HOW do you teach horses like this to be calm, relaxed, polite and safe positively? Of course, most of the horse world will tell you that you need your horse to ‘submit’, that you need to be ‘dominant’, that you need to use more pressure and so on.

One of the problems with this approach is that dominance hierarchies can’t even be determined in healthy wild horse herds, so it’s not actually a natural way horses interact with each other. So, we don’t want to bring force, fear or fighting into our training with our horses, either. That isn’t fun for either of you and won’t help you find that connection, either.

Instead, it’s about learning and motivation. When we look at behaviour like this through this lens, it becomes much easier to see a soft, fair and effective way to train it instead. (and we can see how to use food to suucssefully train ‘foody’ horses).

You can absolutely be soft AND effective with this way of training, and you can teach even the bargiest of horses how to be polite and soft. You can also prevent or overcome problems with over-arousal or excitement around the food.

In fact, once you’ve got the initial lessons in place of relaxation, softness and manners, these horses make some of the best training partners because they’re often highly motivated and engaged.

Here are some training tips for working with horses like this!