Coloured Australian Pony Stud

Should you ever punish your horse?

We’ve either done it, or seen it done, a horse refuses a fence and gets a whack, a horse moves in too close to its handler and gets a slap on the nose, a horse bucks and gets some smacks with the whip, horse refuses to load onto a float and gets a leadrope aimed at their rump, horse kicks out at a child and gets a hiding from an angry parent, a horse dumps its rider so is put away without its usual ration of feed to teach it a lesson.  Is this ever justified and what in effect are we actually doing when we “punish” a horse in this way?  

Many people punish their horses for doing something “wrong” because they believe that the horse knows it did the wrong thing and therefore has to pay a price for making a wrong choice.  That is, suffer consequences in the same way that a child who lies about nicking a biscuit from the jar experiences unpleasant consequences such as getting a smack or being denied dessert.  Or they believe that the horse is dissing their human and needs to be shown who is the “real” boss.

The question is, do horses really see us as their leaders and so understand the consequences of doing the “wrong thing” in the same way that we do?  This is critical because if horses don’t make these kind of connections, when we punish them, what “lesson” have they really learnt?  

To answer this question we need to consider how animals learn from their environment and how we manipulate this for our own ends.  We will start with considering the concept of what we do when we train a horse and what our choices are when it goes “wrong”.

What is “training”?

When we train an animal what we are doing is putting something they already know how to do under our stimulus or cue control, that is, they do that something when and where and for how long we signal to them to do so.  For example, we don’t need to teach a young horse how to canter, it can do that within hours of birth, what we do is teach it to canter when signalled and to keep on cantering until we signal it to do something else.  

Broadly speaking then, when putting an animal’s behaviours under our stimulus control we have two goals, either to get the animal to do more of something or less of something.  In general, our training focus is on getting more of a behaviour and it is only when the animal does something we don’t appreciate that we attempt to train it do less of that behaviour.  For example, we want more of a calm transition from trot to canter and less of a pigroot when we apply the aid.  We consciously set up the conditions to ask for the canter transition but only deal with the pigroot if we need to.   The vast majority of our training is focussed on this first part of the equation, which means we practice the means to get more of the good stuff and only resort to stopping the bad stuff as a last resort.

 Punishers and reinforcers

So how do we get more of the good stuff and less of the bad?  By using punishers and reinforcers.  Huh? Hang on for a bit while I unpack this.  Something is either a punisher or reinforcer depending on what effect it has on the target behaviour.  A reinforcer will motivate the animal to do more of a behaviour and a punisher will motivate the animal to do less of a behaviour.  

 At its most basic, animals are motivated to do more of a behaviour that brings good consequences and less of behaviours that bring unpleasant consequences.  This makes sense for survival- behaviours that bring food, rest, companionship, protection from predators and the opportunity to mate are worth learning and then repeating. Behaviours that cause pain, add stress, make you more vulnerable to being eaten, less likely to eat yourself or prevent you from reproducing are not going to help you (or your genes)  survive so are not worth repeating.

So to get more of a particular behaviour we need to give the animal good consequences from it performing that behaviour and to get it to perform less of a behaviour we have to deliver bad consequences.  The effect that these consequences have on the target behaviour tells us whether we have reinforced (strengthened) or punished (reduced) it.

Thus, a reinforcer is anything that strengthens or makes a behaviour more likely.  There are two ways we can reinforce a behaviour, either positively (adding something like food, sex, liberty etc) or negatively,  (taking something away such as pressure).  In each case, the animal values the addition of something or the removal of something it finds unpleasant highly enough to repeat the behaviour that it believes led to that outcome.  It’s the law of effect, whatever behaviour immediately precedes the consequence that the animal values will be repeated.  

A punisher is the opposite of a reinforcer, it makes a behaviour weaker, that is it  suppresses a behaviour.  Just like reinforcement the law of effect applies- whatever behaviour preceded the punishing consequence is the behaviour that will be suppressed, that is the animal should be less likely to repeat that behaviour.  Just like reinforcement there are two types of punishment, positive punishment and negative punishment. Que?  

Positive punishment simply means adding something to the animal’s world to suppress a behaviour whereas negative punishment means removing something from the animal’s world to suppress a behaviour.

Here are some examples:

Positive punishment:

Horse goes to bite its handler and is smacked on the nose and doesn’t bite- the smack has been added to its world and the biting behaviour is suppressed or punished.

Negative Punishment:

The horse mugs you for treats, you withhold access to treats, so the horse stops trying to mug you- the treats have been withdrawn from the horse’s world, the mugging stops, so the withdrawal of the treats has punished the mugging behaviour.  

In horse training, we mostly rely on positive punishment, usually in the form of whip strikes, strong rein or leg aids, hitting with leadropes, shouting at or scaring the horse and so on.  We use negative punishment less because its much harder to link the consequences of removing something to the particular behaviour we are aiming to suppress.  In dogs trained with positive reinforcement (play or toys), negative punishment (withholding the toy or food reward if the dog responds incorrectly to a cue) is very effective in motivating them to try the correct response next time the cue is given.  

Causes and effects- measuring the success of your punishment

Whether something has actually reinforced or punished a behaviour can only be gauged by considering its effect on the behaviour. If as a result of the unpleasant stimulus you have applied to your horse, it stops performing the annoying behaviour, you have successfully punished your horse.  However, if for example, you repeatedly strike a horse for refusing a fence but it keeps on refusing your whip strike has not actually punished the refusing- the refusing hasn’t been suppressed.

The same is true of reinforcement, if you keep pulling on the reins but the horse doesn’t stop then your rein pull isn’t reinforcing- it has not strengthened the stopping behaviour.  

Back to punishment, for it to be effective, it has to suppress a behaviour which means the animal has to be able to make an association between its behaviour and the likely consequence. It has know which particular behaviour will result in the unpleasant consequence and then choose not to repeat it and thus avoid the unwanted experience.  The application of unpleasant or painful stimuli to a horse (or any animal) that doesn’t allow that animal to make the clear connection and thus modify its behaviour in the future so it avoids the unpleasant stimuli is not punishment, but it could be abuse.  

