Training Tip: Safely Feeding a Group of Horses
Walking into a herd of horses with a bucket of grain at feeding time can be dangerous. The horses are likely to crowd into your space to get to the feed and be jockeying for position amongst themselves. Without meaning to, they can quickly injure you. The safest way to feed horses in a group is to lock them out of the feeding area while you portion out their feed. At the ranch, all my pastures have 100-foot catch pens in them. This allows us to put the food out without having to worry about the horses moving each other around.
If you’re unable to keep the horses out of the feeding area while you’re doling out their food, use the Handy Stick to keep them out of your space. As you start dumping the feed in the bins, the horses will get more wound up, so keep a careful eye on what’s going on around you.
If you are able to lock your horses out of the feeding area while you portion out their food, it’s likely that they’ll see and hear you and come up to the gate, waiting to be let in the feeding area. If you’re not careful, when you open the gate, in their rush to get to the food, they’ll run you over.
The yearling fillies in the photo above are being respectful of me and not barging through the gate. If they had a tendency to rush through the gate, I’d use the stick to drive them away from it before I opened it. Once they were away from the gate, I’d open it and walk backwards so that I could keep my eyes on them. That way, if they came galloping up to it, I could protect my space. Turning a blind eye to an anxious herd of horses is never a smart idea.
Like with anything you do with your horses, the more you practice driving the horses away from the gate and not letting them barge through it to get to the food, the better they’ll get about respecting your space and calmly going to their feed bins. It’s no accident that the horses at the ranch have good manners at feeding time—we don’t let them get away with bad behavior.
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