This is a point that I have touched on before, when I talked about animals and their ‘names’, it concerns the role that energy and body language play in communication between all animals, – including humans. Let’s start by taking a look at body language:

body language is the external representation of the thoughts and emotions that are going on in the mind.

For example, if a person or a horse is feeling uneasy or nervous (both emotions), this is likely to be reflected physically in their body language, equally, if a person or horse is feeling very laid-back and relaxed then that also will be reflected in their external body language but here is the important point, it will also be reflected in the energy they project to others. Energy is one of those things that are quite hard to describe but quite easy to detect, let’s take some human examples first:

1. Have you ever met someone who had presence or charisma, or something intangible about them that gave them authority? Usually this is a very quiet and understated thing but somehow you just know that you are in the presence of leadership, perhaps a teacher or a policeman or a parent, it could be anybody, but the important thing is they usually do not have to say a word for you to be able to feel this, you can close your eyes and still ‘feel’ their presence. This is their energy.

1. Have you ever met someone you just immediately liked and felt were they friendly and somehow you had a lot in common? If you observe the body language, both yours and theirs you might suddenly realise that you are subconsciously copying each other. If you watch courting couples you will see this a lot and if you watch a horse and a human that have a really close positive relationship you will see this as well. In both cases you will notice that very little of their communication is vocal because the connection between them is their body language and their energy.
2. Have you ever met someone you immediately disliked? Something about them warns you to be wary of them, and once again they don’t need to say a word, it’s just a feeling that this kind of person is best avoided.

All of these examples are examples of ‘energy’, all animals use energy, in fact animals use it much more often than humans do because animals do not have spoken language. You will probably find that these different energies are there in different horses as well, some have power and authority, frequently these are alpha members of a herd, some horses are naturally friendly and get along well with everyone and some horses, well, are best avoided although it is usually because humans made them that way.

Poppy

The animal that taught me most about energy and body language was my dog, Poppy. Poppy is an English Springer Spaniel, she is almost totally white in colour and, as is very common in many breeds and species, the predominantly white gene also carries with it the gene for deafness. Poppy has never heard a sound and is not aware that there are sounds in the universe. Poppy also has a pedigree that practically makes her royalty and was bred as a working gun-dog. Just as there is a utility model for horses there is a utility model for the working dog and just as with horses, if an animal is unable to fulfil their utility/purpose then they are deemed literally use – less. Poppy was originally sold as a working dog for the sum of some £800 but it was quickly discovered that she was deaf and so could not fulfil her utility and so was returned to the breeder who gave her away ‘free to a good home’, which is how she came to live with us.

Owning a deaf dog might seem as if it is going to be a big challenge, it is not, here is one reason why; I’m afraid, I often find myself telling people who ask about her, ‘Just because she is deaf it doesn’t mean she is stupid!’ This really sums up the problem, Poppy has no issues with being deaf because she doesn’t know that she is. The ones that seem to have an enormous problem with what they insist on seeing as a ‘disabled’ animal are humans and the reason they feel like this is because they can’t try to communicate with her in spoken English. I have actually had people insist that she must be able to hear something, perhaps a very high pitched sound or a very low pitched sound or ask me if I have thought of getting her hearing aids! (Anthropomorphism is everywhere).

Another big issue people have is about how I train her, actually I basically clicker train her, using positive reinforcement training. Of course, I cannot use a clicker but because I understand the principles behind classical and operant conditioning this doesn’t matter I just use a visual bridging signal instead, such as a nod of the head, which equates to the click. The biggest problem is that you cannot attract her attention you have to wait for her to look at you, but she does this frequently, especially if there is the potential for a reward. If she is at a distance she has learned to come to me when I wave to her. She will cross a five acre paddock in a straight line to my feet. So she is responding to my body language signals, but more importantly she also responds to my energy. Because there is no language to come between us and confuse our meanings, I feel that she and I are able to communicate far more closely than ever we could have done if she could hear.

When I come across anthropomorphic dog owners I notice they are always talking to their dogs, they are continually trying to explain to anyone they meet how their dog is feeling or tell me why it is behaving in the way it is why it likes some things and doesn’t like others. Usually the dog is ignoring them, because it doesn’t have the faintest idea what the owner is trying to communicate, and the garbled, complex sounds their human makes are meaningless parts of the everyday confusion of their lives.

Some dog owners might say, ‘but what about tone of voice’? And here they have a point, tone of voice can convey a message but it is conveying an emotional message but emotional messages are energy and don’t need words.

