Cribbing is a repetitive behavior in which a horse grabs a solid object with its front teeth, arches its neck, and pulls back while making a distinctive grunting sound. About 4.4% of horses in the U.S. do it, and once established, it rarely stops on its own. It’s one of the most discussed behavioral issues in horse ownership, partly because it’s so visible and partly because it’s widely misunderstood.
What Cribbing Looks Like
A cribbing horse latches its incisors onto a fence rail, stall door, bucket edge, or any fixed surface it can grip. It then contracts the muscles along the underside of its neck and pulls backward, often producing an audible grunt or gulping noise. This sequence can repeat dozens or even hundreds of times a day in severe cases.
Despite how it looks and sounds, horses don’t actually swallow much air during the act. For years, people assumed cribbing (sometimes called “windsucking”) meant the horse was gulping down air into its stomach, but research from UC Davis confirms that very little air is taken in. The behavior is primarily muscular, not respiratory.
Why Horses Start Cribbing
Cribbing doesn’t have a single cause. It emerges from a combination of diet, living conditions, digestive discomfort, and genetic predisposition.
Diet plays a major role. Horses evolved to graze for 14 to 16 hours a day, and their stomachs produce acid continuously to handle a near-constant trickle of forage. Modern management often flips this on its head: horses get a few large meals of concentrated grain with limited hay and limited time on pasture. This mismatch creates acidic conditions in the stomach that can damage the lining. Research on young horses found that foals who cribbed had significantly more stomach ulceration and inflammation than non-cribbing foals, and that feeding an antacid diet improved their stomach condition and reduced cribbing behavior in most of them.
Confinement is the other big environmental factor. Horses kept in stalls for long stretches with little turnout or social contact are at higher risk. The combination of limited grazing, high-concentrate diets, and restricted movement creates a perfect storm for the development of repetitive behaviors like cribbing.
Genetics matters too. Some horses seem wired to develop the behavior under stress while others in identical conditions never do. A large U.S. study confirmed that certain breeds show higher prevalence, suggesting an inherited component.
The Endorphin Question
A popular theory holds that cribbing gives horses a “rush” of feel-good brain chemicals, essentially making it an addiction. The reality is more complicated. When researchers measured stress hormones and endorphins in cribbing horses, they found that cribbing horses had higher baseline cortisol (a stress hormone) than normal horses across multiple conditions. Interestingly, endorphin levels were actually higher when cribbing was prevented, not during cribbing itself. And cortisol didn’t spike when the behavior was blocked, which you’d expect if cribbing were genuinely relieving stress.
So cribbing horses do appear to be more physiologically stressed overall, but the behavior itself may not function as straightforward stress relief. It’s better understood as a stereotypy: a repetitive, fixed pattern of behavior that develops in response to an environment that doesn’t meet the animal’s needs, then becomes self-sustaining over time.
Health Consequences
Cribbing takes a real toll on a horse’s body over the years. The most visible effect is dental wear. Horses that crib grind down their incisors far faster than normal, and while this doesn’t cause immediate problems, it becomes serious in older horses. Severely worn incisors can loosen and fall out, reducing the horse’s ability to graze effectively. In some cases this shortens the horse’s functional lifespan.
Cribbing horses also tend to be harder keepers, meaning they need more feed to maintain weight. They burn calories performing the behavior itself, and the time spent cribbing is time not spent eating.
The most alarming health risk involves a specific type of colic. A large international study found that cribbing horses had dramatically higher odds of developing epiploic foramen entrapment, a serious and often surgical form of colic where a section of intestine becomes trapped through a small opening near the liver. The increased risk was striking: cribbing horses were roughly 67 times more likely to develop this condition compared to non-cribbing horses. While this type of colic is relatively rare overall, the association is strong enough that veterinarians consider cribbing a significant risk factor.
Can Other Horses “Catch” It?
One of the most persistent beliefs in the horse world is that cribbing is contagious, that a cribbing horse will teach the behavior to its stablemates. Research has not supported this. No study has demonstrated that horses learn to crib by watching other horses do it.
What can happen is something called social facilitation. If a horse already has a genetic or physiological predisposition toward cribbing but hasn’t started, being housed near a cribbing horse might “release” that latent tendency. But a horse without the underlying predisposition won’t pick it up simply from observation. Isolating or removing cribbing horses from a barn to protect other horses isn’t supported by the evidence.
Managing and Reducing Cribbing
Because cribbing becomes deeply ingrained once established, the most effective approach is prevention through management that aligns with how horses naturally live. That means maximizing forage availability (ideally free-choice hay or pasture), minimizing grain-based concentrates, and providing as much turnout and social contact as possible. For young horses especially, addressing stomach acidity through diet has shown promise in reducing the behavior before it becomes a fixed habit.
For horses that already crib, the most common intervention is a cribbing collar. These are straps worn around the throatlatch that apply pressure when the horse flexes its neck to crib, making the action uncomfortable. A study testing two types of anti-crib collars, a muzzle, and surgically implanted gingival rings found that all devices significantly reduced cribbing compared to control periods. Importantly, the researchers did not find evidence of significant distress from the collars, and there was no “rebound effect” where horses cribbed more intensely once the device was removed.
Surgical rings, which are small metal implants placed in the gums to make grasping painful, worked only temporarily and caused pain during implantation. They’re generally considered a less humane option.
Modifying the environment can also help. Removing or covering graspable surfaces (electric fencing instead of wood rails, smooth metal stall guards) reduces opportunities without requiring a collar. Some owners coat fence rails with bitter-tasting products, though determined cribbers usually work around these.
No approach eliminates cribbing entirely in a confirmed cribber. The goal is usually reduction, paired with management changes that address the underlying dietary and environmental factors. Horses that get more turnout, more forage, and less confinement typically crib less frequently, even if they don’t stop altogether.