Managing Food Aggression

A question from the audience:

Help! I am sure I "have tried everything!

My two year old hanoverian gelding on so well in his training and I feel our relationship is coming on great- except at feed time! He chases humans off his bucket or away from the haynet when we try to hang it! He bites in this situation too as well as pinning his ears and glaring. His mother was quite protective of food and he was bottle-fed for the first 48 hours of his life. He is a dream to do everything else with but this is a real tricky time of the day that everyone dreads!

Thank you for sending through your question about food aggression!

When I am feeding I like my horses to be walking away from me and staying out of kick range with polite manners. There's a few things that need to come together for this to work but I think establishing expectations at feed time is a great place to work on relationship dynamics and showing up as a leader worth following.

All escalated behaviours are escalate emotions - and food can be something a lot of horses get excited about - so it is a great place for working on emotional self regulation. How you choose to set up the feed out routine as a training session is completely up to what works for you and your horse and your horses personality type.

Cue training:

We want a cue that is going to ask our horses "away from"

Guide the behaviour - how are you going to describe to your horse you want him away from you.

Mark the behaviour - what do you use to let your horse know that they've done what you want. We say 'yes' if they have done what we want and we want them to continue doing it and 'good' when they have done what we want and can expect a reward for it whether it be a pat, a break, a treat or getting access to their dinner.

Reinforce the behaviour - what is going to motivate them to do it again? So in this instance being fed will be the big reinforcer.

The hard part of this training around food is the "minding the manners" and "patience", because they have to wait for us to set their feed up. This is where the emotional escalation happens or the food aggression.

Instead of having patience they escalate on their excitement for food which can lead to aggressive behaviours to get access to the food so we need to be able to ask our horses for an emotional reset, what does your relaxation cues look like? And mind your manners, what does your "stop behaviour" cue look like?

There are lots of different ways to get to this point and it really depends on what you are comfortable with and what works best with asking your horse to organise their emotions. With Fitty who was food aggressive, I would stand on the other side of the fence and ask him my "away from" cue and if he didn't start walking away from me I would turn away back to the house and put the feed away and try again in another 15 minutes. This gave Fitty space to work through his impatience without having to worry about an argument and he could learn how to organise his emotions which has really paid off in all our other work together. However, I had the luxury of having him in the backyard and the time to go down to the paddock every 15 minutes until he was walking away from me when I entered the paddock. Now all I have to is click and he starts walking away from me and he keeps walking away until I put his feed down and call him back over. So whatever this process might look like for you.

This most important part of any training is the self reflection. So that when you finish your training session with your horse you can walk away and figure out what worked well, what didn't, where did the communication break down, how can you be clearer, how can you change the way that you asked to be less confrontational, etc. This is the part that reminds us we are the best person for our horse and empowers us to show up for our horse as we want to to be leaders worth following.

I hope that helps!! We don't do one size fits all because it really doesn't so I don't like saying do this, than this, than this - at least until I get to know you and the horse and we can trouble shoot together. So for example, I say try and this and come back and tell me how it went and then we can decide to stick at it, tweak or change altogether. So if you want more support like this you can check out our online program Holistic Horse Handling

Otherwise, hopefully, you've got enough information here to get you going and problem solving.

Are you in our free stronger bond community? A lot of our students are in there as well and will also give you tips on what has worked for them. In the meantime, I think the thing is just the try ideas andbe open and flexible to try different things until you figure out what is going to work for you and your horse.