If you give a horse a cookie…

Many riding instructors and horse clubs will tell you NEVER to hand feed treats to a horse. This will spoil the horse and teach him bad manners by encouraging him to be pushy, rude and to beg for treats. Even worse, you’ll encourage your horse to nip and bite.

At least, that was what I learned growing up. But is this true? Or is it just an old wive’s tale? Although most horse people have a definite opinion on this subject, there has been no quantitative research to see if hand feeding horses or training with treats leads to unwanted behaviors. Until now.

Researchers Jo Hockenhull (of the University of Chester) and Emma Creighton (of Newcastle University) collected data from over a thousand horse owners in the UK regarding their horse management, training and feeding practices.

Specifically, they asked horse owners how often their horses engaged in the following five oral investigative behaviors:

  1. Horse licks at a person’s hands
  2. Horse nips at a person’s hands
  3. Horse gently searches a person’s clothes
  4. Horse roughly searches a person’s clothes
  5. Horse bites at clothing

They also asked owners how often they fed their horses tit-bits by hand. As well, survey questions on training practices determined how often, if ever, owners used clicker training.

So, will feeding treats cause your horse to bite or nip?

Fifty-eight percent of respondents fed their horses by hand sometimes and 33% reported that they did this often. The researchers found that for horses fed by hand, owners were more likely to report that the horse licked hands or searched clothing for food. However, there was no association between how often a horse was hand fed and nipping behavior or biting at clothes.

The researchers also investigated the relationship between clicker training and the five behaviors listed above. Eleven percent of respondents used clicker training occasionally and 3% used it often. Interestingly, they found no relationship between clicker training and any of the five food searching behaviors.

What this means for horse owners and trainers

Horse owners are discouraged from hand feeding treats because this will supposedly encourage nipping or biting. However, this study found no association between hand feeding and nipping or biting. Also, many people are opposed to clicker training because they claim it will encourage all five of the behaviors listed above. However, the study found absolutely no evidence for this claim.

Most owners in the survey reported only hand feeding their horses sometimes and also commonly reported some of the gentler unwanted behaviors (licking hands, searching clothes). The authors speculate that feeding treats occasionally could encourage these behaviors if owners are accidentally rewarding these behaviors. An irregular pattern of treats makes it harder for the horse to predict when the next one is coming and encourages the horse to be looking or searching for treats.

Also, the researchers found no association between clicker training and these unwanted behaviors. (What is clicker training?) As many clicker trainers claim, clicker training could even decrease biting and nipping and aid in teaching horses how to act politely around food.

Here are several of the reasons the researchers suggest for the lack of association between clicker training and unwanted behavior:

  • Most clicker training programs give specific suggestions for how to avoid or stop these behaviors.
  • Clicker trainers may understand better how to avoid accidentally reinforcing these behaviors.
  • Using food rewards in a structured way teaches the horse to discriminate when food will be available.
  • Using food rewards in a structured program teaches the horse guidelines concerning what is required to earn a food treat.

And some more thoughts…

Food in and of itself does not cause a horse to behave poorly. However, poor or inconsistent training practices can and will encourage many of these unwanted behaviors. Most clicker training programs use food rewards in a very structured way. Food is predictable–the horse knows exactly when and where the treat will appear. The horse learns rules about when food will appear and manners about how to take food.

Clicker training is becomes much more prevalent for horse owners. Twenty years ago, clicker training was almost non existent in the horse world. Now, for the population surveyed for this study, 14% of owners reported using clicker training sometimes or often. As clicker training and training with treats becomes more widespread, it is important that horse owners are educated about how to use food effectively and how to reduce or eliminate unwanted food seeking behaviors.

These behaviors can be eliminated by teaching the horse from the beginning exactly how you want him to behave around food. Clicker trainers often begin with the horse behind a stall or fence, since many horses have not been taught self control and manners around food. (This is called training with “protected contact.”) Early foundation lessons also usually emphasize backing up, standing quietly and moving out of a person’s space.

Once the horse understands the rules of game, treats and positive reinforcement become a VERY powerful tool for teaching new behavior. For example, here’s a horse standing quietly at liberty for a bath. You wouldn’t know it from how quiet and calm he is, but this is only the third time this horse has had a bath.

More research and controlled studies should be done to further investigate the positive and negative effects of different training practices. However, this study is strong support for what clicker trainers have been saying all along–that positive reinforcement training can create happy, polite, respectful horses.

If you are interested in more information about clicker training, please check out the resource section of my blog.

