Feed time hadn't always looked this calm.

One of my biggest challenges around Penny (being an energetic young horse) is her over-arousal, frustration and resource-guarding behaviours around food.

A common misconception (that I used to believe whole heartedly) is that if you are "too soft" with your horse they will become "pushy" or "rude" (quotation marks because these are human contructs that horses can't opperationalize). I especially used to buy into this myth when I did alot of what I thought was "natural horsemanship", which I now know used escalating negative reinforcement and was based heavily in dominance theory, which has now been disproven by behavioural science. Perhaps one of the reasons that I thought this when using these methods was that when a behaviour is suppressed, and then the behaviour is *no longer* punished, your likely to see a dramatic recovery of that behaviour (the opposite is true when you stop rewarding a behaviour, ie- extinction).

HOWEVER, I now see things in a whole different way. The truth is, to address behaviours that we perceive as "rude", we need to investigate the function of the behaviour, change antecedent arrangement, set the animal up for sucsess, work in small approximations and reinforceme the desired behaviour that we perceiveas "polite" or "manners". When we work this way, we can actually use the food itself to *elimate* the problem behaviours associated with food as oppose to exacerbating the frustration.

The next step is to create a positive association with other horses (Izzy) bring fed and eventually get her to the point where I can ask her to back up away and "stay" whilst Izzy is fed before her. I hope this will help her with her resources-guarding. I just want to clarify that I'm not an advocate for bulk feeding, and I trickle-feed forage throughout the day. However, Penny still had some unwanted emotions around feed buckets which is what we are now working on.