Calming him down?

[LuckyLaneRider]

So i've had my new horse almost a month now. He is quite strong & will jig about all over the place. After his first couple of weeks he had relatively calmed down & was just a nice fun forward ride for me, i even took him to the gallop track last weekend & he was an extremely good boy
However, over the last couple of days he has been absolutely bonkers. He has had no respect for me as a rider & has tried to leap in-front of cars & bolt home. It's got to the point where it is dangerous. Yesterday was just schoolwork & he was still completely off his head. He's fed on just a scoop of high fibre alfalfa chaff with an equivite vitamin supplement & a handful of sliced carrots. He has comes in once a day for haylage (which i will be changing to hay) He's ridden in a plain eggbutt snaffle (do need a much stronger bit when the bank balance allows it!) Can you suggest anything else?

 

[Mynstrel]

How about magnesium oxide in his feed? Work for ours who has leaping about hysterics if he's not on it. Doesn't work for every horse that's wound up but worth a try. Think about straight MagOx though (ebay), for ours it seems to work better than the "named" versions.

Might be worth losing the carrots too, I know of one horse who becomes a mad tigger thing literally after having just a couple & if you search on here there's loads of threads about carrots making horses bonkers.

OH also uses draw reins as extra brakes when hacking out anything strong but I know a lot of people aren't keen on them so I think they're a matter of personal preferance.

 

[LuckyLaneRider]

Did see about carrots on here & thought that very interesting! I'm going to give it a try & see what happens. The Magnesium sounds interesting too & probably worth a go. He's ridden in a standing martingale to stop him chucking his head & rearing (as has a tendency to do!) Thanks for the suggestions, i'll have a look into it & probably give it a go!