22nd January, 2012 Hand feeding

On Friday I went to see a lovely 18 month old ID x TB filly, just ready to start her education, albeit very slowly. She backs up beautifully, turns when asked whether using body language or a gentle pressure at her hindquarters. Very amenable and very trainable. However, she has been hand fed with treats all her life and once you are at her front end, she won't leave you alone or give you any space and, when I asked her to, with some very gentle body language (not touching her at all) she got cross.This set me thinking about the significance of food in training.

When a horse is hand fed liberally where there is no barrier, they can literally back you into a corner with their demands - a bit like the gaping mouth of a baby bird but in this case it keeps coming forward. Refusal often offends and yet if you give in only after they have pestered for a while, you teach them stamina instead. Horses know that food grows and they have no reason to believe that it doesn't grow on you (especially where pockets smell of heaven) - they always know there will be more eventually and what better than a human vending machine that they can nudge, shake and kick to make it release it's riches. When they are young, they do the same to their mother's udder in order to get her to release the milk and they are non too subtle about it. It's a mistake to believe that such attention is affection - it's a horse demanding to be fed, and if you give in, it works - job done as far as the horse is concerned. There is no moral angle to a horse.

Bringing a horse into you like this, may also make later training very difficult. Too much carrot may lead to too much stick - especially if you go to a trainer that knows of no other way to motivate a horse than a whip. Food tells a horse to stay close to you and to keep his head to you.  Eventually you will need to ask him to go away at all paces on the end of a long rein. You'll need him to accept direction from the saddle too. Horses that have been hand fed find this hard to accept - it teaches them to be sticky.

 Monty Roberts is  absolutely adamant about hand feeding, he says that the horse should not associate food with the human body. He argues that horses do not reward each other with food. I actually agree completely with that save for the ultra-disciplined use of food as part of a reward system for training. When you look at horses in the field, the one at the top of the hierarchy will move all of the others off their pile of hay in turn, not because the hay is any better or there aren't enough piles, but because she can (and it's usually a she!). The others down the line then move the next one off their hay. It's a pretty strict hierarchy with some weird exceptions for foals and occasionally for a best friend. It's a funny old message then that we are giving a horse when we give up 'our' food to him. With food aggressive horses, Monty advocates feeding the place, not the horse so that this situation doesn't arise even with a bucket.

If I was a yard owner, I would make a rule that no-one is to hand feed a horse that doesn't belong to them. Feeding horses over stable doors definitely teaches them to lunge for food and to bite; not just because of the food itself but because of the inconsistency they meet with different people's attitudes to their begging behaviour. One person will feed straight away, another might tease, another might walk just out of a reach and there's always the one that will hit. Then you have a vending machine with the unpredictability of Arkwright's till.


It's well known now that I will use a bit of clicker training, food training with horses in some cases and sometimes only in certain circumstances with a given horse. The disciplines with that include working with a barrier in place at first while you set up the association and assess your horse's attitude to food; keeping the food in a bum bag that you only ever where while clicker training is being utilised and food is available as a reward and similarly only having the target around when clicker training is available; establishing small steps which the horse understands - shaping the behaviour -  rather than going the whole hog in one go; not creating too great a conflict between what the horse wants, the food and what it doesn't, for example, a headcollar.

A horse may forfeit his right to clicker training if he is too avid or food aggressive but it's often (always?) the handler's fault if that happens. Your timing has to be immaculate, you have to be ultra consistent and thinking, thinking, thinking, all the time that you are working with it - utterly logical. There are some horses where you can get away with being wishy-washy - take Jack for instance, but that is because he was so frightened of people in the first place that he is careful around them. A horse that has lost his own language and is completely 'in your face' can become overly demanding and intimidating and it is all too easy to reinforce that by giving food if he offers a given behaviour. Clicker training has to be on your terms - always.

Email received 26.1.12: "You'll be pleased to know that I have stopped hand feeding S altogether and she doesn't bug me for food at all any more. Result!"