Horse life skills and enrichment!! - Fun post :)

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Crazylittlemaisey

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So fun post really... let's put our heads together!

I run a dog training business based on teaching life skills to pet dog owners' dogs. My passion is providing these dogs with the best, most enriching environment and life the owners can offer. Ways of feeding, ways of rewarding, ways of interacting, etc.

Transferring this onto horses I thought it would be fun to each add some of our own ideas of how we enrich our horses lives and teach them life skills. Triggered by having a bit of a downer about my youngster, facing loading problems and with winter looming we all need an injection of positivity and fun while we can't ride as much.

I'll start with a few things i do to enrich my horses' lives both mentally and physically:

• free range access to shelter and hay
• carrot stretches
• in hand walks to varied environments (sights, smells, ground, weather including trespassing on footpaths to take full advantage of the local area!!)
• hiding treats in stable
• Target training with a wooden spoon and a clicker (great for vet visits as a distraction/clipping/farrier for something to do!)

So there's a few. I know I'm a bit crackers btw, I'm just passionate about animal behaviour and learning! Let's have your activities :)
 
I leave tyres, footballs, plastic sacks and plastic barrels in the barn where they live at night. They're rarely in the same place in the morning and sometimes I watch them on CCTV chucking them around :)

I buy very low calorie timothy haylage so I can feed it ad lib from several ground level racks to get them walking up and down between them. Even my Shetland ponies lose weight.
 
I leave a swede hanging up in the stable for her, give her a greedy feder and put carrot slices in it. I hide things round her stable sometimes (hay cobs not treats) I did give her a ball to play with a while ago but she chucked it so high it'd just go flying out the stable. :lol:
 
Throwing the most weird and wonderful objects into the field in the day for the my girls on restricted grazing to play with. Footballs, tarps, cones, even classic cars :D
 
He has a hay play which he loves and will chuck about in preference to his loose hay. Hes fed ad lib forage. He has herd turnout on a reasonable acreage. This makes the biggest difference for him. He was entire until last year and was anxious and worried about other horses. We slowly integrated him into a little herd of geldings and he thinks it is the best thing that has ever happened. They play bitey face and boxing, all have mad gallops round and just stand and groom each other.

I make sure he has variety in his work. He prefers fast work to schooling, so I will try and intersperse walk work with something he enjoys more. We go out for miles in the carriage, lots of different places. He likes the village best. People always want to pat and admire him and theres an apple tree on the way there that he gets an apple from which is the best thing ever apparently :biggrin3: We did a lot of clicker training initally and its something I should do more of as we both enjoy it. He loves being groomed and scratched. Hes a very cuddly horse, so I make sure that he we do some form of that everyday.

Hes an incredibly happy little horse and I intend him to stay that way :biggrin3:
 
I also bought my mini who was desperate for scratches the ultimate enrichment device - another mini to scratch with. It's so cute to watch the two of them scrubbing reach other with their tiny teeth.
 
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