Has your horse’s aggressive behavior toward other horses made you unpopular on group trail rides or in the warm-up arena at shows? Does your horse have a reputation for being aggressive when turned out in the herd? Let’s look at common reasons for this, and how to handle horses that are aggressive when being ridden or turned out with others.
What Is Aggression in Horses?
Aggression describes behaviors intended to forcefully control another’s actions. Aggression can occur when horses want to gain or control access to a resource. This might be food, water, space, or anything else they feel they need to survive and thrive. Or it can occur when horses feel they must protect themselves from harm or ensure their survival when threatened.
For horses, aggressive behaviors can be relatively mild, such as pinned ears or threats to bite, kick, or strike. It can also escalate to actual fighting with the intent to injure or even kill.
Aggression can be offensive or defensive. Offensive aggression is proactive, meaning the horse is the one to behave aggressively first. Or it can be defensive, occurring reactively, only in response to a perceived or immediate threat.
When trying to better understand aggression in horses, it is crucial to remember three things:
- Aggression is a normal part of all animals’ behavioral repertoire. It helps animals stay safe or survive when other tactics, such as freezing or fleeing, won’t work.
- No animal wants to behave aggressively. It is an “expensive” behavior, costing precious strength and energy and putting the animal at risk of suffering a potential life-ending injury.
- Research has shown that horses spend far more time engaging in affiliative behaviors, or those that serve to strengthen bonds between horses, than they do aggressive ones.
When we see aggression in or between domestic horses, we must take it seriously, as it shows one or more horses are feeling a high level of stress in situations where it occurs.
Why Do Horses Display Aggression?
Common causes for aggression in horses toward others can include:
- Pain, certain underlying medical conditions, or disease.
- Fear or anxiety.
- Feeling threatened, afraid, or frustrated.
- Prior learning, such as bad experiences with other horses; inadequate socialization when young or no opportunity to gain experience regulating emotional responses in social encounters; and unintended negative reinforcement, where the horse learns that their aggressive displays can stop things that hurt, scare, or stress them.
- Management that causes horses stress, such as inappropriate feeding, inadequate access to resources, or facility designs that create an inability to move far enough away from others during mild conflict, which would be part of normal social communication.
Reading through this list, it is easy to appreciate that horses behaving aggressively might be doing so for several reasons. Therefore, horses displaying aggression usually need the help of more than one qualified professional to address the issue.
How to Handle Horses That Display Aggression
Whether aggression is occurring under saddle or during turnout, my triage advice for new clients who are dealing with this issue involves four steps:
Rule out physical reasons for the behavior.
Factors such as pain and illness can directly cause or indirectly contribute to horses behaving aggressively. It’s important to consult with an equine veterinarian to rule out such conditions first.
Stop using punishment to address the problem.
In almost 20 years of working with horses displaying behavior problems, including cases of severe aggression, not once have I recommended the use of punishment or corrections to solve the problem. This is because using these techniques cannot address underlying reasons causing the horse to behave this way. Using punishment also often makes aggression worse or creates new, more serious problems.
Avoid exposure to triggers for the aggression unless under supervised, controlled conditions.
Aggression can be both potentially injurious and accidentally reinforced. So whether it happens during riding or turnout, preventing aggression should be at the forefront of a horse owner’s mind when faced with this issue. This might mean temporarily not riding the horse in situations where they behave aggressively toward others. Or it might mean switching up living arrangements to avoid certain horse pairings.
Putting a pause on this behavior in the short term also helps the horse have a “stress holiday,” better allowing cortisol and adrenaline released during these unpleasant encounters to dissipate. As both short-term and chronic stress can negatively affect learning, reducing stress makes it more likely that retraining will be successful.
Retraining/behavior modification work.
A qualified behavior professional can help identify all possible triggers and create a management and retraining plan to stop the aggressive displays. This plan might include reintroducing the triggers at low enough “doses” that the horse can learn they are safe or won’t experience pain in those situations.
Take-Home Message
A warning: Most cases of aggression can be addressed successfully, meaning the horse is less likely to display the behavior in the future, whether in the same situations or in others. But you cannot “solve” aggression or guarantee it will never happen again. This is because aggression is a normal animal response to feeling threatened, frightened, stressed, or in pain.
If you use techniques such as punishment to try and suppress the behavior, the aggression will often happen again at a later time. And it might occur in a much more severe form than it appeared originally. Additionally, memories of prior bad experiences cannot be erased and will remain with the horse for life. If a horse feels he has no other choice, he might quite naturally behave aggressively again to reduce pain or negative emotions. This is particularly true if he has learned that doing so has helped him in the past.
If your horse is behaving aggressively, a team that includes your veterinarian and a qualified behavior professional is your best bet to address the issue without causing further harm.
Related Reading:
- Introducing a New Horse to a Herd: How To Keep the Peace
- From Body Language to Behavior: How Horses Communicate
Lauren Fraser, MSc, FFCP, has helped people understand horse behavior problems since 2006. With a background working as a horse trainer, an MSc in clinical animal behavior, and more than a decade working as an equine behavior consultant, Lauren’s approach gets to the heart of why horses behave the way they do and addresses issues using low-stress methods. Lauren also guest lectures at universities, presents at conferences, and creates educational programs for horse owners and equine professionals.
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