It’s not about training, – it’s about trust
Written by Hiddenhorse on 05/04/2010 – 3:07 pm -If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
It’s not about training, it’s about trust….
In the last post ‘The politics of join-up’, I looked at the join-up process primarily as an behavior based on negative reinforcement, I also looked at how join-up was a ritual that is part of the repertoire of ‘political’ behaviors which allow a horse to join a new herd or group. What I didn’t ask was why would a horse want to do this?
Horse herds are made up of two different energies, the energies of the leaders and the energies of the followers. I maintain that whenever we enter into a relationship with a horse we must, for our own safety, assume the position of leader. By this I do not mean that we must ‘dominate’ the horse, (show him who’s boss etc…) or that we must see ourself as the ‘alpha’ in the horses life, these are popular pitfalls for us predators and of course they are both highly rewarding and highly anthropomorphic in nature. I never consider myself as a ‘horse’ because I am a human being, I do not wistfully entertain fantasies about being a member of the herd, but I do try to project a calm assertive energy because this is how all leaders, (animal or human) project themselves, because it’s this energy, and this energy alone, that’s the energy which communicates confidence and therefore trust in a leader, – and it is really all about trust…
Trust me
When a horse accepts our leadership it gives us it’s trust. What does this word trust really mean for a prey animal? It means the horse trusts our decisions and decisions are always based on emotions, humans like to justify those emotional decisions with logic later but the actual decision is always emotional. So this means, when a horse really trusts us, it trusts our emotions. And what is a trustworthy emotion? It is the calm and assertive emotion of leadership, this is the only energy a prey animal will really trust. So the true goal of join-up is to get the horse to trust our emotions and thus our decisions. This means,that when a prey animal gives us it’s trust we accept a great responsibility. The responsibility of the trust of a prey animal is the greatest gift a horse can give you.
OK, so how do we put all this knowledge together? Are we going to use join-up? No, not really, we are going to try to get the same results but not using join-up. The first thing to clearly understand is that this is not horse training, this is horse psychology.
We will not be attempting to bridle, saddle and certainly not ride the horse at this stage, that is horse training and demands a completely different approach. All we want to achieve here is to answer those two questions and allow the horse to join our herd but most important of all, we want the horse to allow us to make decisions for it. To put this more clearly:
After this process this horse will never need to make another decision in it’s life. Now some of the more anthropomorphic of you won’t like the sound of this. You will be thinking isn’t this just dominating a horse, or isn’t this somehow suppressing his ‘human rights?’ Whoops! I think you just answered your own question. This is the assertive side of calm-assertive energy. One rule I have that is absolute is that any horse I ride never makes decisions. I never want to find myself riding a horse that makes it’s own decisions. Actually 98% of horses you meet don’t make their own decisions anyway, their leaders are the ones who make all the decisions in the herd. And the other horses agree with those decisions because those decisions keep them and the herd safe and safety is the most basic need of any prey animal. But I said we are not setting out to dominate the animal so instead we will be offering lots of choices, and we will be guiding the horse to make the ‘right ‘ choice by rewarding it.
So what actually is a ‘decision’?
A decision is an emotional choice. If you think back in your life at the major decisions that you made, they are all emotional; perhaps it was a decision to move house, take a job, accept someone as a partner, get married, have children, get divorced, buy a car, or how about this one, buy a horse?
All these decisions are emotional. We may justified them with logic afterward, for example, the man who says, ‘I decided to buy a Ferrari because I was offered a really good trade in by the dealer’. Is lying. The real reason he bought a Ferrari was so that he could open the bedroom curtains in the morning and look out into his driveway, – and see a Ferrari! Together with all the good feelings that brings. They are not called prestige cars for nothing. It was an emotional decision.
Back to horses. Your horse is a prey animal and a flight animal, what happens if he makes a decision based on being a prey animal and a flight animal? I expect some of you can answer that one from experience. This is why riding is one of the most dangerous activities you can do. That is why I say the horse must never make another decision ever again. Horses in a herd survive because they trust the decisions of the herd leaders. Horse herds are not some kind of democratic socialist collective.
‘Oh look some wolves, come on everybody, let’s form a committee and take a vote on what to do about it’.
This is not an option for a prey animal. The alpha horses decide (emotionally) what to do about it and react and the followers follow, if they didn’t and every horse made individual decisions the herd would be run under a system of constant anarchy and chaos. That is why alpha horses make the rules and they enforce them.
So let us agree that whatever happens from now on your horse does not make any decisions for itself. From now on you make all the decisions.
So how do we do this? We do it through trust.
Trust me I’m your leader!
Good leaders are both emotionally calm yet can use logical rules. A couple of good human examples of these type of leaders might be Mahatma Gandhi or Nelson Mandela. Both these leaders had calm (emotional) energy, yet both were strong (assertive) enough to overthrow oppression and unite large countries.
