Finding the "Why" of an Aggressive Horse | RES 051

We have another listener question that will be the focal point for this week’s episode. While I like to respond to these personally, sometimes I like to bring them up for episode topics as well. This topic in particular is something many horse owners may have dealt with, and that’s aggressive horses. The question that came in was specifically about a 15 year old mare - one that was bottle fed at some point because her mother couldn’t produce enough milk. This mare will get aggressive on trail rides if any horse comes up from behind. She’ll stop and run backwards to kick at the other horses. Keep in mind that my suggestions here are what I “might” do. There’s not a surefire solution I can give without being there myself, but this should provide a good starting point for anyone with similar issues.

Key Takeaways

Let’s find the source of the problem first. When another horse approaches from behind the mare gets aggressive. So when another horse is out of her range and approaching she reacts. This is most likely a fear response. Since she has probably had less horse -to-horse interactions (from being bottle fed) she can’t tell if the horse is a friend or foe. So, to defend herself, she turns around and goes about kicking.

So what do we do about this? Well, there’s usually no better teacher than mother nature herself. Putting the mare in a large turnout with other horses can help them work things out amongst themselves. This won’t completely solve the problem, but it’s a good step in the right direction.

To start getting rid of this behavior through training you want to teach the mare to focus on you, not the other horses. Start with tons of groundwork exercises you are familiar with. Make sure the exercises are done correctly and if the horse’s attention drifts, run the exercises again and more intensely. They’ll come to learn that focusing on you is the easy thing to do. You’ll move to being saddled and running these exercises, and then finally inviting over some friends and their horses in a controlled environment to help the mare adjust to focusing on you while other horses are around.

Again, finding out the cause of the issue comes first. There are multiple ways to solve any problem. So when we discover the why to an issue we can then go about discovering which how works best for us and our horses.