Dealing with Horse Bites

One day when I was quite new to horses I was feeding treats to a horse I really liked named Cowboy. I had been told to hold your hand out flat, and I was pretty much doing that. I gave him a couple of treats. Then I reached up to give him a pet on the nose, and he clamped down on my fingers.

Let me tell you horse bites hurt! It was like having a stainless steel vise come down on your hand. Even worse-there seemed no way to get him to open his mouth-it was clamped down solid on my fingers. He was looking for a treat and would have swallowed my hand if he could. I risked serious injury-a broken bone or two at least, if I couldn’t get out of the situation. So instead of petting him on the nose I basically punched him and he let go.

I felt bad about hitting him but wasn’t sure what to do in a situation like that. A similar event happened to a friend of mine at the same horse ranch. She was visiting with her horses and another one came by and when she had her hand out, the attention-seeking mare bit down on it. This time, bones were broken and the woman had to be taken in for surgery, and no doubt a long recovery period with those kind of horse bites.

A horse bites for many reasons. They may bite looking for a treat, or they may bite as a means of establishing dominance. I happen to have my horses at a relatively large facility with 60+ horses in residence. That’s a lot of horses, and its a great opportunity to observe horse behavior. They have groups of horses living together in open pastures, maybe 5-7 horses in each one. The horses have large hay bails where they can graze all day long. What is nice about this is you can watch the horses behave in natural horse fashion, because they basically form a herd with a hierarchy and aren’t confined in an artificial barn situation where they need to be “turned out”.

One thing you find is that in some of the groups, a lot of biting goes on. This is where there is a lot of jostling to find out who is the head honcho. Horses bite and kick at each other all the time, and they have the scars to prove it. This isn’t a good or bad thing, its just the way horses behave, although in an extreme situation you might want to move a victim to a different living situation.

So while a horse may bite because of the occasional mistake of looking for a carrot, more often than not a horse is biting because they are asserting dominance. If your horse bites you, it is not something you can accept under any circumstances. A firm, immediate response is required. Remember that horses live a lot more in the moment than we do, so you can’t give a firm response 20 minutes later and expect the horse to understand. It has to be immediate. You don’t have to punch the horse, the only reason I did that was he was about to break my fingers off. Hopefully you will have a tool at your disposal like a whip or lead rope (now I never go around horses without one). One thing you can do is firmly make the horse back up out of your space if he tries to bite you. Dominant horses make the other horses move their feet, so if a horse tries to bite you-get him out of your personal space and make him move his feet. Asking for a backup (FIRMLY!) is a great way to do this.

Of course why do horses bite? Its important to establish leadership and respect with good horse training so that this doesn’t happen in the first place. That is done with good groundwork training-so invest time in your groundwork so that your horse respects your personal space, and doesn’t try to assert dominance by doing things like biting.

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