A long time ago I learned you could control a horse with your energy, I learned this first with a very nervous thoroughbred, I discovered that by controlling my breathing, by quieting my thoughts and relaxing my body I could bring this horse down from a fizzing boiling menace to a relaxed, calm and gentle horse in under a minute. I realised this is what horses do, this is how an alpha stallion in a herd can bring a group of galloping horses to a sliding stop in a few seconds, partly it is his body language but mostly it is his energy. This is real natural horsemanship.

Because of my experiences with Poppy and my other spaniel Charlie who is now 12 and actually becoming increasingly deaf in his old age, I am finding that spoken and verbal communication is actually of very little use in communication with animals and I find that I am actually talking less and less to them, but it seems the less I talk the more and clearer communication we have. So if you really want to communicate with your horse, spend a few hours with it and don’t talk. When you stop talking you will discover that all you have left is each other’s body language and energy and that is true communication.

I believe positive reinforcement, and training methods based on it’s principles, are the next stage in the evolution of the long relationship between horses and humans. Here are the reasons why I make this claim…

We have had millennia of historical and traditional training based on what was practical and efficient. Teaching that was usually taught to the horse by correction and the threat of consequences, (positive punishment), and although we have begun to move in the right direction with natural horsemanship techniques that took an interpretation of some of the natural behaviours of the horse but still used negative reinforcement and the inevitable threat of positive punishment. (In both cases this amounted to ‘do what I want or else suffer the consequences’), this was only the first tentative steps in the right direction, – we still have the most exciting part of the journey to go.

Because we no longer need horses to enable us to survive, for the first time in history we have the luxury of allowing ourselves to see our horse for the wonderful animal he really is. But there is more, by coming to understand the horse as a horse we will also learn more about ourselves as human beings, I think this is the the biggest reason of all to adopt positive reinforcement methods because of the positive changes it will make in us, for example, as we work with our horses and establish more trust with them we will build their confidence and that in turn will build our confidence, in other words not only does our horse get better, more trusting, more relaxed and more confident when it is around us, the same thing happens to us! This is just one of the hundreds of positive spin-offs that we discover as we change our thinking through positive reinforcement training.

So where do we start?

To begin to understand positive reinforcement training we first need to understand three basic ideas. The ideas are:

• Classical Conditioning
• Operant Conditioning
• The difference between a treat and a reward

These might sound daunting but actually they are really simple to understand, for instance the word ‘conditioning’ is really just a scientific way of saying learning. So stick with me you will soon see…

Classical conditioning

The key to understanding whether a behaviour is classically conditioned or not is the word ‘predicts’. When a behaviour is classically conditioned it simply means the animal learns that two or more events become linked together in the subjects mind in such a way as the event predicts that something will happen. Let me use my dogs as an example:

I keep my dog’s leads (leashes) hanging up on the back of the door in the kitchen. When the dogs see me open the door and take down the leads they know that it is time for a walk, this creates a change in their behaviour; previously they have been curled up fast asleep but now, they become excited and jumping around in anticipation of the walk (or ‘hunt’ as they would see it, – I also respect my dogs as dogs!). This is a typical classically conditioned response where an event predicts another event that, in this case, is emotionally rewarding (fun).

Operant conditioning

Some dogs are very clever, when they consider that it is time they went for a walk they will go and find the dog leash and bring it to their owner in order to get him to take them out, this is called ‘operant conditioned behaviour’, all it means is that:

the subject takes a specific action in order to make something happen.

Note: The odd word ‘operant’ refers to the subject, if for example you were training your horse, you would be the operator and the horse would be the operant.

When we train our horse we should always be looking for ways of getting our horse to learn through operant behaviour, in this way the horse is learning along with us and is getting rewarded, along with us. Basically all successful positive reinforcement learning is about operant behaviour, it is about teaching the horse to look for the right answer so that we can reward it, and then getting the horse to want to do that thing again because it was emotionally rewarding, speaking of rewards and such…

The difference between a treat and a reward

This is one of the most commonly misunderstood ideas around any kind of positive reinforcement, and this is why we clearly need to understand the three points above. Classical conditioning and operant conditioning are not ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in themselves it is the emotions they lead to that are important, for example, the arrival of the vet in your horses environment may predict a very bad event and the horse might want to make things happen to avoid the situation, it’s a flight animal after all. This is what sometimes confuses people about conditioning (learning) they don’t understand that the emotions that the events lead to are more important than the physical events themselves, or to put it another way the behaviour is a side effect of the emotions. Nothing illustrates this better than the confusion found around the ideas of treats and rewards.

Treats are not good – at all. I never treat my horses, ever, but I do reward them lots.

