I often help clients who need advice on how to communicate in better harmony with their horses. They may have all the skills necessary to train their own horse, but they’re at a sticky spot and looking for a second set of eyes.
In these situations, I always start by learning about the client’s training approach. It’s important to note that traditional training methods (and yes, this includes natural horsemanship) rely mostly on negative reinforcement. Negative reinforcement isn’t actually a style of training and doesn’t mean “bad” feedback. It’s simply the term used for taking a stimulus away when the horse performs the desired outcome a handler is looking for. Have you ever worn shoes that didn’t fit right and felt instantly relieved when you kicked them off after a long day? That’s a perfect example of negative reinforcement. You removed a stimulus (the uncomfortable shoe) to get the desired outcome (to feel comfortable). Negative reinforcement training has been around for centuries, and it absolutely works! However, there are other options to explore that can encourage us to view the partnership with our horses in a different light.
As trainers, it’s important that we have the ability to step back and ask ourselves whether or not what we’re doing makes sense to the horse. If progress has come to a halt, it’s important to remember that we don’t get to decide if what we’re asking is making sense to the horse. That’s up to the horse, and we need to be able to respond appropriately to their feedback.
With that in mind, when we examine the process of pressure and release training, I think we can all agree it would be an example of negative reinforcement. We apply pressure, the horse responds appropriately, and we release. If we now look at positive reinforcement, I think we would all agree that teaching treat manners and giving a treat after getting a desired outcome (adding something desirable to reinforce a behavior) would be an example of positive reinforcement. Choosing which approach to use in your specific situation with your horse depends entirely on how your horse connects the dots. It also depends on how you apply your cues, which we’ll touch on later in this post.
So Why Does Your Reinforcement Style Matter?
When we take a deeper look into positive and negative reinforcement, it can become subjective. For example, if you’ve just finished a 5-course meal and someone places a steak in front of you, the idea of eating more food might be revolting in that moment. In terms of pressure, many horses love getting a massage. Therefore, pressure is something a horse can theoretically enjoy. There are also situations where an experience can be neutral for a horse. They won’t intentionally seek or avoid them. Have you ever ridden a horse that gets behind your leg? Perfect example.
Horses are smart. They will learn in ways that make sense to them, whether what they’re learning is actually our intention or not. Learning falls into many categories, and many times different ways of learning overlap or follow other intentional or unintentional methods. A horse can learn to kick out at a rider’s leg cues instead of moving forward. If the rider doesn’t consistently follow up to create the desired outcome, the horse will learn that the rider will stop asking for them to move forward if they kick out. This can come off as disrespect in many scenarios or as the horse “planning ahead” to misbehave. However, when we take a deeper look at the situation, we know our horses don’t sit in their stall conspiring against our trot cue hours before being ridden. Their brain isn’t wired that way. When we open our mind to view the bigger picture, it’s easy to see that relying on just one method of reinforcement may not work in every scenario with every horse.
Are Cues Possible Without Adding Pressure?
Many of us have defaulted to negative reinforcement as our cueing system. Positive reinforcement often involves stepping back and taking a less critical view of the horse’s actions. First comes reinforcement of the behavior, and it’s then followed by pairing a cue with that specific behavior. There are a few ways to go about this, including capturing naturally occurring behavior, free-shaping it, or eliciting it. When talking about positive reinforcement, small tries are rewarded, and the end result is broken down into many small steps that the horse must take in order for it to happen. This involves good timing and the ability to break the end result of a cue down into step-by-step instructions that the horse can easily follow. For example, if you wanted to use positive reinforcement for trailer loading you might first teach your horse to touch a target with their nose until touching the target and getting a treat creates a strong link in the horse’s mind. Each time they touch the target while loading into a trailer would warrant a reward from the handler.
The task of connecting an action to a cue has to link correctly in the horse’s mind in order for it to be effective. Whether what we’re focusing on is a ground work exercise or a ridden one, the cue is given followed by a reward when the horse executes it correctly. Does this mean you have to stop to reward your horse after every cue? Absolutely not. Horses have the ability to associate a group of behaviors to a single reward at the end. This “seeking” behavior is something many horses catch onto rather quickly and can become a wonderful training tool in many different scenarios.
