Horse Treats In Use!

Horse Treats are an amazing way to build trust between a person and a horse. Check out some of the Huds and Toke ™ happy customers who use our Australian Made Horse Treats to enjoy their time with their ponies. Thank-you so much for sharing.

Trust is built in the boring moments

Most of what makes a horse easy to be around is not schooling. It is the ordinary handling: catching, rugging, feet, clipping, the float, the vet. A horse that has decided those things are fine is a different animal to one who has decided they are a fight, and that decision gets made over months of small repetitions rather than in one session.

This is where food does its best work. Not as a bribe to get a job done today, but as a way of changing what the horse expects next time. If the clippers have always been followed by something good, the clippers stop meaning what they used to mean.

Starting with a new or nervous horse

With a horse who has just arrived, or one who has learned to be suspicious of people, the useful thing is to ask for almost nothing:

• Let them come to you. Standing quietly in the paddock and leaving when they show interest teaches more than an hour of chasing a headcollar.
• Reward the try, not the finish. A step towards the float is the behaviour worth marking. Waiting for all four feet on the ramp means most horses never get rewarded at all.
• Stop while it is still going well. The temptation is always one more repetition. That is usually the one that undoes it.
• Keep sessions short and frequent rather than long and occasional. Five minutes most days beats an hour on Sunday.
• Do not use food to lure a frightened horse into something. You can pull a horse over a threshold they are not ready for, and what they learn is that your hand means pressure.

Horses who should not be having treats

Worth saying plainly. Horses and ponies with a history of laminitis, insulin dysregulation, equine metabolic syndrome or PPID need their sugar and starch managed, and treats count towards that. If that is your horse, or you are unsure, ask your vet before you start rather than after. For a healthy horse in work it is a different question, but it is worth asking once.

A word on children and ponies

Hand feeding is where a lot of children get nipped, usually not from malice but because a pony that expects food gets impatient. Flat palm, fingers together, thumb tucked, and an adult deciding when the treat appears rather than the pony deciding. Ponies are quick learners in both directions.

What we bake

Everything in the horse treats range is baked in Australia, and the biscuits break up easily if you want to make a handful last a week. There are apple, carrot and turmeric and coconut versions, and a birthday cake cookie for the day that matters.

For the training side, timing and how to hand feed without creating a mugger, we have written that up in using horse treats as a reward.

Keep the photos coming, we love seeing them. From the team at Huds and Toke™.