How effective is punishment as a training tool really?

Punishment is much harder to effectively deliver than reinforcement.  Here’s why:  

1.    In many of the situations in which punishment is delivered it is not clear to the animal which of its responses it should cease performing.  Take for example hitting a horse for refusing a fence- its it the stopping, the cantering up to the fence, or the change in its head position as it judges the height of the fence that caused it to be hit?  How would it know?  

What’s more likely to happen is that it makes an association between the fence, the surrounding context and getting a smack and becomes more fearful and thus either rushes at the fence and leaves a leg or starts refusing earlier as it tries to remove itself from the possibility of another whack.

 In the latter case it could be argued that what the whack has actually punished (suppressed) is the horse approaching the fence at all, rather than the coming to halt in right front of it.   How many of us have seen horses get eliminated by refusing the same fence three times in a row, with each refusal accompanied by a whack and the horse veering away from the fence earlier and earlier each time it is pointed at it?

2.    In many cases the punishment is not contiguous with the behaviour being suppressed, that is there is too large a gap between the unwanted behaviour and the punishment so it is not clear to the horse which of its responses caused the addition of the unpleasant stimuli.

Taking the refusing horse, the horse refuses, the rider turns him back to the fence, gives him a whack and then asks him to jump the fence.  What behaviour is being suppressed?  The refusing, the turning, or the re-asked for jumping effort?   

Similarly, remounting a horse that’s just bucked you off and then giving it a few smacks is not punishment- the horse does not have mental abilities to make the association between its bucking behaviour and the pain it is now feeling from the whip. The gap between the buck and the smack is too long, and the fact that it will have done several things in between the buck and the smack (run away, had a shake, been mounted) means it cannot make the association.  The smacks will not be what suppresses future bucks.  What might be suppressed/punished is its standing still when mounted behaviour and next time a rider attempts to mount, it might not stand still but fidget or walk away, a form of fleeing, because last time it stood still to be mounted it got a hiding immediately after.

3.    Punishment doesn’t tell the animal what response it should give, it only suppresses the response that immediately came before the punishing stimuli. In effect it only tells it what not to do, not what it should do.  Our refusing horse isn’t being told what it should do by the whip strikes, so there is no reinforcement of the correct response to an obstacle- to jump over it.  Consequently the whip strike might make it less likely to refuse, but not necessarily more likely to jump cleanly and calmly which is after all what we are aiming for with a showjumper.

4.    Punishment can either be too weak or too strong.  If we take the rule that we judge the effectiveness of our reinforcement or punishment by analysing its effect, if a punishing stimulus is too weak and it doesn’t suppress the behaviour then it hasn’t punished anything and its likely our horse will simply habituate to it, that is, stop reacting to it whilst still experiencing its negative effects potentially leading to misdirected conflict behaviours. If the punishing stimulus is too strong the horse may attempt to completely flee the situation or react strongly to the punishment itself and thus not learn anything about what behaviour it needs to stop performing to avoid experiencing it in the future.  

5.    Punishment is often administered at full volume and without warning, giving the animal no time to change its behaviour before experiencing its full effect.  In negative reinforcement, we can start with a very light pressure and if it is not strong enough to motivate the animal to respond correctly, we can incrementally increase the pressure until it reaches a point whereby the animal chooses to respond because it wants to terminate the effects of that pressure.  Thus the animal is in control of its responses.

 A strong and sudden punishment, delivered out of the blue doesn’t give the animal that choice, with the consequence that it will react to the pain, but not make the association between the incorrect behaviour and how to avoid it in the future.

6.    Punishments often cause the animal pain and fear, and research in rats, dogs and cats has shown that fearful, stressed animals are less likely to trial novel responses to problems, that is, their fear interferes with their ability to learn and thus work out how to avoid getting punished in future.  So whacking your horse for refusing may make him less likely to attempt to jump again because of an association of fear/pain and the jump, or cause him to rush over the fence in a panic as a way of fleeing the whack he thinks is coming and so fail to learn how to manage the tricky striding between elements of a triple.  A horse which is yanked in the mouth for not performing a flying change on cue is going to be even less able to respond the cues next time because its focus is on avoiding the yank rather than performing the flying change.

7.    The animal may make an association between the person giving the punishment and the pain and discomfort and thus react fearfully next time they encounter that person or find themselves in a similar context.  This is called sensitisation, and it means that the horse will respond more quickly and often more strongly to a lower volume of the same stimulus- meaning it will be more reactive, more fearful, more likely to trial a strong flight response. If it associates you with the pain it may attempt to flee from you before you have even begun to apply the stimulus.

8.    If the punishing stimulus is strong enough to motivate the horse to trial a severe flight response- such as rearing and spinning, bucking etc and the horse succeeds in removing itself from that situation what has actually happened is that the strong flight response is negatively reinforced (eg, it removes the horse from the unpleasant stimulus which is rewarding for the horse).  It is then likely that its behaviour will quickly escalate from mild to strong in a short space of time when confronted with the same situation in the future because that’s what worked last time. These “lessons” can be learned in one go and can be very resistant to extinction.  

Horses which have been hit with a whip and become whip shy demonstrate these last two points, they react extremely strongly to any hint of a whip. We had a pony that attempted to attack a person who was holding its leadrope who also had a whip in their hand.  (The retreat of that person negatively reinforced the aggression).  We don’t know what behaviour its previous owner had attempted to suppress with the whip, but its reaction to being in the vicinity of one revealed it was highly sensitised to it. The whip and the human holding it had become a predictor of pain and fear for this pony to which it reacted precipitately and violently despite the whip being held a good metre away from his body at the time and the fact that individual who was holding him had never hit him with it.  

For punishment to be considered effective it has to result in a reduction of the unwanted behaviour so that the animal has learned what to do to avoid being punished in the future. If the behaviour yields rewards that are more valuable to the horse than avoiding the effects of the punishment it is still very likely to keep on with the unwanted behaviour in spite of the punishment.  We see this when we smack a horse for trying to sneak into a feed shed, pretty soon its back with its head through the door because the rewards of getting into the shed are greater than the pain from the smack.  If the punishing stimulus does not lead to a reduction in the unwanted behaviour then punishment has not occurred and it is likely that repeated application of the stimulus is simply abuse- applying pain or discomfort from which the animal has no means of or does not understand how to escape from.

