How is your horse at feeding time?  Does your horse respect you when there is food around?  If your horse has his head in his hay when you open his stall door, does he forget about the hay and come to you in a pleasant manner?  The combination of horse and food can cause a great deal of undesirable behavior towards his owner.  This is an area that I see people avoid.  They just don’t go there.  I know horses can give looks that are pretty scary so it is easy for me to see why people avoid the situation.

When I start with a new horse…I don’t mind starting my introduction when the horse is in his stall while he is eating…if his head remains in his hay and he doesn’t even think about acknowledging my presence and/or the horse displays undesirable behavior…he and I start at that point.  This gives me a good place to start.  I can see how little or how much it might take on my behalf to ask the horse to take his nose out of his hay and acknowledge my presence without the undesirable behavior.  This can tell me a great deal about the horse before even leaving his stall.

I would like to share an email from one of my newer students that she sent me around 7:30 this evening.  I worked with her horse earlier around 5:00 for about an hour.  Just to make it clear…her horse is having blood drawn in the morning and was not to have any grain or hay after 10:00 this evening.  She asked me if her horse had been fed at the normal dinner time and I said I didn’t know and that she would have to ask Sally.  This is her email…

Hi Vicki,
I just thought I would share some information.  I just talked with Sally and no Sassie did not receive her grain or hay tonight.  In the past, Sassie would be difficult to handle without her feeding. She would be very belligerent about the other horses eating and extremely reactive to handle.  With this information I can state her performance tonight was incredible.  Wow is all I can say :)

This email is want prompted me to write about horses and their, sometimes, undesirable behavior with the situation.  My point to this blog is that it is possible to change your horse’s thoughts away from his food and towards you with a positive frame of mind.  Some horses might be a little harder than others to change their thought and depending on how long the unwanted behavior has been allowed to go on.  This is another area that I see horses that have trained their owner to accept this unwanted behavior…but it doesn’t have to be that way.