Kim LEmmon
managing Editor, ohio’s Country Journal
When I was a riding lesson instruc-
tor, keeping my program’s visitors and students safe was my priority. I forced everyone to abide by a long list of rules. I’m sure a lot of folks, including my husband, Mark, thought my rules were a bit restrictive and obsessive but I felt the rules were a necessity. I was fortunate to have only a few
accidents occur during my time as an instructor. We averaged about one fall every other year. No one was seriously hurt thankfully. To me, the lack of seri-
ous injuries and infrequency of falls proved my rules were working but something was lacking. No one broke my rules except Mark.
I would occasionally catch Mark hand feeding a treat to the horses and it actually made me a little sad. I wanted them to be glad to see me, too. When I sold all the lesson horses
and started having horses around for my own pleasure, I decided to relax the rules a little. I never gave Mark a hard time when he hand fed the horses and I started doing some “dangerous” fun activities with them myself. Here are the results of my experiment.
Hand feeding and other disasters I hate horses that lip or nip at you or
are always pushing you looking for a treat. One barn where I taught allowed students to feed the horses treats after lessons. Once the rustling of a bag of
Hand feeding treats can be a lot of fun for the horse and horse owner but care should be taken to avoid encouraging bad ground manners. All photos courtesy of Ed Chatfield.
carrots started, the horses started danc- ing in the cross ties and nickering. It was really hard to keep everyone safe and saddle horses while all that was happening. Since my teaching days are done, I decided it would probably be OK if I relaxed my feeding rules a little. For this experiment, I started hand
After a couple of kisses and a few treats, mike developed the bad habit of coming at my face with his teeth.
feeding my horses the occasional treat. It went OK for a while. The draft mare, Julie, was fine, but the bay minis, Mike and Ike, could smell treats in my pock- ets and started pushing me with their noses. This pushiness became more and more aggressive. When I let folks pet the horses on their nice and fuzzy noses, the minis
Horse Sense is sponsored by: For more information
on Purina horse feeds, visit
http://horse.purinamills.com. 42 Farm Equipment • Ohio’s Country Journal •
ocj.com • March 2012
started getting “lippy” and even showed some teeth a time or two. The worst thing I did was give Julie
a kiss. She loved it. My nieces didn’t love it so much, though, when she started trying to reach out her nose from the hitch rail to touch them. My nieces are only 4 and 6 and didn’t like the idea of a huge muzzle coming at them. When I showed them she just wanted a kiss, they were less than impressed. They thought it was gross and, more than that, had Julie achieved her goal, she could have easily knocked my nieces to the ground and injured them without even trying. When I tried kissing the bay minis,
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