So are there contexts in which it is effective to punish a horse?  Very few.  

Where the horse’s safety or the handler’s safety is at risk; where the benefit is obviously higher than the cost.  For example if you yell at and hit a horse that has gotten loose and is about to walk out onto a busy road and by doing so cause the horse to stop walking and turn back, you have punished the walking forward behaviour and in so prevented the horse from getting injured.  Likewise, if a horse goes to kick you or a child and you hit the horse and it doesn’t kick you have punished the kicking and prevented an injury. But what you haven’t necessarily done is trained the horse what it should do when it feels a child brushing its hind legs.   You can only judge your success if the horse doesn’t attempt to kick again.

More reinforcement, less punishment.

 In the case of the kicking, what is likely to be more useful for the long term is to train the horse to do less kicking by training it do more standing still and not reacting to sensations on its hind legs and then having that behaviour under your command.  In the case of the refusing horse, the key to training it to not refuse is not to focus on getting less refusing but on getting more of reliable go- that is by training a light, immediate and responsive go response to leg aids, coupled with good turn and slow responses as well as the appropriate fitness, so that when presented at a fence it finds a bit scary, the horse still responds correctly to the go aid and clears it.

The vast majority of horse behaviour problems can be solved by focussing on training the horse to offer the correct response and setting up the conditions whereby it is easy for the horse to do so. Relying on positive punishment of horses is fraught and its very hard to do it humanely.  As noted above with dogs, negative punishment can be an effective training tool, provided the relationship between the unwanted behaviour and the punishment is clear to the animal.  We use negative punishment a lot when clicker training our horses- rewards are withheld if the horse gives an incorrect response.  In this scenario the horse is in control of what happens to it- if it chooses the correct response it gets reinforced, if it chooses or trials an incorrect response it loses out on the food reinforcer but otherwise does not suffer any painful or aversive experiences.  Because its highly motivated to receive food it quickly stops offering behaviours that don’t lead to food.

If you use positive punishment, make sure that it is very clear to the horse which of its behaviours result in it experiencing the punishing stimulus.  

You can do this by:

•    only punishing one behaviour at a time,

•    delivering  the punishing stimulus either during or immediately after the unwanted behaviour- you have a 3 to 7 second gap, after which the horse will not know what behaviour caused the unpleasant consequence,

•    using the smallest amount of stimulus needed to cause the horse to stop the behaviour,

•    only applying the stimulus for a very brief period of time (3 seconds max) and removing the stimulus immediately the horse ceases the unwanted behaviour,

•    immediately stopping the stimulus if it does not result in a quick cessation of the unwanted behaviour- if you keep applying the stimulus and the horse doesn’t reduce the unwanted behaviour your stimulus is not punishing but abusive and you need to change what you are doing.   

If your punishment has not led to a reduction in the unwanted behaviour- for example the horse continues with the behaviour or starts it up again a short time later you may have to accept that you have missed this particular opportunity to punish that behaviour or that your approach is not successful and requires a change in focus from you.  

With many problem behaviours, reinforcing a horse for behaving in a way that is incompatible with the problem behaviour is far more effective than trying to punish the unwanted behaviour.  For example, reinforcing a head down response to a cue in a hard to bridle horse instead of punishing it for throwing its head up should quickly lead to the horse giving you more of the behaviour you want-lowered head and less of the behaviour you don’t want- head up, but you haven’t had to expose the horse to unpleasant stimuli to achieve your training goal.  

 In all horse training, the most humane option when confronted with unwanted behaviours is to consider what is reinforcing or rewarding that behaviour (causing the horse to offer it) and then change what you are doing so its no longer worth the horse’s while to repeat the behaviours you don’t value and much more profitable for it to repeat the behaviours that you do value.  In this way your horse gives you more of the good stuff, less of the bad and avoids getting punished at all.  

So what does elephant training have to do with horses or science for that matter, and how could “feel” ever be cold or hard?

I was fortunate to attend the RPSCA’s annual scientific seminar recently and the topic of this year’s meeting was “All work and no play; Modifying the behaviour of animals”.  A variety of speakers presented the results of their research into the training of animals. The talks covered dogs, horses, elephants, sheep, cattle, Tasmanian devils and exotic animals like giant pandas, rhinos and chimpanzees.  The speakers worked at universities, commercial settings, wildlife parks, zoos or as private consultants and all held masters or PhD level qualifications.  As well as conducting original research into their areas of expertise, all were accomplished animal trainers in their own right- no ivory towers here; bruises aplenty and manure on the boots!

In spite of the range of species trained by the speakers, they spoke unanimously on the qualities that make a good animal trainer and these are, timing and consistency. “Feel” wasn’t really mentioned,  though there was a fair bit of discussion of anthropomorphism (attributing human characteristics to non human things) and the dangers it poses to good training outcomes and ultimately animal welfare.  Dr Paul McGreevy noted in his opening address that just because you love your horse doesn’t guarantee that you will safeguard its welfare and that many of things we do to our horses in the name of ‘love’ can actually cause harm.  

The other key point of agreement was that in “training” an animal, what we are  really doing is putting an aspect of their innate behaviour (sitting, jumping, rolling over, cantering etc) under our control so that they perform it each time they are cued by us.  When we train an animal we are conditioning (teaching) it to respond to our cues, even when what we ask it to do is contrary to what it would rather be doing (eg being ridden in a 20m circle instead of loafing under the trees with a belly full of grass).   We don’t teach a horse how to perform a flying change, it already knows how to do that, what we teach it is to perform a flying change when we ask it to.

 The keynote address was given Dr Andrew McLean on his work with elephant trainers in Nepal and India. Dr McLean is an internationally respected trainer of horses and has an enviable record of success in retraining problem horses world wide.  He has been awarded Australia’s first PhD in equine cognition, so is very well placed to put theory into practice.

