Yesterday I went to the barn to let the horses out and to my surprise Romeo greeted me with his head through the gate we use for his stall. He’s always the one who has his head through a fence eating grass so it wasn’t unusual but after a few minutes it became apparent that he couldn’t figure out how to get his head out of the gate. It’s funny now but I started worrying about his panicking and me trying to manipulate his head to freedom. Of course I expected he wouldn’t know what I was doing and would fight me. I briefly thought I might even had to get out a saw of some kind.
Now let me say right now that of all the animals I’ve worked with over the years, horses are probably the smartest I’ve come across. You can tell how much more intelligent they are from the way they learn and make decisions. Still, in situations like this I wonder.
Since I always seem to have a camera nearby, I grabbed one and pushed record as I tried an idea. If I could just get Romeo to move to the side a little and then incent him to turn his head sideways to fetch a carrot, maybe I could encourage him to fix this problem himself. And it worked. Below is a short (25 second) video.
So this has taught me a few things:
1) It’s important to check on the horses, even if they’re “safe” in the barn. If there is something to get scratched on or tangled in, they’ll find it. Romeo even scalped an inch square piece of fur from his head the day before on a little rough piece of metal on the fence (you can see it wrapped in twine in the video).
2) Perhaps gates aren’t the best wall substitutes. We intended on building a real wall with a wooden gate like the other stalls but just hadn’t gotten around to it yet. This reminds me of the importance to get that project done.
3) Try the simple first. Romeo clearly wasn’t panicked when I found him so it was a good idea to not freak out and look for some complicated solution. A few carrots did the trick in this case.
Have you had anything like this happen with your horse(s)? Please share your story.
Very clever solution! You can see that Romeo needed a little incentive. Carrots were just the ticket. lol!
Thanks for sharing this.
So far we’ve been lucky with our mare not gettinginto any trouble, but once our Nigerian goat got his head stuck between the gate and the post. He had stood up and then slid his head down and was wedged.
We could hear him screaming up at the house, so we went running.
Thankfully a mini-goat is easy to lift up and out, though. lol!
~Lisa
Very easy and elegant solution to the problem! You are very fortunate to have such a sensible horse – he clearly wasn’t panicked or even worried. Horses will get into trouble in the most amazing ways!
That video is crazy! Romeo is so calm about it all. Amazing how easy he came back out. What a good horse he is. I wonder if he’s done it before??
His incentive for putting his head through the gate was likely the hay nearby as seen in the video. I’d remove that to decrease the temptation to explore. Pipe corrals are notorious for injuring horses. I’ve seen people attach boards to them to decrease the risk of getting limbs caught when rolling or kicking through and getting stuck.
Your video of Romeo with his head stuck and your solution is priceless. Maybe you should think of sending it to America’s Funniest Videos? I particularly like what you have said about the intelligence of horses, because I believe there are many people who have horses and don’t realize how intelligent they are. For recreational riders who keep horses at home I recommend Basic Training for a Safe Trail Horse with subtitle of Eliminating the Fear Factors. It is a small paperback narrative with instructions about how to teach a horse to be a true companion without having to use bits, spurs, longe lines or round pens. It is available on Amazon.com or from the author at safetrailhorse@gmail.com
That was worth the price of admission. And it proves, once again, that with horses carrots are always the solution (at least in the horse’s mind).
Hi……not a story but something we did to prevent our colt from getting his head stuck was to attatch some of the squared wire fencing to the gate over the first two openings in the gate. He constantly put his head through and we knew it was just a matter of time before he would get it stuck because he was growing.
By the way,Romeo is a fine looking horse.
We have two donkeys and this morning my donkey stuck her head (Just like the horse) but she was very panicked.. She was jerking her head as hard as she could to get loose and her footing was bad due to mud/rain in our area. By the time I got there she had a couple of bad wounds where she ripped her hair off. I had to force her head sideways and then push it out!! Took all my strength will her fighting me.. Very scary. She is not too smart, although our 2nd donkey is very intelligent. I was hoping that someone made somthing specifically for this problem.