For Overexcited Horses

Many people believe that horses who are over excited, pushy, intense, or even aggressive about food should not be trained with food. When actually, food can be the best solution! Usually these issues come about because the horse feels insecurity about their resources. So addressing this should be our top priority.

We can do this by first addressing their lifestyle. They should have 24/7 access to forage and never have to fight for resources. We can and should provide regular enrichment which provide a variety of foods as well, including the food we use in training. This takes the pressure off our training as being the "one and only" good thing in their life.

We want to ensure our horse feels comfortable when and where we train and they have already eatten and are nice and relaxed when we begin our training. Using protected contact can be a useful tool, we don't want to add punishment into the mix, which would add stress/anxiety. So, you can both feel more safe if you have some sort of barrier between you.

When you train use food that has longer chew time and is of lower value, something closer to their usual food, and have another source of free food available while you train. Chopped hay, hay pellets, soaked cubes all make good options depending on your horse. Feed large quantities of low value food, and work with a fairly high rate of reinforcement. This means you need to break your criteria down into small enough steps you can maintain a higher training speed.

Finally, when training always maintain clean food delivery practices- click when they do the correct behavior, then grab the food, keep your hand closed until you stretch your arm well away from your body to feed away from you, into their space. Train a few safe behaviors, particularly a safe default behavior for them to return to when they don't know what else to do. Standing Facing Forward works well for this (like a dog's sit/stay). As well as head down and back up or touching a target. So they have a safe and appropriate behavior to go to if they are confused or frustrated.