The Politics of Join-up
Written by Hiddenhorse on 05/04/2010 – 12:52 pm -The Politics of Join-Up
For many people the first time they became aware of any kind of alternative methods of dealing with horses, it was when they first saw Monty Roberts demonstrating ‘join up’ ® . Until that time horse training methods had all been based on traditional knowledge, which usually meant doing what everybody else did, – because everybody else was doing it. As you will now know, this is what I call ‘utility model thinking’, based on the idea of the horse being defined by it’s function or utility. See other posts for more details on the utility model.
If you have no idea what ‘join-up’ is, you can check it out on www.montyroberts.com
It is not necessary for me to go into detail here about the process here but I’m sure you can find a lot of resource material on the Monty Roberts site and in the various publications and videos available on the internet. But I can explain the principles behind the process.
Negative Reinforcement
Essentially join up is a way of interacting with horses based on the behavioral principle (law) of negative reinforcement.
Negative reinforcement is defined as: taking away something negative from the horse’s environment.
There has been a great deal of debate over the years about whether this is an ethical way of training horses, those in favor of its use argue that horses use negative reinforcement on other horses all the time, and they do. Some alpha horses will use negative reinforcement to get other horses to move their feet several hundred times per day! Horses are masters of the subtleties of negative reinforcement they are highly skilled in it’s use. Another huge appeal for human beings who want to use negative reinforcement is that it is a natural tool for any predator. So much of using negative reinforcement involves driving and yielding from pressure, all of which are highly instinctual, and therefore highly rewarding, tools for a predator to use when they are around prey animals. Negative reinforcement works really well as a threat, it is therefore a form of coercion, (‘comply with my wishes or else suffer the consequences’), it consequently has many of the negative side effects of using coercion. It is highly reinforcing for the coercer, the amount of coercion used will naturally and easily increase. Adverse reactions such as flight, fight and compliance will be invoked.
But there are some advantages:
Negative reinforcement is a rewarding behavior, it will cause a behavior to increase, and so surprisingly, it will eventually build trust in the relationship between the coercer and the coerced. ‘I may not like you very much but at least I can always trust you to be consistent’.
Negative reinforcement works from a distance and is always available to anyone, (who truly understands how to use it).
The reward of negative reinforcement is instantaneous and clear.
Negative reinforcement does not require any third party items, such as, rewards or bridging signals.
An understanding of negative reinforcement is part of the instinctual behavior of horses, it’s use is ‘hard wired’ into their minds.
Negative reinforcement works with any horse from anywhere in the world, horses of any breed or social status will respond to its use.
Simply put, negative reinforcement is effective.
So, should I use it?
To my mind if you are going to use N.R. techniques then you MUST understand what you are doing. I have seen too many people jump on the bandwagon and rush out and start driving their horses around a round pen and attempt to join-up with them. Unfortunately most people who use techniques like join-up really don’t understand what they are doing because to get really good at this, is a learning process and that requires lots and lots of repetition, in other words most people get it wrong many times before they start to get it right. I think this is one of the biggest disadvantages of using negative reinforcement. Negative methods have negative side-effects, – despite your best intentions
The first time I saw join-up with Monty Roberts was on video, many years ago and I have to admit I was amazed, especially given the context of what was around at the time, – conventional horse breaking. The strange thing was that although, this appeared to be a more efficient, gentle and much less coercive way of achieving the goal of starting a horse, yet, the world did not adopt it en-mass, in fact, in some people’s minds join-up has always been quite a controversial way of training horses. I felt rather like this and so reluctantly, I decided for many years, not to use it.
Why?
Because when I saw some trainers (not Monty!) attempting this technique, it seemed very far from a gentle and natural way of training horses, in fact what it looked like to me was nothing more than a predator animal driving a horse to the point of surrender and the horse simply giving into it’s fate. I realize now that these trainers were not bad human beings they simply were not in the same league as horses that use N.R. all day and every day and someone like Monty Roberts who has performed this many thousands of times.
But join-up kept nagging at my mind, I wondered if there was a way of achieving everything that is achieved in the process, but by using other more positive methods. So I revisited the join-up process and took a second look.
This was what I found:
First there were some universal constants:
It seems join-up is something that all horses will do, whether they are wild or domesticated, male or female, regardless of geography, a Chinese horse will do this, a German horse, an American horse, a Mongolian horse will all do this.
Horses will do this regardless of their ‘horse-anality’, regardless of their history, regardless of their social rank within the herd, regardless of their breed. And here is the really interesting part; other species will also do this, for example other prey/flight animal species such as deer will also do join-up.
