Hi all,
I have a new horse that I purchased about 3 months ago. He is an 8 year old TB gelding, and a generally even-tempered guy. However, I board at a very busy barn, and whenever horses walk by his stall, he pins his ears and aggressively tries to bite/lunge at them. Is this a territorial issue? What steps can I take to rectify this behavior? I don’t want any people or horses to get injured as a result.
Thanks for your help!
Keep the bars on his stall shut during high traffic times.
It is a territorial and dominance thing. You can keep him tied or in hand while you work with him but there is nothing you can do to stop horses from displaying instinctual behaviour when you aren’t there.
Lots of turnout would probably help.
Is it only when he has food? He might be telling the other horses not to steal his food.
If there is a quieter spot in the barn, I would move him there, and keep his door shut.
Thanks! We are in the process of moving him to a lower traffic area, so hopefully that helps. Just wasn’t sure if there was any training I could do on top of that. It does seem to be when he has food in his stall, so probably guarding his food.
I’m not sure how the stalls are designed but sometimes giving the horse a ‘curtain’ On the side the food is on helps a lot. It gives them more privacy and they don’t feel like everyone is coming to steal from them.
A fellow boarder had to do this for her mare. She put up a piece of wood, or some sort of solid over the bars so she has her own enclosed corner where her food is. She can still be a bit fussy, but it definitely helped a lot.
I have a mare who does this. It’s hard for her in a boarding stable.
Moving your gelding somewhere quieter, like an end stall, and feeding him with his head away from other horses and traffic can help.
But it might also help the “politics” of the situation to help your barn mates (and even your BO?) understand. I try to explain to folks that the problem is that we have put a flight animal in a cage. We took away their ability to leave when they felt threatened, and we made getting fed a big, infrequent event, where the whole herd is riled up to compete for the scarce resource. So what do they have left to do with that worry about their self-preservation? Their only option left is “a good defense is a good offense,” so they do that because they think they have to.
People get pissy when a horse won’t just roll with the program, no matter how unnatural or hard for them it is. I feel sorry for them, so I try to stick up for these misunderstood horses.
That said, I would not tolerate the horse pinning his ears at me in the stall, or anything but polite behavior. My own mare turns to face me with her ears up when I open the door. I don’t think this was always her demeanor, 100% of the time, but she has been taught. All of that “defense/offense” behavior must evaporate when a human being is in the mix, whether that’s in-hand or when someone goes in to feed the horse (I don’t let my mare pin her ears at me if I’m carrying her grain to her, either).
Teaching them to be pleasant (and the “relaxed” will follow) actually helps them feel more secure when they are with you. That’s valuable for their training and their ability to just get along in this world.
Good luck!
My horse had stall issues when I first got him. The stalls had gates with yokes for doors and he would lunge at passing horses. He also was unsettled in his stall and would sometime kick the stall walls. What helped him was putting a sliding door back on a stall. We also used a stall that was in a less busy area and had less reactive neighbors. He is totally settled and happy this way. We call his stall his “Man Cave”.
I mean I can think of some applied behavior analysis based strategies you could use to try to change the behavior but the issue is you won’t be present EVERY time another horse is walked by. It would probably work better in a home barn. It’s difficult to try to train a new behavior/decrease an unwanted one when the behavior is happening when you aren’t there to run the intervention.
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