Common Fears About Hand-Feeding Horses

Horse owners (I call them horse trainers) who use food reinforcers are frequently confronted with a lot of misunderstanding about how treats or rewards can be effectively used as reinforcers. Some people don’t realize that you can use treats to your benefit: to help you train your horse.

Common beliefs

I asked my Facebook friends to help me out with some common believes that live in the equine world about treats in training. Thank you all for helping me. I will quote the answers:

1. Hand-feeding creates mugging horses
2. Hand feeding makes them bite.
3. That it instantly makes them fat.
4. Hand feeding horses is bad because it turns them into monsters, they get rude, pushy and bite everyone.
5. That’s bribing and horses do X only for treats but not out of respect towards the person treating them!
6. They get Treat Crazy, and will not be able to think or focus on what they are doing.
7. It will make your horse aggressive pushy and mouthy.
8. Hand-feeding makes them spoiled and they will refuse to eat out of a bucket and you will have to exchange it for a gilded bowl.
9. It makes them nippy, aggressive, pushy, space invading.
10. You can only hand-feed your horse twice.
11. They’ll kill you if you forget your treat bag once upon a time in the future.
12. It’s unnatural (as opposed to using carrot sticks and spurs and what not), since horses don’t feed one another in reward for tasks.
13. It’s super dangerous, for when done incorrectly it turns them into raging killing machines that can never be re-educated.
14.  Only hand-feed grain and hay but not treats because it will send the wrong message to the horse.

Let’s see how we can prevent these objections from happening.
In this blog I gave solutions for objections 1,2,4,7,9, and 13. In this blog I will debunk objection #3.

‘Using Treats In Training Makes Horses Fat’

This can happen, but it is easily preventable:

• You can use the horse’s normal dinner feed in training. You already know they love it! Then of course at dinner time you give less if your horse is prone to become overweight easily.
• Most horses like to work for simple hay cubes or timothy/alfalfa cubes
• You can make your own sugar-free treats which horses really love (at least all horses I trained all love them)
• You can even use handful of hay (in Winter) or grass (in Summer)

Tips

1. Avoid high sugar treats like apples, carrots or store bought horse treats. They all contain lots of sugar.
2. Try out other veggies or low sugar fruits like cucumber or celery
3. Make sure the amount of reinforcers is in balance with the amount of exercise your horse gets.

If you want to learn more about using food to your benefit in training, sign up today for the next course Ultimate Horse Training Formula. One of the 8 modules will be about how to use food reinforcers best, the difference between ‘high value’ and ‘low value’ reinforcers and when to use which. You also learn how to fade out the reinforcer and keep the behaviour!

Stay tuned for my next blog. I will give solutions to objection #6 They get Treat Crazy, and will not be able to think or focus on what they are doing.

Safe the date: Thursday March 7, 2019 and join us!

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Sandra Poppema, B.Sc.

I help horse owners get the results in training they really, really want with joy and easy for both horse and human. I always aim for win-win!

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Myth Monday: Training with Food rewards causes pushy Horses

All positive reinforcement trainers have heard people say: ‘Training horses with food rewards makes them pushy’. Some people even state horses become ‘dangerous‘ instead of pushy. Maybe you have said it yourself before you started using positive reinforcement (+R) to train your horse… Is your horse mugging you? Here’s how you can solve it!

You get what you reinforce

In +R training you use a reward that reinforces the behaviour you want to train. The trainer uses a marker signal to mark the desired behaviour in order to communicate to the horse which behaviour he wants to see more of. Key is the marker signal.

What is ‘mugging’ behaviour?

Mugging or other undesired behaviour around food or treats is just learned behaviour. If you understand how learning works, you see that mugging is caused (reinforced) by the trainer.

Even if it wasn’t a professional trainer, but just a mom who wanted to give her daughters pony a carrot just because….

If the pony was sniffing her pocket or maybe just gave mom a little push with his nose and mom thinks: ‘Oh I forgot I had a treat in my pocket. Here you are, sweet pony. You’re so smart.’

If someone rewards a horse for sniffing pockets, this behaviour is encouraged and reinforced. Therefor the horse will repeat this behaviour. It leaded to a reward.

The same is true for a horse that is pushing you around, in order to get to the food. If he gets rewarded for pushing you around, you have ‘trained’ him to do so. Even if it was unconscious, for the horse it was not. He was the one that paid attention (Read more in my post What to do if your horse is mugging you.)

Teaching ‘polite behaviour’ around food

The same way you can encourage (read: train) a horse to mug or behave pushy, you can encourage him to behave ‘politely’ around food and treats. I put polite between quotation marks because it is not per definition an equine behaviour. It is a trained behaviour. Polite behaviour is one of my key lessons (the keys to success in +R training).

Just like children have to learn not to speak with food in their mouth and other polite behaviours, so must horses learn what behaviours we want to see and consider polite (and save). It’s the trainer’s task to spent time on these.

Mugging is a trainers’ fault

Since mugging is a learned behaviour one can re-train it by reinforcing the opposite behaviour more and ignoring the mugging. Horses are smart and they will learn quickly what behaviours will lead to rewards and what behaviours will not.

If the trainer understands the learning theory and the equine mind, mugging is easily prevented or changed.

Train desired behaviour instead of mugging

Just think about what the opposite behaviours of mugging look like and start reinforcing those more, while ignoring the undesired mugging.

Desired behaviours are:

• The horse looks straight forward or slightly away when you reach into your pocket, instead of moving his nose towards your pocket.
• The horse backs up a step when you are about to hand-feed him, instead of coming towards you to get the food.
• The horse takes the treat gently off of your hand and uses his lips only,  instead of taking it with his teeth.
• The horse stays out of your personal space instead of pushing you with his nose.
• And so on.

So, when people state that using food rewards causes mugging, pushy, dangerous or other unwanted behaviour in horses I know they just don’t understand how learning occurs. That’s OK. They can learn, we just have to reinforce the desired behaviour (or thoughts).

Related post The Dangers of working with Food (rewards).

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Therese Keels commented on Facebook : “It does cause pushy horses! They push you to think faster, use your imagination more. They push you to observe more closely, to pay attention and be present. They push us to be kinder, more considerate and understanding. They push us to be better at being us. Take that kind of pushy any day. :-)”

Thank you, Therese for this wonderful comment! Love it!

Do you struggle with a horse that mugs you for treats or attention?

Do you wish your horse would behave better but you want can use some help?
Maybe your horse:

• Paws for attention when he’s at the grooming place
• Kicks his stall doors
• Always is ‘in your pocket’ (and most often you wish he wasn’t like that)
• Becomes pushy (or nibbles) when you have treats in your pockets
• His mugging behaviours are holding you back from clicker training awesome, amazing or useful and safe behaviors

If you would like to learn where in your training you can improve so that you would get the results you want in clicker training, grap this opportunity to get a free Clicker Training Assessment!

After your assessment you know exactly what to improve and how you can avoid the pitfalls that keeps you stuck. You’ll know your next step and you’ll walk away with valuable insights about your training style.

Sandra Poppema, B.Sc.

I help horse owners get the results in training they really, really want with joy and easy for both horse and human. I always aim for win-win in training in order to enhance the bond between horses and humans!

Join my mailing list to get more positive reinforcement training: HippoLogic’s website.