The behaviour is so constant that it is predictable and in a sense ritualized.
The conclusion I draw from this is that somehow the set of behaviors that we interpret as join-up are hard-wired into the heads of all these animals, a behaviorist would say they were part of the ‘Ethogram’ of the species.
When a human attempts join-up they are therefore accessing a set of natural behaviors, already hard-wired into the minds of these animals, the questions I now asked myself were, why are these behaviors there and what purpose do they serve? I realized that finding the answer to these questions could be the key to accessing a great deal of useful behavior, that the horse already knows about and understands and that must serve an important purpose in it’s life.
Politics, Politics, Politics
When two horses that are strangers approach each other for the first time, or when a new horse approaches an established herd that it would like to join there is always a period of what I call ‘politics’. You may have seen this….
There is a lot of movement such as circling and herding, a lot of approach and retreat, there is snorting, prancing, squealing, if there are mares involved there is probably spraying of urine in the air, (don’t worry we won’t have to use that one!). There is also a lot of feigned aggression, kicks at the air and threats to bite, there may actually be biting or kicking involved. Crucially the whole energy of the original herd is changed and has gone from a calm equilibrium that is the normal and desirable state of affairs to a rushing excited energy. This does not last long, usually a few hours at most and frequently the horses will take time off to graze quietly. Most of the work is done by the leaders of the herd and the bachelor males. Gradually things start to settle down and the amount of disturbance becomes less and less until the stranger is accepted as a new herd member and joins-up as another follower within the herd.
In the human world we have a similar, but hopefully less dramatic equivalent, if a new member joins our own family, it might be a visiting relation, a new puppy or even a new baby. The arrival of the ‘stranger’ unsettles our routine, (the energy of our family). It takes a while to for us to get used to the new behavior and the new energy, it may even result in tension between us, but we soon become used to it.
This is the politics stage, so if we think about this, what does all this disturbance achieve? For horses, I believe that all the politics and behavior rituals, answer two fundamental questions, first, the most important question for any prey animal:
1. Are you friend or foe?
You may look like a horse and smell like one, but are you a threat? Secondly:
2. Who are you?
When horses ask this question they do not ask ‘what is your name’? Because horses do not have anthropomorphic names, but they are still recognizable to us and to other horses as individuals, the more accurate interpretation of this question would be, ‘What is your energy’, by which they mean are you a leader or a follower?
In the world of horses there are really only two types of energy, the energy of the leaders and the energy of the followers. Some humans use the inaccurate terms dominant and submissive, I never use these terms because they are so open to interpretation. This is energy we are talking about not names, so what is leadership energy?
Leadership energy is calm – assertive energy.
Follower energy is calm – submissive energy. OK, I know I used the term submissive there, but submissive energy is not the same as being a submissive being.
For more detail on calm-assertive and calm-submissive energy see other posts arriving soon at this blogsite.
Back to join-up, I wondered could it be that the behaviors common to all horses that we call join-up could mean that the human was somehow accessing the pre-programmed behaviors all horses understand and use when they encounter a new horse? In other words, – were join-up and the political stage both aspects of the same thing? Could it be that the act of joining-up with the human was a similar experience for the horse as that of being accepted into a new herd? Was there even some unspoken agreement between the two parties that was achieved during the process? And if this was so, would this explain how when humans did not understand what they were trying to achieve by using join-up the whole process became simply the pursuit and capture of a prey animal by a predator?
The real purpose of join-up
Is it possible that when we behave like this, we are really asking those two vital questions, 1. are you friend or foe and,
2. who are you/what is your energy?
When I saw the predator prey animal version of the process, I started to wonder if, even though the horse was giving all the right responses, the human was not recognizing them because they were trying to achieve something human (start the horse) but the horse was really asking ‘this is my energy, this is who I am, are you asking me to join your herd’?
So how do we get a horse to ask this of us and why would the horse allow us to do it to them?
I think when we approach a horse correctly in this way we are behaving exactly like an alpha horse checking out a new member of our herd. We act in a way that is highly assertive by doing exactly what a leader will do to a potential follower, by driving the horse using calm but assertive energy. Testing the new horse to find out if it is friend or foe, then when we have driven the horse to the limit of our herd we stop pursuing it. We have made the decision for the horse and we are asking the horse to trust us as a decision maker. Gradually we approach the horse, (it should not approach us) our calm energy shows the horse that we are ready to accept it into our herd and when we finally turn and walk away the horse accepts our leadership and follows us. That is the moment of join-up. In the next post I will look at the consequences of all this and explain how the horse sees this as an advantage, I will also show you a better way of achieving join-up without the controversy, stay tuned.
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