Home of The Hoof Fairy. Equine hoof care professional, bodyworker and trainer.
14/02/2025
The use of food in training horses
I hold a slightly different belief system around the use of food for training horses.
I do not use it as a motivator.
I do not use it as a reward.
I do not use it as a lure or bait.
I do not use it as a reinforcer.
I use food to trigger the natural process of relaxation in the horse.
Food can act as an excellent gauge of a horse’s relaxation. A horse that is tense will usually not take a treat.
So if I offer food and the horse doesn’t take it, I can usually be pretty safe in my assumption that they are not relaxed.
I can also use food to bring about relaxation.
In his book “Twisted Truths of Modern Dressage”, Philippe Karl discusses the “Sugar Lump Effect”. The sugar lump effect is the process of the lower jaw and tongue mobilising in response to a sugar lump. The flow on effect being that this mobilisation frees up the hyoid bone which in turn relaxes the poll, the neck and the shoulders.
Of course, once the forehand is relaxed, the rest of the body can follow suit.
When physical tension leaves the body, the brain responds in kind.
This is why we see horses that are mentally tense also being very tight or very busy in the mouth.
Xenophon recommended that suppling of the neck was best achieved by first relaxing the mouth.
Baucher taught us that the horse will yield to the hand when the jaw is mobile.
L’Hotte told us that flexing the poll comes, above all, from the submission of the jaw.
And indeed, it is an interesting process to watch unfold.
All of the above named use bit flexions to achieve this and I can say in my experience that this is often enough on its own. But occasionally there may be a horse you come across that needs something a little more to help them along before you can get to that point with them.
Joy is one of those horses. Joy is a very mentally tense horse. She has been labelled as “neurotic” by more than one person. She is (or was) a chronic windsucker, she vacuum seals her mouth shut during ground work and in ridden work she is incredibly busy in the mouth while working with almost a glazed over look in her eye.
The decision to use food to get through this wasn’t my first choice but I had a theory that it might work which was in turn supported by my friend and mentor.
The difference in Joys behaviour is like night and day. And literally the only change that was made was the addition of food to help bring about relaxation.
There is no doubt that the food also acted as a distraction, reward and motivator, but that was not the purpose of my application.
