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Stable Vices Information and Videos
Stable Vices: Domesticated horses can also develop bad behaviors or "vices" including; wood chewing, cribbing, weaving, wall kicking, feed bolting, circling, and pawing or digging. These behaviors are usually a result of boredom, lack of exercise, confinement, hunger, and isolation. Below you will find videos of horse's demonstrating these various stall vices.
A horse, by nature, is happiest when allowed to do what horses were meant to do, which is graze and be part of a herd. Being confined to a stall for periods of time or being isolated can cause harm to their psychological well-being.
When a horse is stressed, bored, fearful, or has built up energy that it cannot burn off, it is likely to develop some type of bad habit such as, wood chewing, cribbing, and so on. They can also imitate other horses who have learned such behaviors.
Ultimately, the goal is to stop the behavior by alleviating the cause. The behavior itself is just the symptom. Allowing your horse more time in the pasture to graze and alleviate boredom is a good place to start. Include more frequent feeding times with hay instead of two larger meals. Place a toy or non-breakable mirror in the stall to distract your horse and give them something to do. Make sure your horse has a companion-horse, donkey, goat, etc.
It is important to note that some horse's will not respond to treatment if the behavior has been severely ingrained due to mistreatment or other factors and in these cases it is a matter of managing the horse's behavior as well as possible.
Commercially available cribbing collars are available to manage these horse's that are afflicted with this type of stable vice. For horse's that stall weave, new research has shown that installing a mirror in their stall may alleviate or decrease this behavior.
