What are a horse’s favorite foods? Every horse is unique and your horse has food preferences just like you do. Finding your horse’s favorite treats or foods can help you in feeding, training, or giving enrichment to your horse. Your equine friend can’t tell you what their favorites are, but they can show you what they like in a preference test! Here’s how to compare different flavors and see what feed and treats are your horse’s favorites.
How Can a Horse Food Preference Test Find Favorite Foods?
Testing a horse’s food preferences is pretty straightforward. It’s is exactly like it sounds. You offer several foods and observe how your horse responds to each one.
There are many designs for this sort of test, but the method I’ll walk you through here is simple and fun. You and your horse will both have a good time figuring out their favorite foods!
Image by Comfreak from Pixabay
In this horse food preferences test, you’ll choose several different food options to compare and offer them all at once. By seeing what order your horse eats the foods in, you’ll be able to get a idea of what they like the most and the least.
You can find out what their favorite fruits or vegetables are, or confirm your suspicions that they enjoy carrots more than celery! You can also test your horse’s preference for flavors that can be added to their feed, and their preference for the texture or moisture of their feed.
Why Find Your Horse’s Favorite Foods?
Knowing your horse’s favorite foods is very useful. We usually assume a lot about what foods horses enjoy most. Horses almost always love carrots, apples, sweetened pellet feed, and other sugary snacks. But every horse is unique and they all have favorites.
There are also plenty of exceptions and horses who really dislike certain flavors. Knowing what parts of a meal or what treats your horse really likes lets you customize and plan their care.
These are the ways you can use the results of a horse food preference test:
Image by Rainer Maiores from Pixabay
Use Your Horse’s Favorite Foods for Enrichment
Enrichment for horses is all about encouraging natural behaviors, including feeding behaviors. Food-related enrichment like feeders and puzzles are fun and provide mental stimulation.
To get the most benefit from your food and treat enrichment, knowing how much your horse likes certain foods is important. By setting up a preference test, you can figure out what flavors and foods are most interesting or engaging for your horse. You’ll use this information when planning for stall toys or pasture treats.
Your horse’s favorite food can encourage them to solve an especially challenging puzzle. Slightly less appealing foods encourage your horse to relax and take their time with enrichment. And finding out which flavors your horse can’t stand can keep you from creating food enrichment or puzzles that your horse finds nasty!
A preference test clearly shows what your horse likes the most so that you can use this information to create the most successful enrichment for your horse.
Use Your Horse’s Food Preferences in Training
Knowing your horse’s food preferences is also extremely useful for training purposes. Positive reinforcement training relies on providing rewards, usually food. The type of food reward is a complex choice that impacts your training sessions.
Usually, you don’t want to use your horse’s absolute favorite food for training. Using favorite foods as treats can make some horses anxious and unfocused. Instead, use a food preference test to find foods that your horse enjoys but isn’t wild for.
By knowing exactly what your horse’s preferences are, you can choose the perfect reinforcer for each session and make greater progress in your training efforts.
Use a Horse Food Preference Test to Find Creative Treats
Most horses need to avoid excess sugar and starches. And some horses have metabolic conditions that take sweet treats completely off the table.
Training or giving food toys to these horses can be challenging. By setting up a food preference test for your horse, you can find healthy alternatives that your horse enjoys. Cucumber, celery, squash, and peanuts are all great low-sugar treats. Which one will be your horse’s favorite?
Use a Food Preference Test to Check Favorite Foods Over Time
Lastly, a food preference test can show you how your horse’s favorites or hated foods change over time. Is your horse picky? Keeping track of what flavors they accept can set you up for success if they need a diet change or a medication hidden in their food.
How to Do the Horse Food Preference Test
There are several ways to set up a preference test, and this method is simple, fast, and fun. You’ll offer several different foods at one time and seeing what order your horse chooses to eat them. By repeating the process a few times, you’ll be able to determine if there is a consistently favored food, foods that consistently get eaten last, and some foods that seem to be in the middle of the road.
What Foods to Test?
A taste preference test is a bit like a science experiment – but no grades and no explosions. Just like any good experiment, deciding what to test is one of the first steps. Start by selecting the items that you want to rate your horse’s preference for. Here are some ideas:
- Your horse’s daily pelleted feed with a variety of flavors added
- A group of fruits and vegetables
- The training reinforcers that you already tend to use
- Potential new reinforcers or enrichment foods that you’re interested in seeing your horse’s response to
- Your horse’s daily pelleted feed prepared with various textures or degrees of water added
For most preference tests, keep it simple. To get an accurate idea of what your horse prefers, you’ll want to repeat the same test a few times, to see if they consistently choose to eat one type of food before the others. This is more realistic if you are sticking to three or four food items, usually no more than five.
