Food aggression

Food aggression is almost always rooted in anxiety. Just for clarity I’m talking about horses who are aggressive towards people being around them while they are eating their feed/hay in this post.

It is often framed as a dangerous lack of respect and an effort from the horse to dominate us. People try to resolve it by making the horse move their feet and get out of their space through any means necessary to teach them this supposed “respect”. But once we understand that dominance theory has been disproven and these kinds of behaviours are much more complex, we will hopefully want to approach them differently.

While I absolutely agree that a horse displaying food aggression can be dangerous, there are things we can do to stay safe that don’t involve making our horse feel even worse.

First things first, we need to be safe right now. We need to create the least conflict around food possible. The best way to do this is to have the feed already in the stable before you put the horse in, then leave them alone to eat. Standing and holding a feed in front of a horse who already has severe food anxiety and not giving it to them until they back away from you is going to create even more anxiety.

In terms of addressing the issue longer term we would be looking at why the horse is feeling anxious around food. Are they hungry? Do they have gut discomfort? Do they have a history of being heavily restricted? Do they have pain in the body? Do they feel safe in their living environment? Is their diet appropriate? Once we assess these things we can start to implement changes to improve them.

You often find once the horse learns the food isn’t going to run out and nobody is going to stress him out about it, the behaviour around food improves.

So much food anxiety is caused by our modern horse keeping practices of leaving horses for long periods of time with nothing to eat and keeping them in high-stress environments where their basic needs of socialisation, movement and appropriate forage are not being met. Their anxiety will not improve if we do not get them out of these situations. You can chase the horse around and get them to cease coming at you out of fear, but the anxiety will still be there underneath causing your horse distress and damaging their emotional and physical health.

Food anxiety is a symptom of a wider problem. If you are having issues with this please reach out, I guarantee there is more at play here. 🐴