Problem Horse | Food Aggression

hi i'm ryan rose and i get to travel the country helping owners with challenging horses and i'm out to prove that these challenging horses actually want to do what we want them to do if we can present it to them in the right way using clear communication and building a connection to our idea let's get to it so today we're going to be working with millie and jessica and millie has started getting uh aggressive at feeding time and this is kind of a common habit that can come up and so we're gonna have jessica tell you a little bit more about what's going on hi my name is jessica and i have a two-year-old mayor named millie i asked ryan to come out here because millie's been showing very dangerous food aggression behavior that i would like to stop she decided to bite at the collarbone shoulder and a little marks on the forehead of an elderly woman who takes care of the horses in the morning so she was dropping the hay down and she was far enough from millie and tough so she thought it was okay to put some hay over the fence for the other horses when millie went after her she's also been showing some aggressiveness in her stall as well when you would try to put grain in normally she will put the grain and hay down right away so all the horse has to do is walk right in but we are trying to stop that i have tried things to stop this by having no food in her saw when she comes in have bringing her in letting her wait for like five to ten minutes then i'll put her grain in first but i'll have her in in a corner where she has to wait in order for me to dump it and go out of the stall then when she gives me the cue and puts her head down and looks at me then i'll give her the reward by going to her grain it's been working so far she does wait the problem she's having though is when you take the halter off she will just run straight to her grain bin i'm trying to stop that after hearing what jessica's been dealing with with millie i really want to see firsthand what's actually happening with feeding and see if there's something we can change about how they're doing that we're going to get started here with jessica and milly and we kind of became clear that the horse is mostly aggressive around feeding time that you've been doing some groundwork with her in hand and that's going pretty well so it's kind of isolated to feeding time and this is a really common thing where a lot of horses they get aggressive because we throw the hay and then we leave and then sometimes the horse walks up with their ears back or with an attitude of i'm driving the human off the hay and it gradually if this happens day after day right we feed them two or three times a day sometimes it builds in and gets stronger and stronger of a pattern and you can see she's kind of hovering around the gate here ready to go and i do believe that this in order to do a good job with this horse because she associates it so strongly with feeding time i need to fix it at feeding time i think we could take her in the arena we could do lots of groundwork and it would indirectly help at all but i think i wouldn't still fully trust her at feeding time so so what we're going to start with is i'm going to actually bring the hay out with me and even though i have the hay in my hand i'm gonna own my space with the flag and so i'm gonna teach her that from from my arm's length away she has to stay out of this bubble or even further if she wants to but a minimum she has to stay out of there if she doesn't i'm going to get really noisy with this i do have one concern about the fly which is this flag is not a good tool if i need to touch her with it this is more of a visual bringing the flag up and it's a big energy so i'm hoping that she's responsive enough to it um the other option would be to have like a more solid stick that i could like like touch around the nose with or something like that um but we'll see if this can be a way to start and uh we'll just kind of kind of see how it goes from here so what i'm going to do is for me my safety starts here you can see they're hovering around the gate and it wouldn't take much for them to either open this gate because it's not latched right now um but it there's a lot of risk of a horse squirting through the gate here right just to get the hay so i'm just gonna see what it would take now she didn't respond to the energy you saw he got away right away she tested it a little bit so i actually had to touch her on the nose with the flag nothing major but now you can see how much safer it already is for me to enter in here so that one little move of me driving her off the gate keep in mind she doesn't know me right so she gets relief by by moving away from me i don't play pressure on when she comes towards me oh see that time she was respectful and she stopped and they're standing at attention this is what i'm looking for see here she's thinking about coming in again so now i'm going to take a step towards her and i'm going to go on her space now i did that quickly with the flag so that it had a little more energy versus me doing it really slowly it's critical that when there's an opportunity where she's thinking about pushing me off that i can own that space so i'm going to get where this is kind of a funnel here so i'm just going to drive out now you can see they're actually moving off my energy right here and i'm just going to throw the hay down and i'm just going to ask them to just stand at attention and just be respectful of this so you can see i got a little little buck you there from from the idea of me driving them off i'm not chasing them i'm owning this space this is the for a horse that's become aggressive this is by far the most palatable way for them to say okay all i have to do is just stand here and wait um you know it's easy with a horse that's aggressive to jump in and try to put a halter on them and start teaching them to move the shoulders and back up and circle and change directions and all these things that are good things to do but at a base level the alpha horse in here is going to own space and drive the other horses off while they munch well they munch on the hay and um and they're gonna they're gonna keep them out there until they give them permission to come in okay so what i'm gonna do now is i'm gonna retreat and i'm going to give them permission to come in and can you see how she's being a good girl there waiting so i don't think this would take too many times but at my place um and you can see they're not offended by that they came right back to it they're not they're not afraid um you know because we don't want to scare them either because they can go from aggression to fear very quickly if we do too much so we're going to add another flake of hay to the pasture because i want the horse to understand that it's not about her eating the hay it's about her giving ground and letting me own the space as um her learning that the human is the alpha horse so why don't you come with me and you're just gonna hide behind me okay and we're just gonna go own the space by their hay and drive them off so