Horse IQ

Picture this. You’re returning home from an out-of-state horse event. You’ve got a Ford F-350 pulling a trailer load of 5 horses. Everything was fine when you put them all in the trailer. No kicking. No biting. No attitudes to speak of. Then you hear the familiar “bang, bang, bang” against the walls of the trailer. Only this time you notice that the trailer appears to fish-tail slightly on the road behind you. What do you do? Here’s what we did…

In a situation like this, you have to stop the truck and go back to the trailer to restore order. I know, I hate to do it, too. It tends to reward horses for bad behavior. The might think “if we kick each other, then the truck will stop and somebody will come pay attention to us.” You certainly don’t want to encourage that.

But in this case, you have no choice. The horses are creating a true safety hazard that must be dealt with. So, we dealt with it.

Please hear me on this - we didn’t raise our voices to them (even though we sure felt like it). That would have made an already-tense group of horses even more tense.

So we calmly tied them a little tighter to the trailer cross-ties, giving them less slack. The idea was the tighter you tie them, the further away from each other they’ll be. And if they can’t reach each other, there’d be no point in kicking.

Then we put a haybag in close proximity to each of them. I’ve yet to see a horse who would rather kick than eat. In case you don’t have haybags at your barn, here’s what one looks like:

horse haybag
My horse, Rosie, with a haybag at a show in Aiken, SC

Once we did that, they were fine for the remainder of the trip. (Sigh), Problem solved.

Horses in a trailer kick for a variety of reasons. Maybe they’re just plain bored. Perhaps they don’t like their travelling companions for some reason. Or, perhaps they’re vying for the position of Alpha Horse and have decided your trailer is as good a place as any to do it.

But a trailer on the open road is a dangerous place for horses to be kicking - for any reason. Even if they don’t cause an accident, they can inflict damage on the themselves, not to mention the trailer. And while you don’t want to encourage that behavior by granting too much attention, sometimes you have to.

This bad horse behavior created a hazard on the highway, so we just didn’t have a choice.

If this ever happens to you, take action, but do it like we did: calmly, quickly, and firmly. And giving them something to eat to take their minds off of things doesn’t hurt either.

Yours for Better Horse Health,