The reason treats are not good is that while, treats may, or may not, induce pleasant emotions in the horse, the fact is it doesn’t matter because treats are not about rewarding the horse they are about rewarding the human. Treating our horse is a way of giving us instant good feelings about ourselves, normally this is with food but we can also see this treating behaviour with people, (often very anthropomorphic people), who love to buy lots of material ‘stuff’ for their horses, they think that ownership of items and personal belongings are important to the horse. Of course this is rubbish (some of it literally ), but not to them, because they get pleasure from providing these items, and because they get pleasure from these activities, they will want to repeat the experience, thus, positive reinforcement of the human.

Treats only reward the human and the thoughts, feelings, instincts and emotions and needs of the horse do not matter.

In other words the emotions of the horse are ignored because they do not matter.

This is what leads to the paradox of the devoted benevolent, horse owner who is unable to see anything wrong with the use of whips, fear, pain, intimidation and so on on their horse. They think it is OK because they get good feelings from the situation.

Treats are actually a subtle form of coercion and as such are prone to all the side effects of coercion, for example coercion is always reinforcing for the coercer, coercion will always increase and sadly coercion will always result in counter coercion, (see my posts on the laws of coercion). This is why people frequently have an idea that treating is bad for the horse (‘spoiling’ them) but at the same time they don’t understand why this is because because it is so rewarding for them.

At the beginning of this post I talked about the positive side effects of positive reinforcement training, this is really where we should be getting or rewards, by rewarding the horse not by rewarding ourselves. Speaking of rewards…

Rewards

A reward is a specific event in a horse’s life intended to get a repeat of a behaviour. You have probably realised that repeating behaviour is reinforcing behaviour and the best way to reinforce a behaviour is to make it positive so that it leads to positive emotions; once again it is the emotions we are after not the physical behaviour or material result, although we usually get that as well. This is all part of the positive fallout associated with positive reinforcement training. As I said at the beginning, the best part of the journey is yet to come.

My horse Ted is a 17 HH Irish Sport Horse and he has a magnificent long thick mane, the trouble is if it is not brushed out fairly regularly he starts to develop dreadlocks so he needs regular brushing.

I never tie my horses up to groom them or tack them up, the reason I do this is because I see them as prey animals and I consider that it is the absolute right of a prey animal to move it’s feet if it wants too. If my horse decides that it wants to move away from then I always consider that a clear message from my ‘teacher’ about what will constitute the next lesson! This is a good example of respecting the horse as a horse, but it doesn’t mean that I just quit and never brush them again. No, I try to think of a way where we both get what we want.

When I brush Ted’s mane I always make sure he understands that there are rewards to be earned by standing still, I do this by having some food rewards with me, that’s food rewards NOT ‘treats’. Remember, a reward is a specific event in a horse’s life intended to get a repeat of a behaviour. A treat is something that rewards the human.

So, by having these rewards with me, (he knows they are available) I make whether to stay or go his choice. If he wants to move away then that’s fine but it is his choice, and of course if he chooses to move he is also choosing not to earn a reward; so in a way, if he chose to move he would actually be using negative punishment on himself and he won’t do that, so he stays with me because he wants to.

A couple of other points to note, when I am teaching a horse to do nothing, I don’t use the clicker, I just give random rewards, (technically called a random reinforcement schedule), the reason for this is that the clicker marks a specific behaviour, it also marks the end of the behaviour, I am not looking for a specific behaviour here (do something) I am looking for a general behaviour (do nothing) so just being with me and doing nothing is the thing that is rewarded.

The second point to notice is that in the same way negatives have negative side-effects, positives have positive side-effects, and lots of them. How do you think the horse found the experience of being with his human, having his mane brushed, and getting random rewards for apparently doing nothing at all? Was it a good experience or a bad one? Obviously it was a good one, – it led to pleasurable emotions for us both. How do you think the horse will feel next time I want to brush his mane? And most important of all how do you think the horse will learn to regard me in the future as he now associates me with pleasurable emotions and random rewards. There many more positive things to notice here, for example the other horses in the herd are all watching this and seeing the alpha male in the herd enjoying human company, how do you think they might react when it is their turn? What is my status in the eyes of the herd now? Am I still a cunning predator that is liable to rip them to shreds and eat them or am I now a rather interesting element in their life?

To recap, I made it so that it was the horse’s choice to stand still and do nothing and by doing that he got rewarded and I got rewarded. But the best side-effect of all was that this exercise helped to build the atmosphere of trust between us, no tools, no threats, no coercion.

Both flight and fight have a physical and a mental component, physical flight or fight is fairly easy to understand and mental fight is usually associated with angry, aggressive horses exhibiting disturbed, abnormal behaviours, but what about mental flight; when the horse’s natural physical desire to escape a coercive force is prevented? Perhaps both physical and mental fight have been ineffective or, as is more likely, have met with further punishment, correction and coercion, the only option left to the horse is to resort to mental flight within their own head.