Linking Positive Reinforcement With Positive Touch
When we add touch during training, it’s important to analyze the “feel” behind the cue. Is the stimulus you’re applying intentionally uncomfortable or annoying to your horse, or is it applied from a more neutral place? Personally, I’m not looking for a horse to respond to me because I’m making them uncomfortable. Instead, I want my cue to come across simply as a signal. It’s important to stop and think about how your horse is receiving your cues. For example, the goal of your backing cue should be that you’re applying the cue in a way that the cue itself doesn’t startle the horse into backing away. A cue should be a catalyst for a desired behavior that results in a reward, and not the main focus of the action the horse is required to perform. If we think for a moment about how we give voice cues, is the goal to have to yell at the horse sternly, or to ask calmly? It’s amazing what can happen when we step back and truly think about how we’re communicating with our horses.
Risk Vs Reward – In Human Terms
Let’s think for a moment about a scenario like this: It’s a warm spring day at the beach, and you’re loving soaking up the sun but the water is still too cold to enter on your own accord. If you’re anything like me, it’s pretty unlikely you’ll decide on your own to just go into the water. Now, Imagine you’re relaxing on the beach and I show up and start scratching a chalk board behind you. That’s an awful sound, right? Let’s say the only way to get away from that sound would be to go into the water. Would you go in then? What if I had a box of takeout from your favorite restaurant and 1,000 dollars on a float in the water, and all you had to do to get it is to get in the water? Would you go in then? For most of you reading this example, I’m going to assume the nails on a chalkboard would be associated with negative reinforcement, and the food and money would be an example of positive reinforcement. But here’s where there are variables. I know a few people who would happily swim in 50* lake water on a warm spring day and think nothing of it at all. If you happen to be someone who resonates with that, it would be a really simple choice to just walk away from my annoying chalkboard, or even go into the water for a grilled cheese sandwich and $5…maybe not even! If we translate that to our horses, this would be an example of your horse responding to a cue that she doesn’t struggle with and isn’t necessarily averse to.
Now, let’s think about someone who gets chilled to the bone the second they touch cold water, like me. I’d happily drown out nails scratching a chalk board for a considerable amount of time to avoid the water. So, let’s say I ignore that noise. Before I know it, someone’s playing an emergency siren a foot away from my ear. OUCH! That actually causes pain! I might respond then out of pain and maybe even fear. Would someone like me venture to into the water for $5 and a grilled cheese? Absolutely not. Put $5,000 out there and the best homemade macaroni and cheese ever and we might have a deal.
The point of this thought process is to understand that we’re all individuals. Some people don’t mind cold water, and some horses don’t mind plastic bags. We need to make sure our horses are being paid well for what we ask of them. Easier movements will require less motivation and faster fine-tuning. It will be easy for your horse to do over and over again. More daunting tasks, like loading the trailer for some horses, would require more motivation and more repetition in order for the horse to begin linking the behavior with the reward.
Troubleshooting
It’s important to think about how we can make our horse’s job easier. Usually, a bad habit is simply an instance where the difficulty of the task the way your horse perceives it is far more difficult than how we perceive it. It really comes down to a difference in perception. What is factoring in to the risk/reward system that is established in your horse’s mind that we may need to pay more attention to? Let’s say your horse is afraid to go out on the trail alone. There are so many factors involved in this seemingly simple problem. Is the horse afraid of unstable footing? Is she herd bound? Is the tack suitable for riding on steep terrain? Is the trail ride always a longer ride with harder work than what happens in the arena? The bottom line question to ask should be “What factors are actually linking the undesirable behavior to simply not riding out alone?”
It’s also important, with any sort of new issue or severe overreaction, to rule out pain as a cause of problem behavior. Poor dental balance, muscle tension, back pain, or ulcers can all contribute to “bad” behavior. If you have any doubts about your horse’s wellbeing, be sure you contact the appropriate professional to evaluate him. Once pain is ruled out, we can start to break down the problem into smaller segments until the foundational issue is identified. From there, we go back into thinking about how to lessen the risk and increase the benefits of the desired outcome. Depending on the issue, this can look like riding in a different area, focusing more on ground work and taking a break from riding for a period of time, helping the horse feel more confident around an object he’s afraid of, getting him more fit before asking for a specific movement, making riding in general more enjoyable for him, having a dentist, vet, or bodyworker out, or finding ways to slip some of that positive reinforcement I talked about into the program to switch things up a bit.
Remember, not every horse is alike. Your individual horse and situation is unique and as your horse’s team mate, it’s crucial to be able to understand how your horse thinks about and processes different cues. A good partnership takes empathy, patience, and understanding.
I know this entry got a bit long, but I’m passionate about opening the door to more approaches we can take with our horses. Thanks for sticking with me, and be sure you make your next ride a fun, confident, and connected one. Take care!
-Kimberly