For trailer kickers (and stall kickers) the only reasonable solution is the Vice Breaker electric shock collar. It is perfect for this application. Good luck!
April 26th, 2009 at 11:31 pm
Our new mare had this type of feeding behavior. I did what you say in the article (this was before I read your article) I always have them back up and wait. My other horse Jojo, now backs up as soon as she sees me bringing the hay.