For example, as the director of the riding program at a children’s summer camp some time ago, I was responsible for the care and maintenance of the 50-horse riding string. As with people and in particular children, if inappropriate behavior has a rewarding outcome, it will stay in the animal’s behavioral repertoire. Similarly, extreme fear in a “wild” horse unaccustomed to human handling can lead to desperate and dangerous behavior.įinally, if a horse does something dangerous and finds it gets him out of an aversive situation (such as work), he may be inclined to try it again. Abusive treatment brings out a horse’s fight-or-flight tendencies, so many horses cope by behaving desperately and often aggressively. Instead, it results from severe mistreatment, the lack of human handling, or by realizing that bad behavior causes good things to happen-in other words, bad training. How Humans Create Bad Behavior in Horsesīut the vast majority of rogue behavior is not a consequence of nature. Likewise, hormonal signals can distract certain mares in heat to the point of aggressiveness and make others fiercely protective of their offspring. Successful stallions utilize aggressive behavior to defend their harems against predators, to battle against other stallions for control of mares and to drive their juvenile offspring out of the harem (a natural defense against inbreeding). This can be a particularly serious problem with certain stallions, since for them aggressive behavior serves many adaptive purposes in nature. High levels of naturally occurring reproduction hormones can make a few horses nearly impossible to deal with. What can you do if you find yourself faced with this kind of an equine nightmare? And unfortunately, these horses often end up with novices in search of affordable horses, who don’t yet know how to evaluate a horse’s training. What this all boils down to is that a rogue horse is a serious threat to human safety. The point is that rogue is a label typically used to describe a horse with significant and potentially dangerous behavior problems, such as deliberate and consistent charging, kicking and biting on the ground, or intractable bucking, rearing or bolting while under saddle. While there aren’t many real horses with such “in-your-face” aggressive tendencies, a few such creatures do exist, although generally they’re not created by a run-in with a semi truck. Pilgrim was described as a horse with such overwhelming psychological problems that it was dangerous to approach him for fear of attack. With Nicholas Evans’ best-selling novel The Horse Whisperer and Robert Redford’s movie adaptation, “rogue” horses like the fictitious Pilgrim got quite a bit of attention.
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