FALCON CREEK FARM NEWSLETTER
(Oct/Nov/Dec
2004)
SHOULD
YOU HAND-FEED TREATS TO YOUR HORSE?
Well, the obvious answer is NO - But why
not? I believe there are two
perspectives to this question. One is from
the human perspective and the other is from the horses’ perspective. Let’s look at both of them.
Think about some of the reasons horse
owners give their horses treats by hand.
For one thing, it makes us feel good; knowing that we are doing
something for our horse that he really likes and even makes him happy. After all, we all want our horses to be
happy, right? Feeding a treat is our way
of giving something back to our horse, maybe because he gave us a good ride
that day and was well behaved, or maybe because he is just so darn cute, or
just because he looked at you in that “don’t you love me?” or “don’t you have
something for me?” way. Giving treats is
our way of letting the horse know that we love him, or
are rewarding him for something. It also
makes us feel god doing it, perhaps in hopes of receiving unconditional love
back from him. Ok, there’s nothing wrong
with wanting to give a treat to your horse and to make him happy, and can even
make them happy to see us. The problem
with hand-feeding treats is that your intentions and what you want to glean
from your horse by doing it, is a one-way street. The horse isn’t always aware of your intended
message when he gets them, especially if your timing is off. All he knows is that somehow, he got you to
give up your food and he is going to try and figure out just how he did that
through a myriad of creative (and often destructive) behaviors.
Let’s examine this from the horses’ point of view.
Pretend you are a kid (isn’t that what a
horse is – a big kid??). It’s after
dinner and you are sitting down on the floor watching TV. Your mom comes in and gives you a really nice
treat, like a cookie. She doesn’t
normally do this and she doesn’t tell you why she is doing it. You may look at her and think, “What was that
for?” Then, pretend she never
verbalizes to you why she gave you the cookie.
She just smiles, pats you on the head and walks off. Now, say she does this every night for a
week. After awhile, you’d start
expecting a cookie every night, right?
And, if you didn’t get a cookie one night, you might start getting a
little anxious and start to wonder why mom hasn’t brought you one. You might call out to her, ask her for it, or
even go look for her. If any of those
efforts fail, you may begin to get irritated that you haven’t had your cookie
and you may start getting cranky and demanding.
Then, pretend you finally find her and yell “Where’s my cookie?”. If she says “Oh,
Ok” and gives you one, what did you just learn?
You learned that all you have to do is go hunt mom down and demand the
cookie and she’ll give you one. But what
was mom really rewarding you for by giving you one in the first place? She never told you, but lets
say she did so because you did really well in school that week and got good
grades on your homework. Did you ever
make that connection between the cookie and school? No, it wasn’t obvious. But she felt good rewarding you for it and
was so proud of you, even though you didn’t know why you were getting a
treat. All you learned was that you got
a cookie every night and if it didn’t come, a little yelling and foot-stomping
produced one. See where all this is
going?……….
Just to give a horse a treat out of the
blue, especially with no particular desired behavior immediately preceding it,
is almost like telling your horse to figure out what he did to get you, to give
it to him. Horses are very food-oriented
(a strong survival instinct) and the more one horse can get another horses’
food, the more dominant over the other horse he will be, thus the more food he
will get to ensure his survival. Horses
use this same logic on us humans. If a
horse can get you to give up food (treats), he will feel somewhat dominant and
successful over you and may then become more aggressive in trying to bully more
out of you. This is why some horses get mean or nasty when they are given
treats and why some horses resort to all kinds of behaviors (pawing, head,
tossing, pacing, dancing around, pulling) to convince you that he is expecting more. To do so, only rewards the bad behavior. It doesn’t reward the nice ride he gave you
an hour earlier, it doesn’t let him know that he is cute and it doesn’t tell
him that you love him – like we wish it would.
If he gave you a good ride, then pat him on the neck before you get off
or right after he does a particular move correctly. There are some things you just can’t reward a
horse for. You can’t reward him for
being cute or tell him you love him through food. A horse just doesn’t receive those messages
the way we want him to. If you must
treat your horse, put it in his feed bucket so he doesn’t associate the treat
with you.
There is only one particular instance
where I will hand feed treats and that is when I am going out into the pasture
to catch my horse. In this case, it
rewards a certain behavior. When I call
my horse, she comes to me, all the time, because she knows I will have
something for her. Too many times,
people teach their horses to run away from them because the horse knows when they
get caught; they are going to get ridden.
So, why should the horse come in if he’s going to have to work? There needs to be something in it for him, an
incentive. When I go out to catch my
horse, I give her ONE treat (usually an alfalfa cube) when she comes to me and
while I am haltering her, and then I follow that up by putting her in her stall
for just a minute for a bite of hay.
Then I proceed with my riding plans.
So, from the time I catch her to the time I saddle her up, too much time
has gone by for her to make any association between being caught, and being
ridden – so she never thinks she is going to get ridden when I ask her to come
in. The only association she makes
(which is very immediate) is that she gets goodies when she comes to me. Doing this with her ONLY in this situation has
never resulted in any bad behaviors. I
have tried this with other horses and it seems to work out very well. The reason this method doesn’t produce bad
behaviors is because it is so situation-specific (again, refer back to the
cookie scenario). The
only way for her to get treats, is to keep coming to me, which is exactly what
I want her to do.
Granted, there are always exceptions to
the rule. There are some horses that can
be hand fed treats and do not get nasty or pushy about it or develop bad habits
from it. These horses are far and few
between. If you have one such as that,
by all means, continue to give him treats.
But, you don’t ever want to START hand feeding them treats to find out
if your horse will be good or bad about it.
Most likely, the outcome will not be positive and then you will have
more behavioral problems to fix.
Happy Riding!!!
Comments and feedback are always welcome!
Leslie Laing @
Falcon Creek Farm
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