i'm gonna i'm bringing my energy up and i'm saying i wouldn't be here if i were you you can go anywhere else but don't be here and again you saw i basically i pinned my ears back at them and i said and horses are very perceptive to our intention and that comes from here right just like if i look at you this is a lot more pressure right than if i'm standing like this would you agree this is pressure yeah this is not even if i'm not changing anything you know but if i give them more of a look and i i kind of get more of a position um so now we're gonna retreat we'll let them come back to the hay so did you see how easy that was yeah yeah do that do you feel like that's something you could try now sure yeah all right let's walk over there bring your energy up and i'm here to back you up life up just think i'm the big boss mayor in here you guys stay away and if they're if they lag a little bit give them a so why don't you go ahead and get them up with it there you go i think you got a little more in you though i think you could i think you can mean it a little more do you think you could could you do that a little harder next time if you had to okay because i want you to mean it so let's let's face this way and show me if you're gonna drive you know this just me let's say me i'm the horse i'm here and i want to see you bring your energy up don't hit me but just bring that energy up and just wave that stick like if i don't get out of the way who knows what kind of pressure is coming at me again without touching so just one you're allowed one step one big scare me off my spot ah i don't know i wasn't intimidated try it again bigger mean it uh i think i think there's more under the hood there i'm still i'm still here you haven't pushed me off yet you get bigger meet up oh there we go that last one had a little bit of like she she means business this time does that feel a little different yeah did you did you feel like you got in that like okay he needs to move this time does that make sense yeah so so when you go in there you can't you can't be walking into the paddock with i hope she doesn't come after me today i hope this goes okay you have to walk in here of i own this this is my spot and now can you also see how they've kind of given up on the idea too we're not going after them we're doing it this way but they're like ah i'm over it so you can see that with the right approach to the right intention um pretty easy to drive her off i would do a very similar thing in the stall and so i think what we should do now is we should halt her up and we're going to take her over to the stall and um and see how that goes in there sound like a plan all right [Music] so so what i'd like to do actually is give her some grain that's okay um probably quite a bit so we can probably not a lot you know pound of it or something so that we can um more than a handful so that we can practice and we're going to play the same game in here you know we're just going to go a little slower because now she kind of knows it was good that she had more room to move but now we're going to ask her to stand at the back of the stall when we put feet in and actually i'm going to show you something kind of neat um is is there a way to put the feet when you feed is it in a scoop or a can or something yeah a little metal can plastic okay is it is there is it noisy at all could it be noisy if you shake it yeah okay let's get that set up all right so what happens normally at feeding time and you can tell me if this is different here but most of the time we open the door the horse crowds us trying to get it and we just fight with them hey excuse me get out of my way and then we dump the grain and then we leave and the whole time the horse is pushy and themed might be aggressive now if you get a horse that's as confident as she is um it can turn into aggression um and not because the horse is trying it really wants to be dominant over people just because she's just trying to get to the feed first she's like hey the faster you leave here the more quicker i get to my feed so it's not it's not going to be as strong of a of a a problem as it might appear based on her behavior in the past it's based more so been that she's been allowed to do it so we're going to try to reverse that pattern what we're going to do is the new feeding time program is hopefully going to be shake the grain and that means go back to the back and so instead of shake the grain and that means paw and make all kinds of ruckus at feeding time the new pattern is when we shake the bucket it means go stand at the back of the stall how does that sound sound like a good prime so i'm also switching tools now i'm going to be using this uh stick and string the reason i'm doing this is the flag might be a little bit bigger energy that's good for open spaces like on the pasture when you're trying to make big energy and cover a whole area here i just want her to take like three steps over there you know i don't want her to get scared and run around she can't get away from it so i want to be a little more fair so here we go i'm gonna open the gate here and i'm gonna shake this and drive her to the back and then the feed gets quiet so now she just licked and chewed she got relief in the back of the stall and it was from after shaking it okay so now i want her to come back up [Music] she's got she's got the idea here okay so watch here again so now she's again a little bit away from the back here watch there retreat so she got a little bit claustrophobic there uh but again i had to just get her to understand to go go to the back there now the way this works is when i shake the grain it becomes a cue right and so you give them a cue and then i reinforce it with a stick and then she ends up there does that make sense so then that that kind of becomes the pattern so start shaking it okay and what we're waiting for is when you start to shake she goes am i supposed to be over here now and then we know we're winning the game he's picking up what i'm putting now okay so well we gotta let her stand there for a minute i don't want to bring her back back and forth back and forth um now i'm gonna draw her back in okay give her a little shake and you can shake all the way until she goes there and then we'll take the cue off so this is our cue so it's important to leave the key on until she's in the position we want her in then you take the cue off does that make sense you wouldn't have to do it that way but in this when you're first teaching it it's going to make more sense to her that way okay again we just uh it's important we don't rush her here we got to let her have a chance to pro oh see that was good that she came on her own i'm gonna go great come on over here good to see you give it a shake oh you see what she's doing there you see her start to go back good there's a lick and chew so i really think she just connected the dots there she just got relief over there and did you see her starting to back up there pretty cool huh so that's the that is the initial start of it and um i mean you could do this you could find a way to do