Horse Eating Objects

Because horses are prey animals, they can be pretty fearful when faced with new or unusual objects in their environment. Since we are always working our horses them to improve their confidence, I brought a large blue exercise ball to the farm this week for Sonny and the other horses to play with but as soon as I took it out of my car, I discovered it was a horse eating object.
Horse eating objects come in all sizes and shapes. My first horse, Max, thought that any large piece of road equipment was a horse eating object. That made sense to me since things like bulldozers are large and noisy and can be pretty intimidating. But the first time he had an abscess and the vet told me to soak his foot in Epson salts twice a day, I discovered that he also thought buckets were horse eating objects. Apparently buckets were innocuous items when hung in stables as containers for food and water but the minute you put one on the floor and asked Max to put his foot in it, a bucket definitely because a horse eating object.
Max was an easy going horse. He never gave the vet any trouble and would stand quietly even when the vet was putting a tube up his nose and then down his throat to deliver medicine directly to his stomach. So I was taken completely by surprise at his reaction to having his foot soaked in a bucket. It took three of us to hold him still enough to get the foot into the water in the bucket and he would not, under any circumstances, put his foot down onto the bottom of the bucket. We tried wider buckets, shallower buckets, buckets made from different materials but it just didn’t matter. He just was not putting his foot down into any horse eating bucket. Needless to say, our attempts to soak his foot were only marginally successful and I learned an important lesson about working with horses as a result. Even the most commonplace item can be become a horse eating object in the mind of your horse, eliciting a sudden, fearful reaction as he tries to escape from its clutches.
This is why we try to expose the horses at the rescue to a variety everyday objects that could be misconstrued as horse eating objects. Consider plastic grocery bags. It is not unusual to see bags on the side of the road or tangled in bushes or trees in the woods, but caught by a breeze, a plastic bag can be a noisy, floating object that could scare any unsuspecting horse. Desensitizing our horses to plastic bags makes them braver and more dependable on trail rides.
Some horses are more naturally fearful than others but my horse Sonny is pretty confident around most common items. The first time I put a plastic bag on the end of my training stick he didn’t worry about it at all. I was able to swing it around his head and rub him all over his body and his only reaction was to push his nose into my pocket looking for a treat. Yet the same bag on the stick caused Meredith’s horse Beau to immediately retreat to the end of his 12 foot lead line snorting loudly.
The key to desensitizing a horse to any unfamiliar or scary object is to use approach and retreat. Allowing the horse to approach the object rather than trying to bring the object to the horse reduces fear and engages the horse’s natural curiosity. A good way to do this is to carry or push the object in front of you while leading the horse. That way the horse is following the scary object rather than being chased by it. Eventually curiosity takes over and the horse will approach it on his own.
So what happened when I took the blue exercise ball out of my car on Friday? I planned to use the ball in the riding ring and thought the easiest way to get it there would be to dribble it down the driveway like a basketball. Every time the ball hit the blacktop it produced a resounding twang. Sonny was still finishing his breakfast in the round pen and he never even raised his head to see what was causing the unusual sound but Beau, who was 100 yards away in the front pasture came immediately to attention at the first bounce and stood riveted at the fence the entire time I dribbled the ball toward the riding ring. The closer I got to him, the more nervous he looked and when I was about 20 yards away, he finally took off running, head high and tail flagged out behind him.
Sonny was predictably more confident. Although he flinched away from the ball when I first held it out to him, he didn’t try to run away from it and before long, I had him picking treats up from the top of the ball and pushing it ahead of him when he walked. While Sonny and I were playing with the ball, it caught the attention of all of the horses in the field adjacent to the riding ring. Pretty soon Sonny and I had an audience as their natural curiosity drew then toward the funny blue object on the other side of the fence. As long as I kept the ball moving away from where they were standing, they were fine but as soon as the ball rolled in their direction, they backed off snorting and throwing their heads up in the air.
After 15 minutes of playing with the ball, Sonny and I moved onto other exercises and the ball rolled off into a corner of the ring where it stayed for the rest of our session. Most of horses quickly lost interest and drifted off to graze, but I could see that Beau was continuing to keep an eye on the ball and whenever it moved slightly in the wind, he would snort and retreat a few steps to maintain his safe distance. Clearly Beau sees the ball as a horse eating object but I am seeing some potential for using the ball to reduce his fear and improve his confidence.