u/abconcordia

Hi all. I'm a fairly experienced trainer and very experienced rider, but I am struggling a bit with my mare. She is the boss mare of the herd and is very aggressive about guarding the fence gate, food, any person that comes into the paddock who she thinks may have food, etc. This makes it fairly nerve racking to be near her in the paddock. She is very headstrong on the ground and from the saddle and does not move off pressure well if she doesn't feel like it. She usually respects me, but she regularly tests me and gets in my space.

Has anyone worked with a boss mare like this? What worked well? My priority is for her to be safer for other people to work with.

Just curious. I don't have issues catching any of my own horses so I'm not looking for advice. I just have found that people who don't use treats often try to "outlast" their horses (which I find usually means chase them around until they give up and accept defeat), and I'm curious what other methods there are.

I know treats work for getting a horse to come to you, although I find them unnecessary for catching in the long term. That's why I am looking for answers other than treats and outlasting.

Just because I know people are going to make assumptions, I'll be up front about how I work on hard-to-catch horses. Typically, I find horses hardest to catch at the beginning because they don't know or trust me and they aren't familiar with what I'm going to do with them once they're caught. I'll often use hay pellets at this point to teach them to self-halter. The treats help provide incentive at the beginning when they have no other reason to want to be caught/want to work with me. Once they know me and what happens when they are caught, I don't use treats anymore because they aren't needed.