Negative reinforcement is the most common way to train horses, this is when a negative stimulus (a threat) is removed from the horses environment, the emotional result of this is relief at avoiding the negative thing. Horses will quickly learn to do what it takes to get to this reinforcing feeling of relief, the key thing to realize here is that ‘what it takes’ is the minimum thing they need to to get that feeling! They have no incentive to do anything else. Whenever you see a horse putting in minimum effort to avoid a negative stimulus and doing just enough to avoid punishment then you are looking at a horse that is learning to be compliant:

the problem is, most humans think this is ‘obedience’. Let’s look at an example of this, yielding to pressure:

The yielding to pressure myth

One common idea with negative reinforcement trainers is the idea of ‘yielding to pressure’, but their horse is not yielding to pressure at all, it is evading pressure and it is making the minimum effort to do so.

Note: Pressure, by the way, can be anything from a ‘feel’ on a rope, to to the infliction of severe pain, this sliding-scale of actions is often called something like increasing pressure phases.

A horse that is truly yielding to pressure is one that is moving away from a minimum pressure cue, because it wants to, – emotionally, because it knows that performing that action will lead to good things, by which I mean positive emotions, this scenario is only possible through the use of positive reinforcement. In behavioural terms we would say the horse has become operant, that means, it is performing an action because it wants to make something happen.

When a horse is behaving like this, it has every incentive to perform the action, it may even become creative in it’s approach, it will willingly cooperate with the human to find the right answer and because it is strongly emotionally reinforced to do so, it will associate this behaviour with previous good feelings and will happily repeat it at a later time, in this way learning will become rapidly and enthusiastically remembered.

How different to the compliant horse reacting to years of correction, threat and coercion, this horse is mentally in the foetal position, all it can do is work out the way that will attract the least attention and the least coercion, the very best emotional reward it can get is the feeling of relief. This phenomenon is well known to us humans as well, for compliance is a reaction to universal laws not just a reaction of horses. In humans this situation is well-known and documented, it is associated with depression and anxiety, it is very damaging both physically and mentally.

Negative Punishment

If you have read my posts on the four training methods you will know that apart from negative reinforcement there is also positive punishment and negative punishment. I have not dealt very much with negative punishment but it is important to realize that it is just as damaging as Neg R and Pos P because it is also a form of coercion. It has all the familiar side-effects of coercion, for example, it is positively reinforcing for the coercer, it always generates further coercion and ultimately it will lead to a state of counter-coercion. It has exactly the same side-effects as other forms of coercion and can only lead to a state of learned helplessness. The real issue with negative punishment is that it is usually associated in some way with the horses environment and it is nearly always unavoidable. That means, it never goes away!

• A horse that spends 23 hours per day or more, isolated in a stable from the presence of other herd members is a horse in a situation of negative punishment.
• A horse whose owner keeps it rugged day and night for many months of the year is being coerced by negative punishment.
• A horse who is fed meals of inappropriate foodstuffs such as sugar and cereals is being coerced using negative punishment.

Or how about this one…

• A horse who is being treated anthropomorphically by a human, is suffering from an inexorably oppressive environment of negative punishment.

In each of those examples the horse is losing a freedom as a result of being in an environment of negative punishment. If you want to see the results of this thinking, take a look around most livery yards and riding stables you will see compliant horses, horses that are switched off, horse that do not react to the environment around them, – think of the implications of that for a prey animal.

There is a great deal more that I could say about this subject but it is all rather depressing for me, let alone my readers! Suffice to say that:

all of this is totally avoidable.

It is our choice, we created these environments for our own pleasure and convenience, (coercion is always reinforcing for the coercer) we can choose to un-create them we can find better ways of doing things, we can start by returning our horses to the company of other horses and only keep them outdoors and in herds, we can start educating themselves to their needs as animals and stop thinking of them as machines (utility model) or pretending they have human qualities (anthropomorphic model), we can learn to understand their unique digestive systems and physiology but most of all we can choose to build relationships with them based on trust and mutual benefit for both species and to do that we need to develop training systems based only on positive reinforcement so that no horse ever needs to learn to be helpless just to survive.

To answer this interesting question, the first thing we need to define is what makes an animal a ‘pet’. I have read many books on the subject of the relationship between humans and the animals we keep as pets, but I’ve never yet found a satisfactory definition of what actually makes an animal a pet. So to get a handle on this idea, perhaps we should turn things around and first look at what defines an animal as not being a pet.

