I saw this question come up on a popular horse forum and most replies were describing different ways to punish the horse and how it is a completely unacceptable and dangerous behaviour that cannot be tolerated. How often do we completely miss the cause and go straight to trying to get rid of the symptom? A horse that is biting is not okay and we need to figure out why if we want to actually solve the issue instead of just shutting the horse up.
Now I am not saying you should stand there and let your horse bite you, however it is a communication and it is never as simple as “he’s biting to dominate you and you need to show him who’s boss”. We need to figure out what the cause is so we can help the horse to not feel the need to bite anymore.
Firstly what sort of biting is it? A frustrated horse quickly nipping at you when you’re leading them is very different to a horse lunging at you with their teeth bared.
Truly aggressive horses are very rare and will not be cured by you whacking them when they bite. If a horse is at a point where they are genuinely lunging at people, this is extremely dangerous and needs to be assessed by a qualified clinical animal behaviourist alongside a vet. This is usually chronic pain, trauma or a neurological issue and will not be solved by training alone.
There are two kinds of biting behaviour I come across most commonly. The first one is situation-related, usually when being rugged, saddled, groomed, mounted etc. This is a really clear communication from the horse that they are uncomfortable with what you are doing and is usually a pain/discomfort issue. I don’t care how many checks the horse has supposedly had I am always going to keep looking for pain in these scenarios as horses do not lie. If we have ruled out the obvious I would see if we can change the horse’s associations with these tasks using positive reinforcement training.
The second type of behaviour I see is the sort of nibbly/nippy/biting the lead rope type frustration behaviours. This is again a stress/anxiety response and a horse trying to communicate they aren’t feeling okay. If it is not pain-related this behaviour tends to dissipate with quiet, low-key training, stressing the horse as little as possible, creating clear boundaries and asking easy questions.
In none of these scenarios would I advise punishing the horse by slapping, hitting or shouting at them. I will absolutely defend myself, that mostly looks like quietly pushing their face away with my hand on their headcollar, occasionally it will look a shake of the rope and it stops as soon as the horse moves their head away. There is no backing the horse up as punishment or making them move their feet. I just want them to know “yes I heard you but you cannot take it out on me”, rather than “Don’t you dare!”.
A horse that is biting is already a stressed horse, and a horse that is smacked or chased for biting, will often still bite and then panic because they think they’re going to be smacked, causing more stress and the cycle repeats. The other thing that can happen when we punish the horse, is we stop the biting behaviour, but the horse is still in pain/discomfort but too scared to show it as he knows he’ll be punished for it.
Horses that are feeling okay and relaxed do not bite, they are not aggressive creatures. It is also worth noting that hand feeding does not cause aggression unless you reinforce aggressive behaviour by rewarding the horse when they bite you. I have dealt with several fear-based aggression cases by using food in training with great success.
If you take anything away from this please understand that biting is not the behaviour of a happy horse, it is not a quirky personality trait or just a sassy mare and it is not something we should be ignoring. Horses communicate with us so often and so clearly and we as an industry have become numb to it, we just need to open our eyes and listen instead of trying to fix what we perceive to be the problem. 🐴
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