Fall is a great of year to be with your horse. Fresh, crisp mornings, beautiful weather, and lots of holidays and seasonal activities. Take advantage of autumn by sharing enrichment activities with your horse, giving you more ways to enjoy the season – and ensuring that your horse enjoys it as much as you do! This easy pumpkin and straw forage pile is the ideal way to jump into horse enrichment for fall. Here’s how to set it up, step by step.
What’s This Enrichment?
The pumpkin and straw forage pile is a take on one of the easiest but most enjoyed horse enrichment items, the classic forage box.
Horses love snuffling and tossing through material to find treats inside. If you’ve ever watched your horse pick through a pile of hay and fling it all over, looking for the perfect bite, you’ve seen this behavior in (unwanted) action.
Enrichment for horses means encouraging natural behavior in a way that’s healthy and beneficial for your horse. This forage pile activity lets your horse practice their nose-through-stuff skills in a way that’s fun, safe, and budget-friendly.
What Behaviors Does the Forage Pile Encourage?
The real power of enrichment isn’t just to provide a few moments of fun, or even to keep a stall-bound horse occupied rather than bored and destructive.
It’s to give your horse the opportunity to act like a horse, mentally and physically – to use their bodies and minds in natural ways, since living with humans doesn’t always allow for expression of behavior. Along the way, enrichment lets your horse use their senses and enjoy lots of stimulation and novelty.
Natural behaviors are so important to that they’re considered one of the five crucial elements of good equine welfare.
So even though this horse enrichment for fall isn’t the most natural-looking activity (it’s super cute, though!), it’s designed to encourage some important equine behaviors:
- Seeking out food by touch and scent
- Tossing, pushing, and snuffling through debris to find food
- Problem solving and cognition
That’s a lot of behavioral benefit for an enrichment activity that looks like it was made for your Instagram.
And the best part is, it’s very versatile and surprisingly easy to set up.
What You Need
To make the forage pile as shown, you’ll want a kiddie pool, a whole bunch of tiny pumpkins, some straw, and treats. But this activity is perfect for varying to fit your horse’s needs and what you have on hand, so here are the essentials:
- A material for the pile – straw, hay, or leaves
- Treats to hide inside and under the pile
- A pan, trough, or stall mat (optional)
- Fall-themed add-ins (optional)
I used a plastic pool because it’s crazy how many great, behavior-focused horse enrichment activities you can set up using a cheap kiddie pool, but you can use a shallow trough or set this activity up on clean stall mats. You can also pile the material on bare ground, but I prefer a container to ensure the horse can find all the small-textured goodies like hay pellets.
I used straw for this activity because it’s the perfect seasonal item for fall horse enrichment. Horses can eat straw but most avoid it if there’s anything else to eat. You can also use freshly raked autumn leaves as long as they’re from horse-safe trees (absolutely no red maple, no matter how pretty it is).
If you use straw or leaves, it’s best to clean up the enrichment activity when your horse is done and not leave it unsupervised. If you want to leave it unattended with your horses as a pasture enrichment, use plain hay in the pile instead.
You’ll also need some type of horse-approved treat. Dry treats like cereal work best because they don’t stick to the forage material, but anything will work!
Lastly, the fall pumpkins are totally optional but add an extra level of interest and puzzle to the forage pile as they roll around. And if your horse takes a bite, don’t worry – pumpkin is safe for horses to eat.
Putting it Together
Putting this horse enrichment activity together takes about five minutes. It’s REALLY fast. Just make sure to distract your horse while you set it up!
Bring the container or mat along with the forage material and treats to your horse’s stall or pasture.
Set out the container and scatter the goodies throughout. You can space them evenly as shown, or make little piles here and there for your horse to discover.
Next, layer in the forage material:
If desired, add more treats on top of the forage – this can help horses new to enrichment figure out that there’s good stuff under the forage pile too.
Top with the optional pumpkins or other fall decor.
That it! So simple – now invite your horse in to enjoy their fall enrichment activity.
Using the Fall Forage Pile
This horse enrichment for fall, like other forage items, is a great choice for enrichment beginners. It’s very simple for the horse to understand, so there’s little need to teach your horse to use it.
If your horse is new to enrichment or doesn’t show much curiosity, you can use larger pieces of treats. Cut apples and carrots into extra wide, thin “sheets” to make them easy for your horse to see, and use an extra portion of goodies at the bottom of the forage material.
Of course, safety should always be a top priority. Make sure your horse has had hay or pasture before doing this enrichment activity, because fasting and food anxiety can trigger your horse to consume items they shouldn’t. If they do show too much interest in leaves and straw, replace the forage material with hay and consider providing a browsing board to give them a healthy way to sample leaves and herbs.
This horse is doing exactly as intended, throwing the straw everywhere and making a giant mess:
This enrichment activity uses familiar items and doesn’t move around, so it’s unlikely to trigger fear. But if you notice that your horse seems unusually way of this enrichment, we have an article on what to do when your horse is scared of their toys and enrichment.
That’s all – happy fall, y’all!
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