Should You Give Your Horse Treats?

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My absolute, definitive and experienced answer is…it depends on the situation and the horse, but just so’s you know, I’m stingy.😂

I had great success training 3 pushy pasture horses to backup for a treat. I would put my hand with the treat behind my back while pressing forward until they made the slightest weight shift back. Instantly produced the treat. Took 1 session, and from them on, all I had to do when approaching them was to have my hand behind me, treat or not, and they would all politely take steps back in unison. So for this scenario, treats started as the problem and ended as the solution.

There are a few "tricks" to training with food rewards that eliminate the cookie monster issue. First of all, start with a lower value treat like grass or alfalfa pellets instead of cookies. Teach the horse where you want them to keep their head in order to receive a treat. I prefer them to stand very still with head in calm neutral position. (No reaching towards me.) Then add a new step to the behavior you're working towards like come on cue - then put your head in treat position. I have taught a pony to go stand out of my way while I clean the pen using this approach. She'll stand and wait patiently until I go over and reward her. Usually 15-20 minutes every morning and evening. She has incredible self control for a greedy little pony 😅

Positive reinforcement is a great addition to a trainer's toolbox - it is a powerful motivator for the horse to engage, helps to create new, more positive associations, and allows for the training of skills that are difficult to impossible to train with negative reinforcement alone. Mouthiness and mugging occurs when there are no clear conditions to reinforcement, i.e. a treat is given in the absence of a desired behavior, so the mugging is generally what ends up being inadvertently rewarded. Misuse of negative reinforcement also has its own risks, so no means of training is at all perfect, and each has its uses. Great video Ryan!

Ive give my horses treats alot of times when I do groundwork exercises or stretch them. They still have to respect me, but it gives them motivation and we kind of playing around. I think its part of our bonding time and the horses gets happier if you stimulate their brain and they have to think.

My mare is 16yrs & has been handfed treats her whole life. People just need to realize that there are rules around food delivery then the horse learns not to mug you . Clicker training using treats has enabled me to teach tricks like sticking out her tongue on cue & playing basketball that would be very difficult to obtain w/o the food reward.

For 30 years I've ridden and trained using negative reinforcement (pressure and release). But, over time, I realized that the horse is doing his job essentially because of learned helplessness. What that means is the horse gives to pressure because he sees no other viable option. Recently, I picked up a wild mustang and make the decision to try positive reinforcement (treats for performance) as 80-90% of the training. So, even when I incorporate some pressure and release, the correct answer is followed up with the treat. This mustang is a bit of an experiment for me, to try an entirely new style of training from start to finish. Horses that I trained almost entirely on negative reinforcement/ pressure release, turned into obedient little soldiers on the ground and under saddle, but, weren't the happiest to come to me to be caught for work. Often, they'd start to walk away from me but then only turn to me to get caught because they knew that I would persist until caught... Learned helplessness. This mustang that I started with positive reinforcement being 80-90% of the training, his mind and attitude towards training is different than any other horse (including other mustangs) that I've worked with. When he sees my truck coming, he gets excited. When I enter his corral, he always stops what he's doing and comes straight to me. He catches me. Not the other way around. Because he wants to work and earn the payout. New tasks only take a few tries to catch on. By the end of the first week with him, he went from wild and untouched to me holding up a halter and him putting his face into it on his own. And, yes, we had to work through several days of learning to not be "muggy" or nippy for treats. It's actually really simple to teach a horse to not mug you... You don't give the treat until after they stop trying to mug you and their head returns to a neutral position. So now, when he hears the word "good", he returns his head to neutral to receive the treat, instead of trying to dig in my pockets or nip at my hands. I'm blown away at how eager he is to not only find the right answer, but to do it quickly and so lightly in feel, from this training. It's more effective at getting the horse to *want* to with with you, instead of working with you only because there's no other viable option (slavery, helplessness). If you think about it... Would you go to work 40 hours a week of physical labor for someone else if you were doing it out of force and got NO PAYCHECK? Ugh heck no! In using positive reinforcement, I feel like I'm working with my partner who is getting enough return out of their efforts to want to partner with me and work with me. My horse gets a "paycheck" and that paycheck is enough for him to say "ok what do you want me to do next?" So, after 30 years of riding and training, this year is the biggest shift I have made, and I'm definitely not looking back. But, I think it's super important for anyone who intends to use treats in training, to first learn all about how to prevent and correct horses that become "muggy". Starting treat training without a full understanding of how to successfully handle that, is a recipe for disaster. And it's such a simple lesson and concept... Just search YouTube for "positive reinforcement muggy horses" and watch the video lessons on that before you start! That's the #1 complaint or "con" that people bring up with this type of training, so no big deal just master the prevention and correction of it first. All of the fantastic benefits far outweigh the cons. Also, as training tasks become more complex, you stop treating for ever tiny little movement in the right direction. You can slowly phase out the treats so that they are eventually used only for the big gestures. For example, halter training at first, the horse is treated for each step. Then treated for every 3 steps. Then every 10... Etc. For lunging, I set up 4 cones in a square around me, and treated every time the horse responded to my cue by walking around 1 cone then yielding the hindquarters back to me. At the end of the 1st session, I increased it to 2 cones before the reward comes. In our second session, we moved up to 3 cones (3/4 of a full circle) and then to a full circle before ending the session. By session 4, the cones are removed and the horse keeps going on the circle until I give the verbal cue to halt and receive the treat. Phasing out the treats at the right time and in the right way is what solves the problem of "you always have to have treats to do anything with the horse". Both of these "cons" are only "cons" if you haven't dove into the teachings enough to learn how to handle them. It's like, do you never fill your truck's gas tank because driving might get you into an accident? Of course not. You fill the tank and take all the proper safety cautions into account, and you learn how to be a good driver. You learn what actions on the road prevent accidents and avoid the ones that cause them. Excellent video, btw. It's nice to see that you're open minded and experimenting. The way I look at it, all of these things are just tools in the toolbox. Some tools work better for specific jobs at hand, and learning as many tools as you can to put into your toolbox, makes you more likely to solve the next issue that comes up without any trouble. The most effective scenarios for positive reinforcement / treat training, is with abused horses. And that's because it's the opposite of abuse, and it teaches the horse that while some horrible human in their past hurt them, that not all humans are like that and that a meaningful and rewarding partnership is possible, moving forward. It turned a negative situation into a positive one.