Applying learning theory principles, and in partnership with an experienced elephant trainer from Australia Zoo, Laurie Pond and other trainers from the WWF, Dr McLean developed a reliable and humane system for training young Nepalese elephants to be ridden, despite having no prior experience with elephants before he started.  

Working with the Nepalese mahouts and elephant trainers, over four days, previously unridden and largely unhandled elephants were able to be mounted and controlled with light signals delivered by the bare toes of the mahouts.  This training was completed without the elephants being restrained or tied up and even though  they would regularly take themselves off for a break from the training, they always returned of their own volitation and recommenced the training when they were ready.

So what’s this got to do with horses? We’re getting there….

 Like the horse world, elephant training has a long tradition of several thousand years of accumulated knowledge.  And just like we do with our horses, mahouts have strong opinions about the character and motivations of their charges based on anthropomorphic notions of respect, arrogance, submission and that the animals know what is right and when they don’t do as required they are being deliberately disrespectful.  Just like with horses, the key to being able to ride and handle an elephant is to have its innate behaviours (locomotion) under the control of the rider.

The traditional method of elephant breaking is just that- breaking the animal until it submits and the methods used to achieve this vary from country to country, but all involve rendering the elephant immobile, weakening it by deprivation of food and subjecting it to various painful and aversive stimuli until it stops reacting.  Dr McLean showed some footage of some of these methods and they were very difficult to watch, though not dissimilar in technique, if not level of force, to those used on horses today (hobbles, sacking out, dropping to the ground, tying up for hours and hours, tying heads to tails etc).  The result of this treatment is that the elephant learns that no response it can make stops the pain and discomfort, so its stops trying.  It develops what is called learned helplessness, where it becomes dull and unresponsive.  

At this point, the elephant is deemed to be suitably "respectful" of its human handler and is mounted and taught via aversive stimuli, the commands for go, stop, back turn etc.   The problem with this training method, aside from its obviously deleterious effects on the elephant is that the safety of the mahouts is seriously compromised.  Many of the elephants will go on to display what is called latent hyper aggression, which is an expression of aggressive behaviour later on and out of context.  Something happens that triggers an aggressive response in the elephant and it will then turn on the mahout or other people in its vicinity.  It is actually reliving the pain and fear it experienced when being “broken in” and being free of the restraints this time, can express that fear and aggression, often with tragic results for the mahout and the elephant.  In India 8% of all mahouts are killed by their elephants each year and no doubt you will have seen footage on the news or youtube of domestic elephants running amok.  

So what’s this got to do with horses? A little more about the elephants, because this next bit is key!  Dr McLean applied the scientifically validated principles of learning theory to train the elephants, demonstrating that when applied correctly, the outcomes of the training are predicably reliable and for any species of animal that can be trained. No whispering, respect or leadership required.

The point about learning theory is it’s not a system or method, but a set of principles which describe how animals learn new behaviours or responses to cues, what will motivates them to change their behaviour or response and also explains what has gone wrong when outcomes don’t match expectations.  Learning theory can be applied to any animal, any training system or method.

To get the elephants’ behaviour under the control of the mahouts, Dr McLean used a combination of positive reinforcement (food rewards), negative reinforcement (pressure signals and their removal) and classical conditioning (making an association between two events because one event predicts that the other event will occur- eg verbal command predicts food reward, animal responds to verbal command to get food reward).  

After four days of applying these techniques and carefully shaping the responses from a small try to whole movements (eg, standing still, to being mounted, to moving at the right speed and direction) the elephants were calmly and obediently under the control of their riders and the cues the mahouts were using were very light (toe pressure from bare feet).  Now these are not small animals and they aren’t ridden with any kind of bridle, saddle or restraint.  The results from the first visit have now been replicated at several other training centres, the Nepalese government has mandated its use for all elephant training and it is now being adopted in India.  

So what’s this go to do with horses?  We’ve finally arrived!  We use exactly the same techniques when we train our horses and using them, we can get the same kind of results.  

When riding and handling horses we primarily use negative reinforcement, which isn’t bad, it’s simply a maths term, which means that something is removed or subtracted to reward or reinforce (make more likely) a behaviour.

 Let’s take using your legs to signal to the horse to go- you apply a pressure on their sides, the horse doesn’t like the pressure on its side and wants it to stop, it moves forward and you stop pressing.  The removal of the pressure is the reward, next time you apply the pressure the horse is likely to move forward because that’s the behaviour that made the pressure go away last time:

Pressure of legs on horse’s side= cue

Horse walks forward=response

Pressure removed =reinforcement (reward)

So long as that pressure does always go away, the horse’s world is predictable and you have his go forward behaviour under your control.  The pressure motivates the horse to respond, the release tells it what it needs to do to make the pressure go away. You haven’t taught the horse to walk or gained its respect, what you have taught the horse to do is to start walking when you signal it to.  Its walking is now under your control.   Whether it’s walking forward from leg cues, performing passage, cutting out a beast, clearing a fence, or leading onto a float the horse is responding to pressure cues by doing something in order to make that pressure go away.

 It really is that simple and whether it’s your seat, your reins, the leadrope, the bosal,  a whip it’s all the same principle at work.

 Positive reinforcement involves adding something, usually food, to reinforce or encourage a behaviour.  It works in exactly the same way as negative reinforcement except that something is added instead of being subtracted:

Hand signal=cue

Horse nods its head= response

Piece of carrot= reinforcement (reward)

The head nodding in response to the cue has been reinforced by the addition of the carrot. Next time the horse sees that cue, it is likely to nod its head again, because that’s what made the carrot appear last time.  Because food is a highly motivating reinforcer- eg they love it(!), horses trained with positive reinforcement will usually pick up new responses or behaviours very quickly because they really want that food!  

 Both of these methods of conditioning (training) actually put the animal in control of its responses- it learns what it needs to do to get the outcome it wants (either food or relief from a pressure).  When we get it wrong and don’t reward it for the correct response it gets confused and tries new ways of getting its reward and often those new behaviours are ones we don’t appreciate so we call them problem behaviours and blame the horse for getting it wrong or believe that the horse is being disrespectful of our leadership.

