Keep Your Horses Contained
Safe, reliable confinement is the foundation of effective horse management. Loose horses can severely injure themselves, overeat to the point of laminitis and colic, wander out into traffic or simply disappear forever. A lot of horses are set loose during one-time lapses when caretakers forget to close a gate or latch a door. Vigilant double checks of barriers and ingrained gate/door-latching habits would prevent most of these unplanned outings.
But every once in a while a horse comes along who learns to fiddle or shove or leap his way out of confinement, and the game is on. Many of these crafty escapees then go on to free other horses to join in the adventures. The slyest of these escape artists seem to time their antics for periods when their caretakers are not around.
Given the gravity of the consequences, repeated escapes are behavior that has to be met head-on. At the same time you're dealing with the perpetrator and his motives, you need to implement heightened safety measures to render any succeeding breakouts relatively harmless.
Discover the Motives
My own chestnut mare, Fire, began escaping immediately following a flooding incident at the barn. After I rode her that evening, I had no choice but to put her back in her soggy stall. I left her with plenty of hay, her evening grain and a mental apology for having to bed her down in such conditions.
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When my husband and I went to tend to the horses the next morning, Fire's stall door was standing open, and she was watching for us in the next aisle. Sometime during the night, she had escaped and opened the goats' stall door, liberating them to roam with her. Thanks to the facility's existing horse-proofing, no harm came of the mare's outing, but it was a behavior we didn't want to encourage. Fire had never attempted to escape prior to the flooding and now seemed intent on leaving that stall whenever she could. The circumstantial link suggested that we try her in a different setting. We made arrangements to move her to another barn with dry stalls, and the escape attempts ceased.
Horses breach their confinement to get away from situations that threaten them or get to circumstances that satisfy them. A confirmed escape artist may start his career in response to an authentic threat to his well-being within a stall or paddock. Yet after a time or two of enjoying the good eating and unfettered socializing that may come with the newfound freedom, the literal or figurative greener grass on the other side of the fence/door becomes the motivation.
If you have an emerging problem and want to nip it in the bud, examine the escaped horse's living situation closely for any environmental or social factors that may be goading him to leave his space. If your horse is continually escaping a particular stall, take a minute to stand in it yourself. Look around and ask what it might be that is making the space so inhospitable. Does it contain a bees' nest or other insect threat? Does the roof leak during downpours? Does a loose piece of roofing or siding make a racket in high winds?
Observe the escaping horse's interactions with his near neighbors in the stable and during turnout to see if he's being intimidated by their threatening behavior. The close company of a bully may put more psychological pressure on a stabled horse than he wants to bear, regardless of the fact that a wall separates the two of them. Horses who escape from paddocks during turnout may be on the receiving end of bites and kicks from aggressive herdmates or frightened by dogs or wildlife that enter the field seeking a chase.
Horses who escape to satisfy a need may be motivated by the most basic drives, starting with hunger and thirst in cases of neglect but also including sexual urges for stallions and for mares in heat. But most commonly, the motivation to escape to something derives from the disparity between equine nature and the restrictions of domesticated life.
As herd animals, horses have an innate urge to be in the company of others of their kind. An insecure individual kept in isolation may apply all his energies to fiddling or muscling his way back to the reassuring companionship of other horses. Separation stress often causes stabled horses to fret rather than eat and rest and turned-out horses to run the fence line rather than graze. Their living spaces as well as their psyches are in disarray, making the motivation for any successful breakouts apparent: They are miserably lonely.
The inactivity of confinement is just as abnormal to horses as social isolation. The combination of pent-up physical energy and the lack of mental stimulation is usually behind ingrained escape behavior. The initial escape occurs because the horse has nothing else to do. In looking for an outlet for his energy, the bored horse begins mouthing the door latch, probably enjoying its clatter along with the oral activity. By chance, the latch releases, the door swings open, and the horse saunters out. Particularly bright horses may need just one success to learn an irreversible lesson. A couple of successes are bound to cement the idea that fiddling with the latch leads to exciting alternatives to the tedium and inactivity of confinement.
In my experience, habitual escapees are most often intelligent horses with a low tolerance for boredom, particularly when kept in stalls with little exercise and/or turnout time. Because of their intelligence, they quickly learn that fiddling with latches causes doors to open and remember the procedure to try again. Well-practiced horses can open standard latches as quickly as you can, and the average horse has about the same adeptness with doorknobs and latches as a 2-year-old child.
Fix What's Fixable
Our rescue organization took in an abandoned horse named Ranger, whose background we did not know because there was no one to give us his history. Shortly after he came to us, he began jumping fences, some as tall as five feet, to get in with mares, whom he then bullied and chased in the pasture. He was a gelding, but we suspected from his studdish behavior that he may have been gelded late in life or possibly had a retained testicle. We tried putting him out with other horses to combat the fence-jumping habit, but he remained an inveterate bully. He bit, kicked and chased the others in the pasture. In the end, Ranger was confined to a stall and used in a lesson program where he got plenty of exercise. He was adopted by a teenager who rides him daily, and he does not seem to be bothered by being stabled during the rest of the day.
After identifying the motives for the breakouts, correct as many of the contributing factors as possible, given your circumstances. Remove or repair the sources of discomfort/threat that you may have uncovered in the escapee's stall or pasture. In confinements where the horse has experienced memorable physical or psychic trauma, correcting the problem may not be enough to erase the association, and you may need to move the horse to a different stall or turnout area.
An escapee seeking companionship will consistently be found near occupied stalls or pastures and be reluctant to leave when you do find him. Take the hint, and provide him with a more natural and satisfying social situation. Horses aren't likely to escape from a field filled with friendly herdmates, and even visual contact with other horses can be enough to ease the insecurity of some isolated animals.
If the problem is a horse who escapes from an enclosure containing other horses, study the group dynamics. A horse at the bottom of the pecking order may take to jumping the fence rather than tolerate the aggression that comes his way. Try moving him to another group, removing the particular horse who bullies him or placing him in a private run, all of which require some flexibility in your turnout arrangements.
When you own just one horse who goes wandering off the property in search of others, find him a companion animal. If you cannot afford to purchase another horse, look into fostering for a rescue organization or taking in a boarder. Companion ponies or goats may fill the social role at reduced upkeep costs.
Preventing boredom-motivated escapes means keeping high-energy horses busy. Stall toys can help during confinement, but horses' responses to them are variable. The best boredom fighter is lots of riding and/or turnout. I've seen many escape artists reformed by regular, consistent work.
Feeding programs also play a role in the motivation of and solution for escapes. Examine the problem horse's ration and body condition to be sure that he's receiving an optimum diet. If a thin horse's breakouts seem always to lead to edibles, he's obviously in need of more feed. Well-fleshed horses who escape to gorge at the feed bin are dangers to themselves and need special care to prevent the fulfillment of their appetites.
In between these extremes are confined horses whose diets supply much more concentrated energy than they actually require and much less roughage than they'd be eating under natural conditions. One antidote to confinement tedium is lots of chewing. For bored horses, cut way back on grain and processed feeds, and increase the hay ration accordingly. Make the roughage consumption even more "natural" either by doling out the hay in many small portions over the course of the day or supplying it in a hay bag or feeder that forces the horse to expend some effort to extract each mouthful.
Read page 2 for tips on selecting latches and making your horse's surroundings safer.
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