The animals we keep for food, such as chickens, pigs, cattle or sheep, are most definitely not pets, they exist solely for the purpose of producing meat, milk, wool or eggs, they live within the most rigid utility model of all, agriculture. In general not many farmers would describe their animals as pets. An old farmer once told me, ‘If your going to eat it, never give it a name’, and this is the first clue to the difference between those animals we regard as food and those we regard as pets. Pets always have names.

When we give an animal a name, we project something of our own feelings onto that animal. We start to personalize our relationship with it, by deciding on an appropriate name that usually sums up or idea of its ‘person-ality’. Although we are aware the animal is a different species we always look for ways in which the animal is like us, in other words, has human characteristics. We soon begin to notice that the animal behaves in a way that fits with our interpretation of this personality. This gives us enormous pleasurable feedback, ( a positive reinforcement loop!) and so we eagerly look for more ways in which our pet lives up to it’s name.

This is why people all over the world keep pets: – because it is positively reinforcing to do so, in other words, keeping pets rewards us with good feelings, – that’s why we do it.

So here is my definition of a pet:

A pet is an animal onto which humans are able to project their feelings and thus their emotions, typically through the assigning of a name, leading to an interpretation of the animal’s behaviour as a ‘human personality’ in such a way, as is rewarding to the human.

Of course, what I am really describing here, is anthropomorphism.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

Well, in many ways keeping pets is a very good thing. There is serious scientific evidence that keeping pets is extremely good for us, there are important positive implications to our physical and mental health. Pets allow humans to learn about relationships, they provide us with instant positive feelings and gratification, they frequently become important part of our lives for many years. So keeping pets can allow us to become healthier and more well-adjusted people.

So keeping pets is very good for humans, – but not always so good for the animal. The root of the problem for the our pet, is that, when we project our feelings on them as human-beings we often lose sight of their physical and mental needs as an animal. We think that because we meet all their needs as humans we can therefore ignore their needs as animals and this is especially true for horses.

In many ways horses have a unusual relationship with humans, they live in a strange world, somewhere between their historical role as functional animals and our desire to enjoy them as pets. This puts them in a different category to almost all other animals, and more than any other species it puts them entirely at our disposal, so that we can, if we choose, exploit them in any way we want to.

This is when pet-keeping or anthropomorphism is a truly bad thing for the animal, when the idea of the animal becomes so associated with giving us pleasure, that we fail to consider the animal’s natural needs at all, – indeed they are, to all intents and purposes, irrelevant, because strangely, they do not fit with the animals purpose. Yes, just as in the utility model, the anthropomorphic model actually defines the horse as having a purpose but in this case the purpose of the horse is to reward us with emotional pleasure.

So this is why my horses are not pets, and neither are they machines, to me, their natural needs as horses are absolutely paramount, I respect my horses for what nature has made them, – not for what they can do for me.

But this does not mean I do not get any pleasure from my association with horses, neither does it mean that I do not see my horses as individuals, exactly the opposite, I get more pleasure. My horses are all highly individual, and my life would be a drab affair without the light of horses in my world.

I believe, the way I think about horses, (my mental model), is a healthy one, by which I mean, it is healthy for me and healthy for my horses, because I totally reject anthropomorphic feelings and thoughts about them, instead, by learning from them, by studying and respecting them as horses, taking the time to notice the infinite subtly of their behaviour and interaction each day, by learning all the positive things they have to teach me, my horses pay me back with interest a thousand-fold. One of the most important aspects of our relationship is the constantly building relationship of mutual trust, for example, when a prey animal leaves the herd to come over and spent time with you just because it wants to, not because you are training it or bribing it, – then that is truly a gift, – not from a misunderstood pet but from a free horse.

They all work!

Yes, all four methods work and all four methods have been used for thousands of years but which one should we choose? Looking at our table you are probably thinking, well that positive reinforcement thing looks good and seems a sensible choice and certainly the nicest way of training an animal. That must be the one most people choose. Wrong!

By far and away the most popular training methods in the world are Negative Reinforcement and Positive Punishment.

They form the basis of almost all animal training and, you might be surprised to learn, most of our human political, legal, religious and education systems as well, in fact almost every aspect of our lives are governed in some way by negative reinforcement and positive punishment

But that doesn’t mean we have to use it to train our horse.

Let’s look at the table again:

You will notice there is a strong relationship between the laws, in fact, the four laws work in two pairs:

• Negative Reinforcement and Positive Punishment work together
• Positive Reinforcement and Negative Punishment work together

For the moment we can ignore the second pair, but if we work with horses it is crucial that we know all about the first pair. (I usually abbreviate them like this: Neg R and Pos P)

I like to think of the connection between these two laws as like a sliding scale, really it is a sliding scale of threat. You will find this method is very common in the horse training world, you will hear this scale described (euphemistically) like this:

• Moving away from pressure
• Advance and retreat
• Pressure and release
• Four phases of pressure
• Yielding from pressure
• A stronger bit
• Training ‘aids’

So lots of pressure there, but what all these things amount to is the human saying to the horse:

‘Comply with my wishes or else suffer the consequences’.