Classical conditioning involves the animal making an association between two cues in which the first cue predicts the second one.  We use it in combination with either positive or negative reinforcement.  In positive reinforcement we might make a sound, a click,  then offer the horse some food.  Very, very quickly (normally about two goes!) the horse starts to expect the food each time it hears the click.   We have positively reinforced the clicker as a predictor of food.  Now when we want to let the horse know that a behaviour it has offered in response to a cue (such as a hand signal or voice command) is the right one, we can use the clicker(secondary reinforcer) to let it know that it got it right and that the food (primary reinforcer) is coming:

Hand signal=cue

Horse nods its head= response

Click= food is coming because you made the right response (secondary) reinforcer

Food= (primary) reinforcer

 By pairing the clicker (secondary reinforcer)  with the food (primary reinforcer) and then using the clicker to tell the horse it got it right we can get its behaviour responding to our cues even when it is working at a distance or we are riding it. The click allows us to mark the correct response without having to give the food reward straight away.

 We can use the same classical conditioning principle with negative reinforcement by pairing a low volume version of a stimulus- eg a light squeeze with our calves, with a high volume one (stronger squeeze):

Light squeeze with calves= soft cue

Horse doesn’t respond

Stronger squeeze with calves= stronger cue

Horse walks forward =response

Pressure removed = reinforcement

After a couple of repetitions...

Light squeeze with calves= soft cue that now predicts that the strong cue is coming

Horse moves forward=response

Pressure removed= reinforcement

Horse has avoided the strong cue by responding to the light cue.

This is exactly how the elephants were taught to respond to the pressure of the mahout’s toes. This pairing of the light cue to a stronger one allows us to train the horse to respond to light signals and thus we can largely avoid having to use strong cues at all.  Horses which are soft to ride or respond to subtle seat cues demonstrate classical conditioning in action.

So back to the elephants, instead of tying them up, subjecting them to beatings and using force and strength to control them, applied learning theory allowed the mahouts to use humane, gentle but consistent signals which were not harsh or punishing in their effect to gain complete control over the mobility and locomotion of 2 tonne elephants.  The ultimate result has been calmer elephants, calmer trainers and a much safer working environment for mahouts and elephants.  

As Paul McGreevy pointed out in his address, horses kill and injure more people in Australia than any other animal (except snakes and most people who are killed by snakes are tying to kill the snake at the time).  At the very least, from a safety perspective we owe it to ourselves to train our horses in ways that produce calm relaxed and obedient mounts, who don’t trial random hyperactivity (bucking, rearing, shying etc) or random aggression (biting, kicking) and who are not confused and in conflict because they are being subjected to pressures they can’t escape from (strong rein contact, using legs and rein aids simultaneously, strong punishments, harsh gadgets and bits, tight nosebands).  If a little learning theory can get control of an elephant without fear, force or intimidation, imagine what it can do for you and your horse.

There is a wealth of information about applying the very simple techniques of learning theory to horse training, a great place to start is www.aebc.com.au, the website of the Australian Equine Behaviour Centre which is run by Dr Andrew McLean, and Equitation Science, a comprehensive introduction to applying learning theory to horse training, written by Drs Paul McGreevy and Andrew Mclean.  And the beauty of it is, you won’t need to give up on your current methods, be they Parelli, Lyons, Monty Roberts, the German Training Scale, but you will be equipped to understand why they work and what’s going wrong when they don’t.  Whether its an elephant or a horse, learning theory gives us the tools to humanely gain control over our mounts so we stay safe and they stay relaxed.   Warm hearted science in action.

For video of Dr McLean's team in action in Nepal check out http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/2533487.ht

Firstly, welcome to the new members to the site, thanks for joining, I hope we can continue to provide relvent and thought-provoking information.

This latest post is one which I put up on a horse forum last year, been doing a lot of thinking about this issue lately so have reproduced the original post and of my repsonses to some of other posts it generated.  Very interested in getting feedback from others about this issue.

These two terms, respect and leader have been much used by natural horsemanship practitioners in the past twenty years, so much so that they are now commonplace and we use them to describe our horses and their interactions with us on a daily basis. So a horse that won't load onto a float is either not showing you enough respect and is usurping your rightul role as the leader in the relationship, or doesn't have enough faith to trust you as a leader.

But do horses really see us as leaders in their lives and do they even have a concept of respect or leadership towards humans anyway? Just because they may follow the dominant mare to water, does that mean they can translate that to their interactions with us and the myriad of things we expect them to do.

Can we really be sure that a horse can apply the body language, sights, smells etc of horse to horse relationships (which they are evolved to understand and respond to), to two legged humans who routinely expose them to situations that no other horse would ever expect of another horse (having a predator sit calmly on their backs).

By using such terms, are we in effect, in the name of being more "natural" or more humane, actually loading up our horses with anthropomorphic judgements that can still blame the horse when it doesn't do what we want.

The term respect implies a choice, that the horse is choosing to do or not do what we ask because it has a belief about our worthiness to make decisions for it. Respect also implies that the horse has the mental abilities to hold such a belief by a careful consideration of the options, and that horses which are not respectful have arrogantly chosen not to submit to our (obviously) resonable demands.

Similarly, in the human world, leaders are those who we consciously choose; through the ballot box (or sometimes coercion), usually consensus (eg our boss) to make decisions on our behalf. We make determinations on a whole host of factors as to whether we will follow the decisions made by our leaders or not. We can predict likely outomces by applying our knowledge of what happened in the past, we can analyse the positive and negative outcomes of past experiences and we can modify our thoughts and to an extent our emotions to take into account that information. In some contexts we will trust a leader even when it appears their decision will lead us into harm.

But is this what is going on in a horse's head when it follows you into a horse float even though it is obviously anxious about it? Or have you successfully trained the horse to move forward from poll pressure from the leadrope so completely that the horse continues to respond to that stimulus despite the evironment (the scary float) providing quite a strong counter pressure? Is the horse respectful or simply well trained? (What about the new horse you've just bought that obviously doesn't have any past experience of you personally, is obviously anxious about your float which it has never been on, yet still walks forward from lead pressure and onto the float?)

