Q: My gelding is being evicted from his boarding barn if I can’t get him to stop kicking the stall walls within the next month. For five years before coming to this barn, at two different places, he never kicked walls. Soon after arrival at this barn, when I started veterinary school in another state, his kicking started. He has done it off and on for two years. He will sometimes go several weeks without any kicking, and we hope he’s over it, and then it comes back for a few days at a time. Once the kicking persisted for about a month. We can’t seem to figure out why he does it or how to stop it.

I saw an online article from a veterinarian in California on how to stop stall kicking. He said to move the horse to different stalls, which the barn owners have done a couple times when he was in a kicking phase and there was an open stall available. It made no difference. That veterinarian also suggested trying a larger stall. The stalls in this barn are already pretty big–about 12 by 16 feet–and there’s no way to make any of them larger. Another suggestion in that article was to keep hay available all the time, which we also had done right away and have continued for more than a year and a half with no change. The author said if those things don’t work, then the horse needs to have something to punish the kicking, so that he doesn’t hurt himself. He suggested kicking chains, a shock collar, and an automatic water sprayer. Do you know if these things work with all or any horses?

My horse has hurt his foot a couple times when he was in a kicking spell, and that didn’t seem to stop the kicking, so I’m not sure something that hurts him will be effective. Another suggestion to keep the wall intact and prevent the horse from hurting himself was padding the walls with old tires behind stall mats. My horse’s kicks can contact anywhere around the stall. The dents in the boards on the side walls, chips in the cinder blocks at the back, and dents in the metal stall front start low down near the floor and go as high as six feet or higher–so you would have to pad the walls from floor to nearly the ceiling, including the stall door. I don’t think we can do that. What are your thoughts?
— via e-mail

A: Kicking out in a stall with hind limb contact to the walls as you describe is almost always due to physical discomfort of some sort, especially when it comes and goes. And if the horse kicks randomly around the stall rather than only in one place, it is almost always because something is bothering the horse physically that leads to an outburst of discomfort or frustration. Finding out what is aggravating the horse physically might be challenging (and expensive), but in my experience this is the humane way to go