There’s no right or wrong set of food items to test using this method. The only important part is consistency. So if you want to find out your horses preference between apples, bananas, grapes, and carrots, you’ll want to offer apples, bananas, grapes, and carrots.
You can set this test up for any different kind of food, but it’s most useful to keep fairly similar groups of foods together if possible. So you can test all your usual training reinforcers, or various vegetables, or different kinds of bagged treats. It can be really interesting to see what flavors, textures, or sizes your horse prefers within each group.
Lay Out the Food Preference Test
Once you know what foods you want to test, decide the best way to set up your food items. You’ll be offering your group all at once, so you’ll need containers or plates to hold the foods.
It’s important that the horse understand that they can freely choose to eat from a variety of foods that they see all at once. A set of flat dishes or mats is ideal.
The best layout I found so far is a snack tray with multiple sections. It’s shallow enough that the horse has a clear line of sight and smell between the different options. Plus, this set was a very inexpensive dollar store find.
For doing multiple trials in a row, I have several of these available to set up so that I can repeat the same test a few times in sequence.
If you don’t have a partitioned plate or tray, you can set up the food trial on nonbreakable plates, vinyl placemats, shallow feed bowls, or a rubber stall mat.
Find Your Horse’s Favorite Foods!
Now it’s time to set up and run the preference test. Take your food items and arrange them on the tray. Use small amounts – just enough for two or three bites. A huge pile of food is not needed to determine your horse’s preference, and smaller amounts let you run the test several times in one go without giving your horse too many treats.
Here’s the food preference test ready for the horse:
It looks like a lot of food, but here is just a scant handful of each food item in the partitioned tray. When testing for favorite foods, a little goes a long way!
Use roughly the same amount of food of each type. Don’t put a single pretzel next to a big pile of apple chunks. If you’re doing multiple tests one after another or giving multiple trays at once, arrange the food in the exact same way on each plate.
Here, you can see the foods set up for a texture preference test, arranged in exactly the same way on the two trays:
Repeat the Horse Food Preference Test
Some horses tend to just go for whatever food comes in front of their nose first, whether they have a preference or not. This happens most often the first few times you set up the food trials, when your horse is really excited about the food.
After the first test or two, they tend to explore a bit more before selecting a food to eat. If your horse does tend to always eat the closest food option first, make sure this doesn’t mess up your results by spacing all the foods equally and presenting them to the horse so that they are all an equal distance away. You can do this with all your food options arranged in a line or semicircle.
For best results, plan to repeat the preference test several times, either on the same day or over several days.
Recording Your Horse’s Favorite Foods
Pay attention during the food preference test to see what your horse enjoys most. Taking a video of each trial on your phone is a great way to keep track of what order your horse picks the foods.
Writing down the results is another great strategy. Make a list of all of the food choices in the trial and write a “1” next to the first food that the horse chooses, “2” next to the second, and so on. Make a note if the horse takes a bite and then chooses to move on to another food rather than finishing all of a certain food type, or any other interesting information.
Then repeat! Once the horse understands the process, you will often observe a clear preference as they choose to eat certain foods immediately, just like a kid eating french fries before broccoli.
Horses will show clearly what they prefer. The more times you set up the test the better your information will be – each one is a snapshot of how they felt about the foods at that moment. And the best part about this is that each food preference test is actually an enrichment situation in itself. You’re offering food in an interesting and engaging way, and allowing the horse to taste new flavors and textures.
You can then use the results of each set of food preference tests to inform what and where you choose to use food in enrichment and training for your horse, what flavors can be added to their bucket feed, and how their tastes change over time.
Safety Notes
Setting up a food preference test is usually very interesting, engaging, and very safe. There are only a few safety points to consider.
- Make sure that any plates or mats you use to hold the food horse safe.
- Make sure that the total amount of food you’re giving to the horse is appropriate for their daily diet. If your horse can only receive a certain amount of some foods, such as high carb treats or sugary fruit, use very small amounts in your tests. You can also mix higher-carb items into tests that mostly contain low-NSC items like watery vegetables, but don’t be surprised if the sweet foods are always first to be eaten.
And that’s all there is to it! Good luck finding your horse’s favorite foods!