purplefdu

I was wondering if anyone has a favorite treat for their equine friends. My recipe box from high school got lost with my horse treat recipes (and dog treats-award winning) and a colleague has a picky eater she's trying to use clicker training on but can't find something her mare will eat. She's tried carrots and apples, and grass, and hay and sugar cubes but she pretty much just ignores them. Has anyone found something their horse just can't live without?

SpiritWind

A horse eats considerably more than a dog does, and I've never thought of clicker training a horse, but I clicker train my dog! Haha!

Basically, if this was my dog, (bear in mind I care for a horse that I don't train, and I research training because sometime I want my own horse, but I haven't got hands on experience) I would not feed before training, or if that's not an option I would feed lightly. I do not feed my dog until he's done what I want. So I'll take a bag of dog food and he'll work for it.

She can't carry around the amount of food a horse eats, but if she trains before breakfast the horse should be far more interested in the apple or carrots than if she's already well fed. Or she can feed her mare handfuls of her regular feed for doing the right things as she trains.

purplefdu

She's not keen on using pellets and losing a finger (her mare is quite the snobby brat). Thats what we do with our dog as well, but he'll eat pretty much anything, and prefers veggies to kibble. Our bird is the same as her mare. She's smart enough to be clicker trained, but she won't work for anything we've tried feeding her. At least not anything that she can eat enough of for a training session. We were hoping to get some product names possibly. I used to buy treats in high school and I know they make all kinds of stuff I've never seen in our teeny tack shop.