When Neg R and the threat of Pos P are used in this way they have another name, that name is coercion.

What is coercion? Here is a dictionary definition:

Coercion is the practice of compelling a person to involuntarily behave in a certain way (whether through action or inaction) by use of threats, intimidation or some other form of pressure or force. Coercion may typically involve the actual infliction of physical or psychological harm in order to enhance the credibility of a threat. The threat of further harm may then lead to the cooperation or obedience of the person being coerced. The term is often associated with circumstances which involve the unethical use of threats or harm to achieve some objective.

Not very nice is it? Yet three of our laws are all forms of coercion they are:

• Negative Reinforcement
• Positive Punishment
• Negative Punishment

NOTE: Negative reinforcements work as a response to a threat, but negative reinforcement also causes behaviours to increase because it is on the left side of the table so we know that something must be ‘rewarding’ the horse. As ever, the reward here is an emotional one, it is the emotion of relief. But to my mind, simple relief is not exactly a great thing to motivate a horse with, don’t forget this is a prey/predator relationship the relief for the horse is that it didn’t get killed, ripped apart and eaten!

Anthropomorphic bit, Sorry!

Horse says: ‘Wow, how exciting, I didn’t get killed ripped apart and eaten, I just can’t wait until the next time I don’t get killed, ripped apart and eaten…NOT!’

What is really happening here is that the horse is learning something, it is learning what is the minimum effort it needs to put in to avoid the coercive stimulus and thus achieve relief as quickly as possible. The horse has no incentive to do anything else. I will return to this idea of the minimum effort later as it is one of the most important things you will ever learn about horse behaviour.

I used to use negative reinforcement on my horses, mostly, because I didn’t know all this stuff then and because everyone else was doing it, and worst of all it was strangely satisfying, even though for a very long time I failed to notice; it nearly always gave me the opposite result to the one I wanted!

What I didn’t realise was that I was using coercion and coercion has side-effects, here are just three of the most important ones:

• Coercion is always positively reinforcing for the coercer
• Coercion always generates more coercion
• Ultimately coercion always generates avoidance or violence also known as counter-coercion

There are many more but let’s look at these three in more detail:

• Coercion is always positively reinforcing for the coercer

Horses are prey animals and humans are predators, predators find the coercion of prey animals hugely rewarding. Of course, we don’t don’t chase, capture, kill and eat horses very much nowadays but we certainly use some of those activities when we train them, we definitely chase them and capture them almost every day of their lives. I believe this is why so many humans behave like predators when they are around prey animals, not because they are ‘bad’ people but because it feels instinctively good to do these things and we are positively rewarded by positive emotions, such as satisfaction, a sense of accomplishment, a feeling of superiority (power) and so on. This is also the main reason people are reluctant to abandon coercion and adopt positive reinforcement methods.

One big area of confusion especially in the world of Natural Horsemanship is that horses use negative reinforcement on each other hundreds of times every day and this has lead to the mistaken belief that using these methods is ‘natural horse behaviour’ so it is OK to use it on horses’. It would be a big digression to explain how horses use negative reinforcement here, so watch out for other posts on the subject. But given that coercive side effect number one: coercion is always positively reinforcing for the coercer; and because it is positively reinforcing for the coercer we are on the increasing side of the table so coercive side effect number two is:

• Coercion always generates more coercion

Have you ever seen someone get on a horse and kick it to go – they always kick it to go don’t they? What did they do when the horse didn’t go? They kicked it again – harder. Coercion is always a downward spiral for the horse. What advice do some people give you about a horse that is already in a strong bit? – Get a stronger one. If our threat of coercion does not work, we always increase the threat level, either by increasing its intensity, increasing its frequency or trying a different form of coercion. Negatives always attract more negatives sometimes these negatives are ‘counter-coercive’, which brings us to side-effect number three:

• Coercion always generates counter-coercion

In case you hadn’t realised it, coercion is a negative thing:

Negative things, especially emotions and experiences attract more negatives that generate AVOIDANCE or VIOLENCE

Avoidance and violence are also called flight or fight.

Horses are prey animals, they are programmed by evolution to avoid predators like us who coerce them, horses (and humans) have three built-in counter-coercive mechanisms, these are really safety mechanisms designed to allow the horse to survive when faced with a threat, you’ve probably heard of the first two, flight or fight. Some examples:

Have you ever desperately clung on to or parted company with a horse that has been trying to avoid your coercion through flight? This is what happens when horses ‘explode’ or bolt, have you ever been kicked or bitten or barged, this is fight.