Citation:
Jo Hockenhull, Emma Creighton, Unwanted oral investigative behaviour in horses: A note on the relationship between mugging behaviour, hand-feeding titbits and clicker training, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 25 September 2010, ISSN 0168-1591, DOI: 10.1016/j.applanim.2010.08.008.
(http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6T48-513DYX8-1/2/d8c9f6dab7953ce7c1bf3979c7bea5c1)

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19 Responses to If you give a horse a cookie…

  1. Emma October 3, 2010 at 10:24 am #

    Great post Mary thanks for posting the citation 🙂 I’ve heard this so many times that feeding treats makes horses muggy, it’s one of the most common responses I get when I say I clicker train Star. Star is actually far better behaved around food since we started clicker training than she was before! What people don’t realise is teaching no mugging is exactly the same as teaching a horse to stand for mounting, or anything else you want.

  2. Maria Y October 3, 2010 at 1:11 pm #

    Great post, great blog! I’m so happy I was directed here by a fellow clickertrainer. Will probabaly not get much else done today 😉
    I’m assuming you study for Jesus Rosales-Ruiz? Lucky you! I loved his lectures at the one and only ClickerExpo (Austin, TX, ) I’ve so far attended.

    Best regards from Sweden

  3. Bookendsfarm October 3, 2010 at 2:25 pm #

    Great article Mary!!!

  4. Epicfarms October 4, 2010 at 12:48 am #

    Treats are a HUGE tool for training, provided they are used properly and therein lies the rub. Kind of like most power tools; they can help you to complete a variety of jobs with ease, but if you are careless the lesson can be a disastrous one. This is on my list of things to blog about actually, since I do most everything I can at liberty and use treats all the time. Great post!

  5. Guest October 4, 2010 at 4:50 pm #

    So happy to read this. For me, at least, I had to be all or nothing… If I gave treats without clicker training, the treats became a little TOO interesting. But once they really understood the clicker, their patience for earning treats went way up. But you have to be willing to go through the initial “muggy” patch. My first time trying c/t, I gave up and did not return to it–or treats–for a year because my horse WAS being grabby. If only I had taken another couple of weeks to improve my own delivery skills, I’d have seen how that behavior would have dropped away.

  6. Susan October 9, 2010 at 2:37 am #

    I’ve been waiting until I had some quiet/down time to read this blog. Well said. Well spoken. : )

  7. horse_racing April 11, 2011 at 2:08 am #

    the horse face is really funny
    that’s the first thing caught my attention on this site…

    it’s a well said blog, but is this really true?

  8. Hiperlynx2 July 9, 2011 at 3:46 am #

    I grew up in the “no treats” era, in a barn where this was not enforced at all. Horses sometimes got treats for no apparent reason (in their minds), and other times did not. Sometimes as a reward for a “good” ride, but not in any way that the horse could actually connect to the ride or the behavior on the ride. We were told no sugar…but all sorts of other things were fair game, including Fanta sodas!

    I came to my own conclusion that horses do not feed each other to make friends (as carnivores do). So, in my own training, I generally used affection and praise, like a good scratch, as reward.

    Initially, I was skeptical of clicker training. I am still not a big “treat” giver, but I have seen that clicker training does, in fact, work and also does NOT produce the bad behaviors described above.

    In both horses and dogs, asking for SOMETHING, even just a “sit” or step back, is always a good idea before treating. Our brains are so different from theirs when it comes to cause and effect. I find that this “work for it” rule helps decrease pushiness and …in the case of a few dogs I know…downright mania.

    Great post!

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    great post i found this article very interesting and knowledgeable and thank you very much for sharing this information with us.

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  17. Hayburner November 30, 2013 at 4:12 am #

    Excellent! I’ve been preaching this for more than a decade, and I’m still faced with frowny faces and wagging fingers. I have a horse that’s far too mouthy. He got that way because the kids working in the barn thought it was funny that he’d untie their shoelaces or take off their gloves…then yelped when those lips revealed teeth and a nip was included in the game. All of my horses are clicker trained. There is not a faster way to train a horse!

    • Mary Hunter December 4, 2013 at 9:02 pm #

      Thanks for stopping by and leaving a comment! I definitely agree with you that clicker training is a fast and effective way to train horses.

      cheers,

      Mary

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. Walt Disney needs some Clicker Training! | Stale Cheerios - November 27, 2010

    […] take a treat, or knock the rider down while searching for more treats. Contrary to popular opinion, treats don’t have to cause bad manners. This horse has such a sense of humor, though, I’m sure he’d get a kick out of clicker […]

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