Who is really training your horse?
Written by Hiddenhorse on 11/03/2010 – 4:01 pm -Horse training 24/7
One of my horses is a thoroughbred chestnut gelding who is socially low-ranking within the herd. I have a problem with him, and the problem is:
All the other horses in the herd keep training him to move his feet!
As usual with horses and humans this is the opposite of what I want. You see I want him to stand still, I want him to stop when I ask him, I want him to be calm and relaxed and most of all I want him to stop making decisions for himself!
The trouble is, when he makes decisions he makes them based on being a prey animal and a flight animal and that means… well I’m sure you can guess what that means. It means flight, immediate flight. I don’t want a horse that makes this kind of decision and I certainly don’t want to ride a horse like this.
Yet the horses in the herd seem to actively want him to react in this way, so I ask myself, why? I admit that the answer I have come up with is speculation on my part but it is based on daily observation of the way the horses interact. Here is my theory:
In a natural herd some horses, the non-breeding males, form a sub group of the main herd called the bachelor herd, the function of these males is to be the security guards of the herd, they also perform a function of an early warning system against potential dangers. The more eyes there are to see, the more ears there are to listen, the more noses there are to smell the safer the overall herd will be. So if you were a prey animal what qualities would you look for in the ‘guards’ of your herd? Well I would say you would want guards that were super-aware of what was going on in the neighbourhood. You would want guards that react quickly, but decisively but were not simply panic-aholics. So I guess it would make sense for the leaders of the herd to invest quite a lot of time in training these horses to keep them on their toes. The way they do this is to use negative reinforcement*, primarily they do this through the use of threatening body language and ‘pressure’. (* Negative reinforcement is defined as taking away something negative from the horse’s environment). The key thing to understand about negative reinforcement is:
Whatever behaviour is being performed at the moment of release is reinforced, that is, it is likely to happen again.
So a horse, say the alpha male, approaches the other low rank male assertively, by using a lowered head and ‘threatening body language and the low ranking male moves his feet in order to experience the feeling of release. The low rank male is then reinforced for reacting by movement. Horses don’t take the attitude of ‘If it is not too much much trouble could you move your feet, please’? No! They say move your feet. Now!
I believe that the reason horses behave like this is to deliberately and continually refine the reactive skills of the lower ranking herd members. Now it is very tempting for us anthropomorphic humans to see this kind of behaviour as dominance or tyranny and bullying, but any of these reasons would serve no purpose in the herd. Neither would simply performing these actions to flatter the ‘bully’s ego’, and most tellingly of all they would not be consistent with every horse’s primary need for safety.
Alpha horses spend quite an investment in time and effort in these activities and horse’s don’t do things without a good reason.
This theory would also explain why if herds of horses are left to their own devices over long periods of time without human contact they return to a feral state, that is they become better and better at behaving as wild horses. Don’t worry by ‘long periods of time’ I mean very long periods of time, this won’t happen if you take a short holiday for a few days!!
So that’s what I mean when I say the other horses are training my low ranking friend to move his feet. This is also why training methods that use traditional techniques frequently end up with horses that are, let’s say, ‘interesting’ to ride.
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Tags: behavior, Natural Horse, TrainingPosted in Miscellaneous Stuff, Training | No Comments »