The third counter-coercive mechanism is altogether more subtle, I call it compliance, some behaviourists refer to it as ‘learned helplessness‘ and it is so important it gets a post all of it’s own.

Counter-coercion is especially powerful and dangerous, don’t become a victim of it, and the only way to avoid it altogether is not to use coercion, – at all!

I call them the four laws of behaviour.

Because they are universal they work on everybody and every living thing, they work on me, you, goldfish, peregrine falcons, dogs, horses and everything in-between, but for the moment let’s stick with just horses and humans. Here we go….

Whenever we train a behaviour we get one of two results, we either cause a behaviour to INCREASE or we cause a behaviour to DECREASE. Let’s put this in a table:

• In order to get a behaviour to increase we must reward it in some way, by this, I mean we must make it emotionally rewarding.
• The scientific term for reward is ‘reinforcement‘.
• In order to get a behaviour to decrease we must make it unpleasant in some way, by this, I mean we must make it emotionally unpleasant.
• The scientific term for unpleasant emotional experiences is ‘punishment’.

It is very important to understand that while we may make something physically rewarding or punishing, the real reward or punishment is in the emotions it evokes in our minds, for example, if I were to give you a substantial sum of money (I’m not going to, by the way), you would be greatly emotionally rewarded and thus happy, the physical cash would not be important, likewise if someone stole your life savings you would not be happy, – happiness and unhappiness are emotional not physical.

Reinforcement

Rewards are also known as reinforcers that is, they are actions which are likely to cause a behaviour to be repeated and therefore increased, for example, If I call my dog to me and every time he comes to me I give him a piece of meat, he is soon going to be very keen on increasing the behaviour of coming to me.

If on the other hand every time he comes to me I kick him hard (don’t worry I would never do this!!!) he is very soon going to no longer want to come toward me and so decrease that behaviour, in fact he would probably go one step further and actively avoid me or bite me, – and I wouldn’t blame him. Let’s add this to the table:

So now we have two types of training and behaviour but as there is Yin and Yang in everything so, there are positives and negatives in both sides of the table giving us:

Right so what does this mean? Well, what we have here are the four possible ways of training anything:

• Positive Reinforcement
• Negative Reinforcement
• Positive Punishment
• Negative Punishment

These four possibilities, the laws of behaviour, cannot be cheated, bent or broken any more than the laws of physics can, they will always work whether we like it or not and they will always work on both the trainer and the horse simultaneously.

Let’s look at each of the laws in greater detail:

Positive Reinforcement

With this law you add something positive to the subject’s environment. So when I call my dog and reward him with a piece of meat, – and thus ‘positive feelings’, I am using positive reinforcement and the behaviour is likely to increase and be repeated.

Negative Reinforcement

With this method you take away something negative from the subject’s environment, Have you spotted a catch here? Yes, before you can take something negative away – you have to put it there in the first place. Negative reinforcement is the basis of an incredible amount of human and horse interaction, it is probably the most common way of teaching and learning on the planet. Negative reinforcement can be expressed in many other ways but what it amounts to is this: Respond to my wishes – or else suffer the consequences!

Which brings us to positive punishment; positive punishments are ‘the consequences’

Positive Punishment

With this method you add something negative to the subject’s environment, just like in the second example I gave you using my dog if he comes to me and I give him a hard kick (I promise you I absolutely would never do this!). The dog will decrease the behaviour of coming to me because, – well, he doesn’t like it! We are now on the decreasing side of the table. After a very few repetitions my unfortunate dog will learn not to come to me at all because of the threat of getting kicked. So he is responding to fear of the emotional threat not the physical kick.

Negative Punishment

With this law you must take away something positive from the animal’s environment, once again the positive thing taken away is something perceived as (emotionally) positive, usually this is a freedom of some sort, for example if you decide to keep your horse in isolation in a stable and away from other horses, I’m afraid you are using negative punishment.

Summary of the laws of behaviour

In the next post I will deal with the implications of all this, – for they are many and varied!

Our management of the horse  must always create good-health and well-being in the herd.

This is the most fundamental principle on which we base our thinking about the horse. Every thing we do with our horse should stem from this principle, it makes sense on every level. Good-health and well-being should be more than just a principle, it should be a right of all horses.

This principle is at the heart of the responsibility we accept when we take on ownership of a horse, or any other animal for that matter!

There is no occasion where the human can justify anything less than this, it is a policy that will lead to enormous benefits for both horse and rider, happier, healthier horses mean less vet’s bills, safer horses, longer lived horses and that will lead automatically to riders who no longer see the horse as a means-to-an-end or a dumb animal that we can project our feelings on to, in order to make us feel good about ourselves.