Cookies are good for Positive Reinforcement, but Timing is the most important thing with that. If you want to teach your horse something new, a cookie in that moment your horse does it right, tells him he is right and motivates him to do it again. So in that video at 3:30 when you give that horse a treat for nothing and after he is begging for more you give him again, you are reinforcing that behaviour. Cookies are good but mostly the problem is when people not use them correctly.

That chick that said "I am the treat" Giiirrrlll!!! 🤨🤣🤣🤣 I'm kind of surprised you didn't touch on the subject about people who give their horses sugar cubes as treats, and how it's not a good thing for their teeth and all.

R+ is only good when paired with good timing. Just like pressure & release. Bad timing means rewarding & reinforcing possibly the incorrect or even "bad" behavior. That’s why horses can get "muggy". It’s usually when the horse comes into their space, then they give a treat, then yeah, that’s reinforcing that behavior. I will say that training with R+, horses are much more motivated & they learn faster. And if your environment or stimulus is scary for the horse it helps them switch back to a parasympathetic state very quickly! Especially if they’re used to being reinforced.

If my horses were nippy, I would not use treats. But they are not, so I do. Using only release from pressure (negative reinforcement) as the reinforcer is only half of the equation.

Haha it depends on if you are actually trying to train with positive reinforcement and willing to learn about the basics of it and how to do it correctly, or if you are simply giving your horse treats while you are training them.

I also give my horse a treat in the barn, but not while we are working. But I am not hard set on any rule.

You know I see people argue that they can't reward them in a timely manner. Yeah. It's hard with dogs too. That's why you use a bridge - like a clicker. There's also rules to giving treats to maintain manners And you can use markers to make pressure and release training more effective too

My horses love getting treats and it’s has strengthened our connection with each other. It makes them excited and happy. They are respectful and don’t get pushy. Why would I think about training with herd mentality when I’m not another horse?? If I behave like another horse I’m leaving myself open to be challenged and kicked etc right??? Makes no sense. I’m teaching my horses to work with me in my human world. It makes me sad that horses don’t get treated as well as dogs and cats. They are our pets and they deserve treats and being loved on. You can still have a respectful partner.

I trained my share back in the day and found food as a reward/motivator decreases the horse's awareness. They focus on the food/treat and not the task, their safety, or your safety. Is this an absolute? No. But, for the most part I did not use food as a reward or motivator for those reasons.

Treats and positive reinforcement is amazing if done right and with boundaries taught and working lol. Usually the people that don’t do treat training or clicker training is the ones that don’t understand how to teach the horse patience, boundaries, etc. of course balancing positive and negative reinforcement is great for the horse mental and thinking

We do carrot stretches all the time..

Wouldn't it depend upon the horse that's being trained?