Working with food: part 2: Hay exercise

Other uses for hay when you're not eating it...

I have a simple exercise I do with hay which is a nice way to start introducing the idea of focus around food.

For safety, I must be able to move my horse away from my space easily at a slow or fast pace without any food around. I must feel that I can reliably move my horse without food.

First, I will sit/stand with my horse while they are eating their hay and just let them relax with me for a time. I am not in a hurry to chase them off their food. It's not about depriving them. Once I've allowed them to eat for a bit comfortably, I will ask them to leave the hay pile either by just my body language and voice or using a stick with body language depending on the horses' nature. I wont hold them away from it. It is just about them letting me move them off slowly and then allowing them to come back as soon as they show willingness to leave.

This game is played with horses all the time in paddocks when you drop several hay piles down with more then one horse. I call it the Musical hay pile game. The top horse will push the others from one hay pile to the next. But at some point you see horses sharing the same hay pile together. I also see this done with grass patches as well. It is not done out of meanness or spite though it may seem that way. It is how horses establish order using food. See more examples of food work in my Vlog of Starting Django http://www.fdhorsemanship.com/#!classroom Happy horsing!

Working with food

This guy loves his food!

Working with food exercises has many applications with horses from Leadership to rewards or just plain sharing a favorite tidbit. Before I learned Carolyn Resnick's Method, I didn't work with food much.  Of course I gave the occasional treat and reward for certain things. I found her way of working with food a simple and very powerful exercise that was not taught in any other approach I'd studied.

Horses use control of food and sharing food, as a way to bond and set boundaries and rank. In training communication, a well timed food reward can motivate your horse and make it far more interesting and fun to see when and how he gets you to give him a treat. The timing of rewards is quite important to the exercises you construct. A poorly timed reward can emphasize the wrong behavior as much as it can emphasize the right one.

Before I work with food around a horse. I will have established that I can move them away from my space a few steps slowly or quickly without food. This has to be reliable for my personal safety and confidence. Food can bring out dominance and territorial behavior that you have not seen previously.

I also work with something simple like hay when I am confident to move on to food exercises. Hay tends not to bring out a horses dominant behavior as much as say their regular feed or a very delicious treat. I work gradually toward foods that a horse may get more excited about as they get used to the idea of moving away from or waiting for permission to have the food.

The idea of food work is not to torture or prevent your horse from ever eating. It is an often overlooked area of Leadership opportunity for many people.I see it more as a Leadership and rank exercise which can be creatively implemented in training. This is also how I see it used within herds. Where my horses live, we feed large round bales of hay. All the horses must share the round bale but as you can imagine there is a very specific order to who is allowed to eat when. When a new horse is added, (depending on where he fits in) is how long it will take for him to get his "place" at the round bale. Once they feel the proper protocol has been reached, All horses are allowed to eat at the same round bale peacefully (there are anywhere from 3-6).  I find it fascinating to watch different herds as well at different barns. No two are the same.

If you have the opportunity to observe your horse(s) at feeding time or a new horse coming in to a herd, see how they handle each other around food and what you can learn from it. If you want to see some examples of how I used food exercises in Starting Django you can subscribe to My Classroom to follow along with his progress and approach.
http://www.fdhorsemanship.com/#!classroom