What do you do if you have an aggressive horse? What solutions work, and which common solutions might actually make an already aggressive horse even more aggressive? One rider is asking for help.

October 2007 • VOLUME 26 • © HORSES For LIFE™ Magazine

"Our first Halloween show yesterday. Although it was fun initially, my horse really started acting up and I wanted to ask you for advice. There were 12 riders in the arena and my horse just got kind of angry. He spun around a few times, spooking at the costumes, I suppose... That wasn't really a major problem, but he then tried to attack some of the horses, striking out at them and even kicked out on two occasions which wasn't a good thing and I decided to withdraw from the rest of the classes, because I didn't want any of the horses to get hurt.

I was not happy with my horse at all and when we left the arena, I got off of him and and he looked really mad, not scared, but angry and I wasn't about to start a fight, so we took him back to his stall and he relaxed after that. Some people at the barn told me that I shouldn't let my horse get away with stuff like that and he needs to be disciplined for kicking other horses.

Of course I didn't carry a crop that entire time, so I couldn't really do anything about it, but how do you feel about this? I mean, how to do you tell a horse that it is NOT OK to attack other horses in the arena? I've never really run into a situation like this, I'm sure he was a bit scared to some degree with all these costumes and the noise. I think you can see that in the first photo, but I don't understand why he was going after the other horses in the arena in such an aggressive way... What do I do if he does that again? Hopefully, you can shed some light, I would greatly appreciate your insight."

This is a tough one, as discipline is not necessarily a cure-all. It might work for one horse, but then doesn’t work for the next horse and can actually make it worse.

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