Why does my horse... EAT POOP?

Eating poop/ dirt/ bark

You just saw your horse do the most revolting thing imaginable! He sniffed a manure pile, and then tucked in like it was a five star meal! While you try to suppress the nausea and drag him away from his snack you want to forget the whole thing. After all, it must have been a terrible mistake. Well, not necessarily.

Poop, bark, and dirt eating are all among the unsavoury dishes we might see our equines tuck into from time to time. The official name for this behaviour is pica, and it can be dangerous as well as disgusting. Horses are disappointingly stupid when it comes to detecting toxic edibles, and for owners whose horse children insist on eating everything this is a big problem! Colic, poisoning and worn down teeth are all on the table when your horse changes up his menu!

Although mortifying for first timers, foals are known to tuck into their mothers manure before they have the teeth to graze with the rest of the herd. This is known as coprophagy and is thought that this assists with transferring the necessary gut bacteria from mother to foal. Although it's truly gross it's completely normal. In adult horses, however, manure munching is not normal at all. Neither is eating sand, or tree bark. However this behaviour happens within a context, and that is the key to figuring out why your horse is branching out his culinary options. If your horse child is tucking into a pile of poop you're gonna want to have a good hard look at his diet. Is he getting enough good quality roughage? Is he getting all the vitamins and supplements that he needs? Is he easily able to get to a fresh water supply? All of these can lead to manure munching, as well as eating other foreign dishes like dirt and bark. Thankfully a change in diet or additional supplement or lick are an easy fix with these issues, and could save you an enormous vet bill further down the line.

If you have your horse child on the best roughage 24/7, a complete nutritional supplement that takes care of all his needs, and easy access to lovely fresh water, you might have something else on your hands. You're probably looking at the result of boredom, stress and frustration. We all know that comfort food is a thing because the act of eating is soothing to us. I don't know how stressed or frustrated you have to be to eat poop, but some horses find themselves in that situation. Unfortunately domestic bliss is more for our benefit than our horses, and the further away a horses living situation is from their natural habitat, the more likely they are to become overwhelmed and resort to any number of coping mechanisms, poop eating included. As with stable vices that we covered in another episode, management is your key here. Things like exercise, time out with friends, freedom to roam, type of food, and stable enrichment will all go a long way to making your horse's life less stressful, and leave the poop disposal up to you.

[JessicaStinson-ogrq]

Thank you so much for the answers to this question, our mayor who is a foster child not actually ours, recently started displaying this habit about two weeks ago she lost a horse she had been bonded to, so this is probably not helping the stress, and although I would like for her to be eating all day the people who own her only want her to eat twice a day I am not as much as I think she would be happy with, but she is an easy keeper she’s not losing weight or anything so I’m gonna try giving her more exercise and just going out and brushing her a couple times a day thank you you