My young horse hates road kill !?

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POLLDARK

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My young horse really hates the sight & smell of dead animals. He can detect the bodies long before we see them & starts a low snorting/blowing from his nostrils. He is not a spooky horse at all in the norm but will sidle & side step around the bodies. The worse the smell the more reluctant he is to get too close & is genuinely anxious, tight through his body & snorting. He can take a lot of encouragement sometimes to go past..
I have never not eventually got him to go by but wondered is it just him ? It's not a problem I can't live with but I have never had another horse act this way. He will remember for weeks after where a body was as well.. perhaps I should hire him out to search parties as a 'sniffer horse';)
Anyone elses horse do this or have strange phobias ?
 
one of my ponies was like this when I was a kid-he also hated the nearby abbattoir, which people might think perfectly natural but none of the other horses we rode out with seemed to care. Sounds like he has a good sense of self preservation-a good thing :D
 
Well I never, an interesting site fburton.. I could see my boy in an airport lounge sniffing out meat & MAYBE POLOS, SUAGAR LUMPS ETC .Contraband for sure. Not sure he would be able to run round on the luggage carousel though.
 
My boy developed a total phobia of a road near us after a deer was killed there- I always wondered if he could smell the blood but he will pass other roadkill with just a sideways glance. Maybe the timing was coincidence. Interesting tho
 
POLLDARK said:
Well I never, an interesting site fburton.. I could see my boy in an airport lounge sniffing out meat & MAYBE POLOS, SUAGAR LUMPS ETC .Contraband for sure. Not sure he would be able to run round on the luggage carousel though.
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lol, I love the idea of this! Nobody would get through with undetected apples/polo mints/bananas etc if mine was on duty! He even knows how many carrots you have in your pockets, and will keep asking until they're all gone!

On the roadkill front, I am always surprised horses don't react more? Maybe ours are used to it, as we have a slightly weird YO who occasionally leaves heads and limbs of his slaughtered, erm "pet" pigs in the field, so the horses just don't bother. Don't ask why, btw - I have never got a useful answer from YO on this one...

We were out hacking last weekend when I spotted a dead mole on the road and was just going "oh, I wonder will Jackson worry about the dead..." when he plonked his hoof on it and walked on :eek:

He has also stopped in the street and carefully sniffed all over the flatbed of the local slaughterman's lorry. I was worried, but he just sniffed, went "hmmm", to himself (figuratively) and then walked on?

If you have a few of the polo mints in your pocket when dead things are detected, I would suggest offering one, as by association the smell of roadkill will start meaning "polo mint", and therefore turn into a good thing in your horse's mind. Same approach works for tractors/HGVs including bin lorries/skips/wheelie bins etc.
 
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My horse puts his head down and sniffs the road kill. He likes it! He once walked up the road sniffing the blood stain where a badger had been hit and dragged along for quite some time.
 
Our boy is obsessed with poo! Even the really flattened dried out ones he will fight to get his head down and have a sniff! Not encountered roadkill with him yet, I imagine he will need to snuff it thoroughly! He does the flehmens response at least twice every time I visit him, at random stuff he has smelt a million times before... hoof oil, fly spray, my jods after dog walking, my son (!) lol
 
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