Alan":tv0kn2zr said:
Not to start an argument, but I find it hard to believe that if your horses ever ate grain from a bucket or out of a bucket they would not know what it was. Now if they never had grain from a bucket it would be a different story.
Alan
No argument, but it has been my experience that when a horse is in the corral there is no need to shake the bucket. There is nothing to distract/compete with their attention, plus they are used to having people approach/pet/scratch/feed in a corral. However, in the pasture there is green grass, whole other situation. Unless they are familiar with/able to correlate the sound of the grain being shaken with the taste of said grain, they are likely to ignore it as they are busy eating all that green grass. Case in point, one of our horses - actually several of our horses - have never been on pasture because we don't have pasture where we are now. Although they have been fed a mouthful of grain out of a bucket from time to time, when one of them jumped his run fence, he didn't have a clue what shaking that bucket meant. Where horses are concerned, in the corral and in the pasture are two totally different things most times.