Response 1

You've made some interesting points X and I am in complete agreement about not using force or coercion to get a horse to do what we want it to. That said however, there is very little horse training, whether NHS, the Jeffery method, Parelli, Monty Roberts etc, that does not utilise a form of negative reinforcement (pressure release) as the basis of the training. Is that what is meant by the horse's language?

The obvious exception to negavtive reinforcement methods is clicker training which uses positive reinforcement (food rewards) to induce the desired behaviour.

Being animals which do find pressure on their bodies aversive does allow us humans to condition them to do amazing things in response to what can be incredibly light and subtle pressures and which in a really well trained horse are not in themselves aversive in the way they will be in a naive or young horse who usually trials a lot of responses before giving us the one we want.

My take on why my horses (whether reactive or plodders) lead well, keep a certain distance from me, walk quietly on and off the float and are (normally, though not always!) light and soft in hand, is not that they respect me, see me as their leader, or that I even speak their "language" in any meaningful sense.

I think its because I have hijacked their aversion to pressures on certain parts of their bodies and by reliably releasing those light pressures when they give a desired response they continue to behave in ways that are (mostly) predictable for them and me, which results in calmness and lightness. They have learned through trial and error what response makes the pressure go away. I am not in any way an intuitive or gifted trainer. All I know about training horses I have learnt from people far more talented and experienced than me and I still encounter behaviour problems that I find a puzzle.

In regards to speaking the horse's language I would appreciate more clarity about what is really meant by that. I don't have ears that can signal my intentions or opinions about my horses, I can't snake my head at them, and when I lower it it doesn't go very far, I can bare my teeth but I have no hinquarter to turn at them, nor tail to swish or hold high in play or fear. I can stamp my feet and rush agressively at them, and I can scratch them on places their herd mates do but I certainly can't whinny, rear or double barrel! My horses don't signal to me that they want me to move forward by putting pressure on the top of my head or my sides or that they want me to slow down by pressuring my mouth.

While I think the concept of using the horses' language is broadly useful in getting riders and trainers to consider things from the horse's point of view, rather than viewing them as performing robots and blaming them for everything that goes wrong, I think terms such as respect and leadership end up being a moral and value judgement that imply that horses have insights into their own behaviour and make concious choices not to do what is asked which can very often lead to us believing that it is the horse that is at fault anyway. The fact that the opposite of respectful is disrespectful, which implies a choice and deliberation to the horse's behaviour, rather than a failure of the trainer to install and reinforce the desired responses in the horse is a case in point.

Is a horse which constantly barges into the handler while being led arrogantly disrespecting their personal space, or has it been allowed to do so in the past and has never been taught to lead differently?

How would a horse know what distance constitutes personal space when being led, unless we teach it to them, given we get in very close to them when catching, grooming, saddling and bridling them.

Hi there folks, thanks for commenting on my posts, its great to hear other perspectives. I enjoy having my ideas challenged, if only to make me think more deeply and do some more research into why I think my perspective is correct. Sometimes, usually from well argued and well informed points of view, I do change my mind. I am always trying to learn and develop my understanding of horses, how they learn and behave and how they are influenced by humans. As an aside and a topic for later posts, the latest book on the subject is Equitation Science by Drs Paul McGreey and Andrew McClean, have just finished reading it and can highly recommend it to anyone wanting to understand horses and what we do to them when we train them. There is an excellent chapter on what they call apparatus (gadgets) which explains very clearly which parts of a horse's body they operate on and explain how in many cases the claimed benefits are biomechanically dubious or outright erroneous.

What has always troubled me about the Pesoa, is unless it is very loosely attached, the horse receives pressures in its mouth from the locomotion of its hind legs, pressures which are completely unrelated to anything other than the horse's head carriage. Anyone spending any time with ridden horses knows that it is easy to get a horse to flex its cervical vertebrae and drop its nose behind the vertical to avoid mouth pain, whilst at the same time having a hollow back, stiff loins and trailing hindquarters. This gets rewarded in the show and dressage arenas a lot.

Yes aif, I haven't ever prepared a horse for CCI**** level or GP dressage, though in a past life I saw a lot of CCI**** horses in action in Adelaide, and most of the four star horses went around in snaffles, most with no martingales. Andrew Hoy rode Darian Powers around Sydney in a plain snaffle. Maybe all of these riders, behind the scenes, are using the contraptions that force horses into the desired outline but if that is what it takes to get to that level, and it can't be achieved through correct schooling, long term muscle development etc, then perhaps the sport can't be justified on animal welfare grounds. If the kinds of things we do to horses were done in public to dogs and cats there would be a justifiable outcry. Just because horses do learn to tolerate unrelenting mouth pressures via gadgets doesn't make it ethical to do it. And the fact that tens of thousands of perfectly healthy horses with behaviour problems end up in abattoirs demonstrates the high cost that those who can't handle the pressure pay.

Link to the Stacy Westfall demo on Youtube. Compared to a lot of reining demos which are characterised by gaping mouths, swishing tails and pinned ears, this trainer shows what can be done without a bit.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yl0ukPkRMQM&feature=related

I personally train with a bit, though am experimenting more without and am in awe of riders who can execute higher movements without them- so yes you may be one of those more than mortal riders!

As to the footballers and the gadgets on the horses- there are some fundamental differences. The footballers choose to be there- the horses don't. The footballers can and do negotiate with their coaches, doctors etc as to the duration, timining and difficulty of the conditioning session and may remove themself from the session if it gets too painful or difficult- the horses can't- they rely entirely on the skill, experience and ethics of the trainer and when forced into a physical position by restraining gadgets, sharp bits etc are at high risk of physical and mental damage if worked beyond their capabilities or with no regard for the impacts of such devices. The footballers get paid big bucks and get a whole slew of other benefits, not all of them beneficial, the horses get made to work far harder, for far longer and get exposed to the risk of significant injury or death and are usually housed and managed in such as way as to be prevented from expressing even the most basic of social interactions with conspecfics. They don't get to go on team drinking sessions after an event...

Horses are our slaves, not our team mates, we sell on our horses, we don't sell on our team mates,(perhaps there's times we wish we could- they can get "traded" but that doesn't mean they get euthanised.  Horses can't resign from the job if they don't like the boss or the work, except by sustaining an injury or by developing conflict behaviours that are so dangerous to their human riders that they are removed from the sport, often by way of a knackery.