this at hate time too where you you have a whistle the grain bucket you might not want to have that it could you could use it though it'd be a consistent cue but where i'm going to do this and this means you need to leave you know but i think you're just walking in there with your energy is a fair fair way to ask for it on the paddock okay so let's bring her back up so because this is a really strong pattern for millie we're gonna have to do this a few times make some repetitions um but as she understands it more and more it's gonna be safe for jessica to go ahead and give it a try shake oh she gonna make it oh did you see that high five fist bump all right that was exciting huh is that a pretty cool pretty cool move so now that she's getting the idea here now we need to actually try going in the stall and delivering the feed to the bucket now go ahead and what i have to do is go ahead and shake it okay so that changed a little bit just because she was in a different position she kind of learned the pattern of here and then there so this is going to be important for you to practice several days where she's in different positions and it doesn't matter exactly where she ends up as long as she's generally back that way that that is the part that matters more and so here so we've shaken it i'm gonna come in and go to feed keep my eye on her so now i'm asking her to stay there while i dump the feed just gave her a little bit of feed now i'm gonna retreat out i'm gonna let her eat now we're gonna oh there we go still a little bit that was really unfortunate that i missed because that would have been a good time to uh to correct her so as soon as she started to pin her ears at me see now she's telling me now she's telling me that she's gonna come get it there we go let her get relief back there so that's like a little bit of left over from the pattern that was there before so we're going to teach her a new pattern but we still have a little bit of residual after using that pattern we eventually got to this point and so once she's committed to standing there then the person can come in and feed and we need to expect her to stand there all right see i caught it earlier she was she was less committed so we caught it earlier that time it's even made shaking the bucket that sent her nose over there and then interesting very good so i think that's probably a good place to finish with her um for this and what we're going to do is we're going to put the halter back on her we're going to work with her a little bit in the arena and uh maybe we'll come back and we'll do this exercise one more time sound like a plan all right so i'm really happy with where we've gotten millie with this now we need to go into the arena and i want to make sure that jessica really understands how to own her space so so there's one exercise that's really important that i think for you to be able to do on the ground so i'm going to give you one game very very simple there's two parts to the game but it's one game and and the game is owning space and there's all kinds of different ways we can ask horse to move around us on the ground but just at a base level i just want to teach her that this is my space to the end of the stick and i want her to understand that she can go out there and she can do whatever she wants out there but she's not allowed to come any closer than the end of the stick and because she already knows how to lunge and things like that you can see that that was relatively easy so now i'm going to move my location so i'm going to go somewhere else and i'm going to say this is my spot and she's used to being led very closely and which is okay except for when you're doing this exercise she she needs to stay at that distance at all times this this helps the horse get to the same box that we're asking her to get to when we're when we're on the pasture when we're here saying the human's claiming this space you need to be somewhere else the stall was extra difficult because there was no more room for her to go to move further away okay let's walk just get get your march on and you mean business we got a plan we're going over here and we're stopping ah swing the stick oh now she she cleared out one over there there you go she's like well i'll just stand on the bridge okay now head this way very good just walk straight act like you're on a mission good deal and i try to not let my arm get behind me because you can hurt your shoulder there try to keep the rope in close to your hip you're a lot stronger here in this position and just keep it in front yeah and if you feel that hole just hold but you feel like you're stronger there yeah i'll stop good now turn towards her and walk on the line walk through her wave the stick vertically there we go look look where you're going yep keep that keep that rope close to your hip so so you don't get pulled on and we're walking this way we're walking we're walking good no oh turn and go the other way do you see her getting off the line already let's make sure it's not a coincidence let's do it again walk on turn walk towards her keep the stick down oh did you see that that was great she really moved off your space there so it was really good so we don't want her to think the answer is go around so we can send her kind of there i want her to kind of stay back here so if she does that if you can block her that's it's ideal because pretty soon she'll figure out she just has to move off the line that's it that's all she has to do she doesn't have to run off it she just has to step over us turn around there do you feel her respecting your space there does that feel better yeah does that help you feel a little more comfortable with her um excellent let's go ahead and stop now i'm gonna walk in [Music] your turn stick in the right switch hands that way you're ready to block her over here so just walk in i'll be ready too oh put your stick down because she's not doing anything just walk in uh nope nope she's where she's supposed to be [Music] yep and come back out good job [Music] how'd that feel yeah something you can keep working on oh yeah all right good job jessica well thank you so much for having me out and uh keep up the good work with her if you're running any problems let me know all right i think millie did a good job here making some nice changes it's amazing to me how adaptable horses are when we present it to them in the right way so now let's hear what jessica had to say about this so at first i was very nervous about this whole thing because i know that she has she can come attack me or kick at me or come and bite me but after working with ryan i feel that i'm more comfortable i just know that i have to bring more energy towards her to say hey back off my space thanks jessica for bringing us out and letting us work with your horse milly thank you guys for watching i hope you enjoyed this video stay tuned for the next one [Music] you

Channel: Ryan Rose

Views: 3,639,683

Keywords: horse, horse training, Food aggressive

Id: RRCVRUpRdw8

Length: 24min 9sec (1449 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 01 2020