There is of course another type of leader, the ruthless tyrant. They work by controlling the reactions of their followers, they don’t mind if their followers make their own decisions because they remorselessly suppress, usually by physical means, their followers reactions. I hope that doesn’t sound too familiar because that is often the methods of some horse trainers, usually trainers who work with the traditional utility model. You can always spot these type of riders because their horses will be wearing more leather, chains, straps and metal work than you will find in a Goth’s wardrobe! These people believe in dominance and discipline. They don’t care if their horse makes decisions because they have all the tools they need to control those reactions. Because these people use coercion to get what they want from the horse they constantly have to deal with the side-effects of coercion. There are many side-effects to coercion but let’s take a quick look at the three main reactions from the horse. You probably already know about two of them they are flight and fight.
The first reaction to a negative or coercive force for a horse is always flight. Everything about the horse’s anatomy and physiology tells us this it is a flight animal. Usually the first thing we predators do is find some way of taking that away from the horse, we have to find some way of controlling the horse’s environment, so we use pens, corrals, stables and ropes to achieve this.
The second reaction of a prey animal is fight. Horses that kick, bite, buck and barge are examples of this. There is also mental fight. Have you ever seen a horse being ridden round an arena that is fighting its rider every step of the way? Nearly always you will see all the usual horse control tools in use here, you will see the horse sweating, salivating and generally resisting the process. This is not a happy picture.
Compliance
The third reaction of a horse is more subtle. Horses by their nature are survival animals and consequently they will do what they have to to survive. Many horses work out what they have to do to avoid coercion. I call this reaction compliance and it is one of the commonest behaviors you will see in the domestic horse. Compliant horses are usually robotic, they have switched-off from their environment. In many senses they become automatons that simply perform repetitive tasks over and over again. The most obvious place to see this type of horse is in a riding stable where horses continually carry first time riders round a familiar trail. These horses have learned what they have to do to survive. Compliance is really a form of mental flight. They have learned physical flight is not an option, neither is fight so the only decision left to them if they are to survive is compliance. For some people compliance is not seen as a bad thing after all one word used to describe this type of behavior is ‘obedience’. But compliance has one really bad consequence:
The horse will only ever make a minimal effort, it has no incentive to do anything else other than do the minimum to avoid the coercion that is being used against it.
Some trainers actually see this as a desirable outcome of their training. Usually these trainers will explain the horses lack of response as the horse being ‘lazy’. The ‘cure’ for this idle tendency? Usually a stronger form of coercion which will of course create more compliance. This is why it can often take years to train a horse to even a minimal level of performance.
If you consider the history of the riding styles broadly described as ‘English riding’ and you realize that most of what we understand today comes from techniques originally developed in the cavalry units of 150 years ago, you will realize that total, unquestioning, obedience from both horses and their riders was a desirable thing you will see how compliance has been used by horse trainers for hundreds of years to teach horses to become obedient.
One last point here, can you imagine the consequences for a prey animal of switching off from it’s environment in this way? There are no decisions here and worse than that there is no element of personal choice all there is, is minimal effort. This isn’t a happy picture either.
Let me give you one last picture and this time I hope it will be a happy one.
Imagine a rider on a horse where the horse has total faith and trust in the riders decisions. The rider makes all the decisions, calmly and assertively. If the rider decides to canter the horse canters until the rider decides to stop if the rider wishes to turn right they both turn in an easy and relaxed way. When the rider cues the horse to do something to an observer there is no sign that any instruction has been given, it is so subtle it is as if the rider just formed the thought and the horse performed. These two also seem to have a special relationship. The horse actually seems to seek out the rider’s company and wants to spend time together with them. When the rider trains the horse, the horse shows enthusiasm and interest in what is going on and makes the maximum effort to learn what is being taught. The rider never uses physical tools and coercion to get what they want instead they actively work to present choices to the horse, choices that when the horse responds in the right way the rider just rewards the outcome they want. There is nothing negative in this relationship. The rider does not see himself as a horse and the horse does not see itself as a human being. They have a relationship built on total trust, respect for each other and from that flows all the positives of that special relationship.
This is why I don’t use join-up and this is why I don’t use negative reinforcement, not because they don’t work, but because they can never give me the outcomes that I want.
This is why I only use positive reinforcement training, (clicker training) with my horses. Until next time.
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Tags: Choices, Decisions, Emotions, Join-up, Positive Reinforcement Training, PRT, Training, TrustPosted in Clicker Training, Training, join up | 1 Comment »
April 23rd, 2010 at 11:01 am
Very excellent blog – thank you. Much food for thought. Great articles all around!
Lynda
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