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If your horse gets pushy around treats, start here
If your horse gets pushy around food rewards, it can be really tempting to treat it like a manners problem.
They crowd into your space, grab for the food, swing their head toward your hands, paw, get impatient, or seem completely unable to think about anything except what’s in your pocket.
So naturally, we start trying to fix those behaviors.
We ask them to back up, move their head away, stand still, and wait longer. Stop mugging… Be more polite… And while that is all great, especially when we see considering safety, we can miss something important when we start there.
Before I think about training, I want to know what the horse’s relationship with food looks like throughout the rest of their life.
Do they have appropriate access to forage throughout the day? Are they regularly being pushed away from hay or other resources by herd mates? Do mealtimes create competition or stress? Are there long stretches where their stomach is empty?
I also want to consider whether discomfort could be contributing. Horses dealing with gastrointestinal pain or other health concerns may behave very differently around food, so if something feels unusually intense or has changed suddenly, that’s a good reason to involve your veterinarian and, when appropriate, an equine nutrition professional.
Because if the horse is already arriving at the training session feeling anxious about access to food, we’re going to have a much harder time creating calm behavior by simply asking them to “have better manners.”
Next I look at the food itself.
Are we trying to teach calm, thoughtful behavior while waving the equine equivalent of dessert around?😅
For horses who become highly excited or anxious around food (and really all horses), I lower the value of the reinforcer and use something very plain—hay pellets, chopped forage, or soaked hay pellets rather than highly palatable treats, apples, carrots, or flavored feeds.
I want it to be reinforcing without overwhelming the horse’s ability to think. These food reinforcement types are more than adequate for horses. Trust me, they enjoy dried grass for 18+ hours a day. They don’t need a sweet treat, they need forage.
And then we get into the training itself.
This is where I see another common mistake: waiting for the horse to finally calm down before giving them the food.
The horse gets frustrated and offers all kinds of perfectly reasonable (to them) behaviors. We wait. They try harder. We keep waiting. Eventually they happen to stop long enough or do something random we like, and then we reinforce.
From our perspective, we rewarded calm behavior and “manners”, but from the horse’s perspective there may have been a whole lot of frustration and guessing before they finally stumbled onto the answer. Not only are we unintentionally ALSO reinforcing all of those behaviors we don’t want too, we are also associating frustration with training.
I’d rather set things up so the horse can be successful from the beginning.
One way I do that is through protected contact, using a fence or barrier between us while we establish the early reinforcement pattern. I don’t use the barrier because I’m afraid of the horse or because I think they’re “bad.” I use it because the environment itself provides useful information and gives both of us some structure while the horse is learning.
Then, rather than waiting for perfection, I start reinforcing quickly. The horse receives food while they’re already in an appropriate position. There’s a brief moment where they’re simply eating and not searching, grabbing, or guessing—and I can reinforce again.
Over time, those calm moments become longer. We’re not repeatedly letting the horse become frustrated and then trying to fix it. We’re building the behavior we want from the beginning.
I made a video walking through these four pieces and what I do when I’m working with a horse who becomes pushy or anxious around food:
I believe this is such an important distinction because I don’t want to teach horses that access to food depends on how long they can tolerate frustration without making a mistake. Or even how “creative” they can get with what they are testing out.
I want to create a training setup where calm behavior is easy to find, reinforcement is predictable, and the horse doesn’t have to fight their way through confusion to figure out what works.
And that means looking beyond the behavior in front of us and asking whether the environment, the horse’s physical comfort, the food we’re using, and the way we’re delivering reinforcement are all helping us create the behavior we want.
This is the kind of detail I love exploring inside The Willing Equine Academy. Not just how to stop a behavior we don’t like, but how to understand what may be contributing to it and build something better in its place.
If you enjoy understanding the why behind training, not just following the steps, I’d love to have you join us. ❤️
Stay curious about the why,
Adele