Given this, it us up to the humans, with all the brain power and the insight to train and use horses ethically and humanely, giving them the time to develop the muscular conditioning and mental skills to complete the tasks we set them. If that means relying on gadgets the apply unrelenting pressure, or pressure that can only be avoided by causing pain in other parts of the body (muscle pain from adopting an unnatural position to avoid mouth pain)  or by forcing them to do something that causes consistent pain, then perhaps some horses sports are no longer justifiable at all. 

I don't believe this is the case with eventing, though with modern dressage it may well be true. The fact that spurs and a curb bit are mandatory for higher level dressage says that the body governing the sport has little interest in allowing the those riders so inclined to choose not to use them. So how would we ever know what can be achieved at GP level in snaffle bridles? 

 The fact that is is perfectly legal to crank shut a GP horse's mouth with a noseband means the horse could be in agony but can't open its mouth to relieve the pressue.  How is that ethical or even beautiful?  It should be mandatory that nosebands are fitted loosely so judges can tell if the horse is truly "accepting the bit" or merely has its mouth wired shut. 

I have seen Georgia Bruce's horse do passage and piaffe at liberty and bitless under saddle so it is possible to get the outline and the movements without a bit, let alone a curb...

Also, from page 58 of the updated FEI Rules for Evening-

Article 540 OLYMPIC GAMES

Every four years, Eventing in the Olympic Games will be organised under the patronage of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). The Olympic Three Day Event is for Seniors. It will be conducted at the Four Star level in accordance with the “Special Regulations for Equestrian Events at the Olympic Games”.(my italics)

Thanks again for the comments.

I haven't been that complimentary about "natural" horsemanship in my previous entries, but I do believe the approach has, overall, had a very positive impact on the training of horses around the world. And its not that I don't think many of the approaches don't work, far from it, they do work.  My quarrel is not the efficacy, but rather the analysis of why they work.  But's that a subject for another post. 

One of the areas in which NHS has had a good influence is with the issue of gadgets.  Broadly speaking, they don't use them and the don't encourage riders to use them on their horses.  Sure they all use rope halters and the Parelli method makes frequent use of the ubiquitous carrot stick, but other than that you won't see them spruiking the latest contraption which claims to solve every horse behaviour problem in history.

Go to any saddlery store or open any horse magazine and the array of gadgets, mostly its bits that are on offer and growing in number every day is astounding.  In fact it often makes me wonder that any of us have managed to ride our horses successfully up to now. 

The bit sellers are the worst however, in trying to convince you that it is the piece of metal in the horse's mouth that is the key to every problem a horse has, and if you only change the bit, the problem will be solved.  One manufacturer has developed a whole "system" with levels which apparently target different areas of the horse's mouth, depending on their level of training and which if implemented will lead to 'clearer communication" between horse and rider.  Another manufactuer claims that their bit will lead to a "relaxed horse without mouthing issues". I am not entirely sure what a "mouthing issue" is, but if you use that bit you won't have them...

Leaving the bits behind, there are the lunging "aids".  The pessoa system, allows you to tie your horse's head to hits chest via its hind legs, and apparently by forcing it to run in this unnatural position you will correctly develop the muscles needed to do the same once you are on its back.  It i adjustable and the accompanying instructions do advise increasing the level of torture gradually so your horse gets used to it.   Used as directed there is no way for your horse to avoid getting belted in the mouth due to the movement of its hind legs except by hunching up and tucking its nose into its chest.  That's unless its at the advanced stage in which case its head will already be on its chest.  Try running around in a circle with your chin resting on your chest for five minutes and see how that feels.  Bet you start to feel sore all over your back...

There's side reins, drawreins, chambons, market harbouroughs, nose bands etc etc.  All designed to make your horse go "on the bit" with his aching mouth clamped shut so there is no way for him to avoid the agony. 

Watch Stacy Westfall complete her winning reining workout, involving sliding stops, roll backs (turn on the hindquarters), flat gallops, flying changes and the rest, without saddle, bridle or even neck rope and then tell me these gadgets are needed to get a relaxed and obedient horse.  Look at the best event riders, at the highest levels and most of their horses go round four star courses (Olympic level) in snaffle bridles and maybe a noseband and running martingale. 

A wise saying about gadgets, quoted by Andrew McClean in most of his books, is that gadgets should only be used by experienced trainers and experienced trainers don't need to use them.  Gadgets are used either because we are lazy and don't want to take the time to build up our horses slowly, both physically and mentally, or because we want a quick fix to a training or behaviour problem, and just like instant coffee, the gadget is the water and we get an instant repsonse.  Often however, not the one we want or the horse needs. 

So if you are having problems with your horse, its "hard" in the mouth, too forward, "lazy" off the leg, won't jump into water, bucks, rears, won't turn properly, rushes at fences XC or whatever, don't go out and buy a gadget, get a good trainer and find out what YOU are doing wrong.  If you are a mere mortal and not able to train a horse to be ridden without saddle or bridle ( and I count myself in this category) then all you need to break in and train a horse is a saddle that fits, a bridle with a snaffle bit that also fits, a halter and lead and my only gadget, a dressage whip.  Ride with light soft hands, release the contact every time he does what you ask for, never hang, let your horse develop the musculature to bring itself on the bit instead of forcing it and above all, be patient and you will save yourself big bucks by not wasting on money on gadgets that won't come close to fixing the root of the problem- the rider. 

Do we interact with your horse in the same way you interact with your dog?  I think much of what underlies much of "natrual" horse training methods actually relate far more to our experience of interacting with our pets than applying conspecific interactions (horse to horse) to horse/human interactions.  Here's why.

Firstly, as far as using horse-horse interactions as a model on which to base horse human interactions, most of these which involve volunatry interactions between non-related individuals, which we recognise as "play", are precisely behaviours that we don't acccept when we interact with our horses, such as rearing, kicking, biting, running away etc.  We spend considerable time training our horses not to do these things. Yet, wild or paddocked horses will choose to engage in these behaviours and especially in young horses, appear to derive pleasure and enjoyment from doing them. 

