Stress at feed times

I travel around to a lot of different yards and being around at feed time can be chaotic, stressful and very loud. Horses kicking the door, lunging at each other through the bars, people screaming at the horses for expressing their frustration, which in turn adds to their stress. I’m not a horse nor am I even involved and it makes me feel edgy.

When we are keeping horses in an environment where they are anticipating high value feed, they are going to find that stressful and frustrating, but there are ways we can make things better through management and potentially a little training.

Instead of just being irritated by behaviour we find inconvenient, we need to think about why it is happening. Resource guarding is a perfectly justified response for a horse who is feeling anxious around food, as is kicking the door, trying to barge etc. I would not try to fix this behaviour through punishment for several reasons. Firstly the behaviour is an emotional response, if you shut down the behaviour by punishing the horse, they still feel that emotion, you’ve just stopped them expressing it which will cause even more anxiety. Secondly if you use punishment, your horse is going to develop negative associations with you. Your presence will cause negative emotions.

What we actually want to do is reduce stress at feeding times so the horse doesn’t feel frustrated in the first place. This is going to look different depending on your individual circumstances.

🐴 Are they hungry? Horses are trickle feeders. If your horse is running out of food overnight, he is going to be stressed, that’s his genetic make-up. If your horse needs to be on rationed forage you can find different slow feeding options to make sure he doesn’t run out before morning.

🐴 Are they chronically stressed in their living environment? We need to make sure the horse is getting adequate turnout and socialisation, doesn’t have any underlying pain issues and isn’t finding their training unpleasant and stressful. A chronically stressed horse will behave like a chronically stressed horse.

🐴 Are they comfortable in their stable? Having bars between stables so they can see other horses is great, unless they feel threatened by the horse next to them. Sometimes boarding up maybe half of the bars can help horses feel less anxious about other horses being close while they’re eating. Sometimes we need to play around and choose more appropriate neighbours. Another thing to note is whether the horse feels safe enough to lie down and sleep in there. Having a window at the back of the stable can seem nice to us, but for some horses it can make them feel that they need to be hyper-vigilant and “check both sides” all of the time.

🐴 Is their diet appropriate? If you’re feeding your horse extremely high-value sugary feed maybe think about feeding something more fibre-based and natural and see if their intense behaviour at feed times calms down.

If we’d like to train our horses to step back as we come in with the feed, waiting until they are hungry and stressed is not the time to do it. Start after they’ve had their feed, ask them to back up as you enter the stable then reward them with a handful of feed, then do it with a bucket in your hand and eventually you can translate it to feed time now you’ve established the behaviour.

If you can’t change any management for whatever reason, I would genuinely just throw the feed over the door as quickly as you can and reduce their stress instead of having unrealistic expectations of a horse that is actually displaying completely justifiable behaviour.

I have recently collaborated with my good friend Kelly from Horse Weighbridge North East to help Stepney Bank Stables with their feeding time stress. They were struggling to dish the feeds out fast enough and really wanted to create a better system for the horse’s sake. A lot of these horses are on a weight-management diet so giving completely ad-lib forage isn’t an option. We suggested changing to slow feeder haynets so the horses didn’t run out of hay overnight. We then suggested filling a wheelbarrow with loose hay and just throwing piles of hay over each door in the mornings, much quicker than dishing out hard feeds and not as high-value. This then gives them time to give out the bucket feeds without all of the stress and the horses will stop anticipating so much.