What is the best way to introduce a new horse to a herd? Horse in question is a yearling filly. Herd is 3 other yearling fillies and a yearling gelding. There seem to be a few strong/alpha mare personalities in the herd, my horse being one of them.
Asking because the first introduction did not go well and resulted in an injury! I want to make sure we are setting her up to success when she is ready to go back out with the herd.
What is the turn out situation? Are there enough shelters and feeders for each horse or do they have to share?
I try to put new horses in an isolation pen for 2-3 weeks in sight of their eventual herd, so they get relaxed about the routine and general area. If you can, you might want to let her get used to one of her new paddock mates but moving them in with her (she will feel more confident in her current pen). Ideally, it is nice if the new horse can investigate their new space without the other horses at first, but that isn’t always possible.
I usually make sure everyone has food far enough away when I add the new horse so they may be distracted and not crowd the gate at least.
Adding new horses to a herd is always tense!
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One thing I did before I introduced a horse to a new pasture/herd is to lead the horse ALL around the fence line, telling the horse that this was as far as the horse could go.
I don’t know if it did any good but I often ended up having to board in fields with barb wire fencing or a barb wire top wire and I just wanted the horse to be aware of where that nasty barb wire existed in their pasture. I was fortunate, my horses did not end up trying to barge through the barb wire fence that they knew was there. But I did this with EVERY type of fence, if the horse knows the geography of the field there is less chance of a panicked collision with a fence.
Of course my horse ended up with the normal introductory skin abrasions and bite marks and mildly strained muscles (from I have to get away from this horse NOW!)
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Put them in adjacent fields/paddocks with a safe fence in between. They will kick it and stick their legs through it (but you have babies so you already know this 
). Once they’re ignoring each other (days? weeks? always depends), or if one of the existing herd takes a liking to the new one, you can put one of the less dramatic horses out with the new one. Let them become very good friends (weeks? a month?), then slowly introduce the others over a couple of weeks. The whole process could take 3-4 months depending on how conservative you are. You can always just chuck them all out together too - they’ll figure it out and it just depends on how assertive they are as to how many kick marks you get.
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I am sure you have them all together now but what I have always done is have a stall with attached paddock to put the new arrival in. It is accessible to my current horses so they can get to know each other over the paddock fence( tall horse round pen panels).
After a few days when all is calm I let the new horse out with the alpha and later add my remaining horse and have never had any issues.
I usually put the new arrival back into their stall/ pen area at night for a while just so they can eat undisturbed until they are fully a part of the herd.
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