So, does your horse have bad habits? I hope that the information about The 5 F's of Instinctive Horse Behavior helps you to understand more about equine behavior problems and where they might be coming from.

Many of the reasons that a horse will exhibit these fear and stress based instinctive behaviors can have a lot to do with the 3 Reasons Your Horse Might Misbehave. If you have not read that section, I would encourage you to do so now.

Quite often, relieving your horse of these 3 common problems will help a lot of his stress and anxiety based behavior to go away. However, sometimes your horse's behavior problems will continue because it has now become a bad habit.

Don't be tempted to take the short route and think you will just try to correct the bad habit. Your horse's behavior problem will most likely either get worse or will come back unless the original problem has been dealt with.


After addressing the reasons why your horse was "misbehaving", he will then be able to focus more on the training methods that are being used. Now you and your horse will be able to overcome the behavior problem - rather than your horse focusing on what is bothering him or causing him pain.

I believe that most horses don't want to "misbehave". It is instinctive for horses to avoid stressful situations. Why would he want to be fighting with you when everything inborn in him just wants to have peace? This "naughty" behavior is his way of trying to tell you that there is some kind of problem (at least from his point of view). So, try to figure out why your horse is "misbehaving". Does he have a fear of something? Maybe he does not really understand what you want him to do? Or has he possibly been abused and now has fear and trust issues?

Try using positive horse training methods or equine clicker training to overcome these problems. Positive training methods will help to overcome a lot of that "naughty" behavior by allowing the horse to learn without causing him a lot of stress and fear. (I will be adding more on this topic at a later date)