Allogrooming (wither and neck scratching) is another pleasureable and voluntary conspecific interaction that horses of all ages do with each other and which can be successfully translated to the horse/human dyad (pair) but which interestingly is rarely incorporated into natural horse training approaches, many of which use the head pat/stractch which has no analogy in conspecific interelations (horses don't allogroom each other's heads and not having hands can't pat each other...)

Onto comparisons between dogs and horses.

We call our dogs and they bound up to us.  Mostly, we catch our horses- we walk up to them. We have to specifically train our horses to come to us.   Our dogs voluntarily spend time with us, even when we aren't feeding or patting them.  Our horses don't, generally when we are done with them, they are done with us and walk away, unless we are feeding or doing something that they enjoy, like giving them a scratch.

We don't need to tie up or use leads to keep our dogs with us and to spend time with them.  Sure we, tie up our dogs to stop them straying and in our case we, put our dogs on leads to stop them chasing the roos, but when we want to spend time with them in the yard, we don't tie them up.  Generally we tie up our horses to spend time with them, and certainly we tie them up to groom, saddle and bridle them.  If we didn't tie them up they would most likely walk off and go eat somewhere.  This strongly suggests that they tolerate, rather than enjoying and looking forward to being saddled, bridled, ridden.  We have to train our horses to lead and to follow us, even the foals of extremely quiet and "friendly" horses. As anyone who has raised a littler of puppies knows, puppies will naturally follow and interact with humans from a very early age.

Most of the things we ask dogs to do exploit instrinsic behaviours that are self rewarding, such as fetching, rounding up sheep (chasing prey), hunting, solving problems (searching for drugs, flyball), and so.  Most of the things we ask horses to do are not, they don't go round in circles on their own, they run around rather than jumping over obstacles, they don't canter or trot continuously for hours on end, they avoid dark confined spaces, they don't get into floats and go places on their own and so on. 

Dogs will often choose human interactions over interactions with conspecifics and food, unsurprisingly given that humans have spent 10,000 years applying selection pressures to the genetics of wolves to turn them into dogs.  Dogs cooperatively hunt and raise their food, horses do not.  Dogs rely on relationships with other dogs to surive, horses although evolved to live in herds which rely on the benefit of many eyes to watch for predators, do not rely on other horses to catch their food or water. 

The upstart of these comparisions, because our dogs do voluntarily spend time with us, derive such obvious pleasure from being with us (choosing us over food and their doggy mates) and the relationship we have with our dogs is based on voluntary interactions that we project these attributes onto our horses and in so doing, kid outselves into believing that what our horses get out of the interaction is equal to what we do. 

For some reason we need to believe that our horses love doing what we do wtih them as much as we do and we blame them when they don't as though they are being ungrateful.  The sooner the horse world acknowledges that our horses are our much cossetted slaves, from whom we take almost all of their individual agency over just about every area of their lives, the better. 

It might mean that we come to the conclusion that some of the things for which we use horses for our enjoyment, such as high level eventing, rodeos, jumps racing and so on, are actually unacceptably harmful to those horses.   In order to train and handle our horses ethically, we need to be honest with ourselves and admit we do it because we enjoy it, our responsibility is to do it in a manner which makes it as little uncomfortable, painful, tiring, confusing, fear inducing for our horses as possible. 

I am often puzzled that NHS focuses so much on us being a predator to the horseas prey and then seamlessly transitions to us being simply a more dominant preyhorse in a herd of two, with little explanation or insight into how the horse is supposed to tell the difference.  Even the best NHS and related trainers rely on terms like willingness, respect, attitude, dominance, submission etc, all loaded terms that have at their basis the idea that the horse should want to please us or that its life is at its most fulfilling complying with our demands, which would make it unique amongst all other species, humans included.  Dogs are perhaps an exception...  

What is it about our interactions with horses, that there seems to be an actual need to believe that our training systems are a relationship of two partners with the same individual agency, equally exercising their free will rather than seeing them in terms of the operation of either negative reinforcement (mostly) or occasionally positive reinforcement to motivate a behavioural response that is desired by us.  (Maybe its just easier to just call it love than “behavioural response”…;))

In the past thirty years there has been an explosion in horse training methods that claim to be "natural" by using the inate behaviours of horses to train them.  There are a plethora of these approaches around, some of the most famous being the Parelli "Natural Horse-Man-Ship", Monty Roberts "John Up" as well as others such as John Lyons, Ga Wa Ni Pony boy who use variations on the same theme.

Whilst the actual techniques used by these methods vary quite considerably what they are all based on is an assumption that the behaviours that horses express in their relationships with each other can be adapted or mimicked by human trainers to elicit desired responses from their horses.  Underlying this belief is a scientifically untested assumption that horses view humans as simply another horse (albeit a strange looking one) and subsequently read and understand human signals in the same terms and frame of reference as they would if relating to a conspecific (another horse).  From where comes the concept of "natural" , that what the horse is being asked to do and how it is being asked is "natural" to the horse's inate abilities, including the ability to acquire new behaviours.  And somehow, training them using this approach is more humane than other approaches.  While past techniques could be extremely brutal and with our awareness of animal welfare issues today, can never be justified, it is possible to use these "natural" techniques in ways that are just as frightening, confusing and ultimately abusive as the old "breakers' of yore.

The question I have about all of these methods is, fundamentally, what is "natural' about a horse voluntarily spending time with another species that might eat it (us)?  Secondly, what is "natural' about a human sitting on a horse's back- in wild sitations, the only time anything would be on a horse's back would be if that thing was trying to eat it. 

Thirdly, what is natural about halters, bits, saddles, whips, roundyards, stables, floats, saddles, jumping logs, etc etc?  Absolutely nada.

A "natural' horse is one living with its mates, able to choose what it eats, where it goes, who it spends its time with, who it mates with, how fast it runs, for how long etc.  Just about everything else is not 'natural' and we are kidding ourselves if we think our horse would rather spend time doing the pointless things we ask them to do instead of loafing about in a paddock under the shade of a tree with a belly full of grass and a mate to help keep the flies away.