Principle #2.

We base or relationship on the Natural Behaviour of the horse. That means: Life in a herd, a life full of natural movement, a diet that closely relates to the natural fibre-based diet.

We must educate ourselves, and those around us to begin to see the horse as the animal it truly is. Natural behaviour is defined by the science of ethology in the form of an ethogram of the species. An ethogram is list of verified behaviours observed by scientists and taken from the wild horse. Even though these behaviours are sometimes inconvenient to our traditional approach they are easily incorporated into our management system, some examples: if we begin to understand that a horse must always live in the company of other horses, that movement is not only a fundamental right of the horse it is a vital component of a healthy digestive system, that horses are fibre-digesters that need only to be fed on low energy fibre-based foods from which their efficient microbe-based digestive systems can extract large amounts of energy, if we start to accept new ways of managing the environment of the horse such as track-based systems we will lose forever the ‘cages and coercion’ approach that is killing horses and riders all over the world.

Principle #3.

Horses need to move. Constant movement any time, day or night is a fundamental right of the herd.

The most profound effect to the horse, of humans deciding that they must live in houses, is the loss of freedom of movement, horses don’t just need to move, they must do it to remain healthy. They must be able to move in order to digest their food, to maintain their physical bodies, to wear down their hooves, to stimulate themselves both physically and mentally. It is a fundamental right of a prey animal, a flight animal, a foraging, herd animal to move when it needs to. Horses that are able to move at will in the company of other horses are able to interact and react to the environment around them in the only way that is natural to them. Once again humans do not lose by this, they gain by having happier, healthier, safer horses.

Principle #4.

Management is based on the environment, – not just the horse.

When I see a problem or a factor that I wish to change in my horses, I do not change the horse, I look at the horse’s environment and see if there are changes that I can make there that will benefit the whole herd, not just the individual, for example, I might notice that one of my horses is getting too fat, rather than singling out the individual horse and ‘putting it on a diet’, I will try to find ways to increase the daily exercise the herd takes, I will place forage in places where they have to go looking for it, I might also increase the fibre in the horse’s diet by adding say, chopped straw to the daily haylage ration, the effect of this is to have the horses work harder to obtain the same amount of energy, this is something that benefits the whole herd rather than the individual. Always treat the environment, – not just the horse.

Principle #5. The opportunity to feed is the main daily activity. Up to 16 hours + per day!

One of the commonest anthropomorphic misunderstandings of all is the myth that your horse is spending too much time eating. The truth here is that it probably not spending anything like enough time eating, the problem is what it is eating. The digestion of fibre to extract energy is a slow process and because the horse’s primary defence is running away, it is not possible to spend hours of the day and night standing in one place digesting bulk, so the horse has become a ‘trickle-feeder’, nibbling and foraging just enough bulk to keep the process ticking over while still retaining the ability to run away at great speed if necessary. This process is so fundamental to the horse and takes up such a large proportion of a 24 hour period during which the sociable and gregarious horse spends much of it’s time eating in the presence of other horses I say that eating is not just a physiological (physical) need it is also a major psychological (mental) need. Horses actually show their relationship to others by the proximity and length of time they spend grazing with others.

Principle #6.

There is always something to look at or do. Horses have a right to live in a stimulating environment.

Many years ago I worked in zoos, in those days, sadly, animals and birds were often kept in dull rectangular cages with little or no stimulation, not surprisingly they didn’t last too long, fortunately zoos realised this was not a good thing, mostly because the public noticed this as well and stopped attending. The answer to this was to provide environments that were far more stimulating, in which the animals could exhibit their natural behaviour, in addition zoo keepers actually started a process know today as ‘environmental enrichment’, where, for example, they would hide food around the environment so that animals could once again spend their day hunting and foraging food. This has lead to happier, healthier animals that breed readily in captivity. See other posts with the tag ‘zoos’ for more on this.

Horses are intelligent. I have heard some say as intelligent as dogs or dolphins in their own way, (this is likely to be a very different way, as dogs and dolphins are both predators). It would make sense for prey animals to be highly selected by evolution for intelligence, the stupid ones would get eaten!

I have certainly seen horses perform highly complex actions that I cannot explain other than reasoning at a high level. I have seen them solve problems, I have seen them give up on a problem and return to it later with new ideas, I have certainly seen evidence of creative thinking and evidence of problem-solving and I have seen horses that are very fast learners indeed.

In 1945 a scientist called Donald Hebb discovered that rats kept in a stimulating environment were able to excel in learning tests. To cut a long story short his conclusion was that animals that were exposed to stimulating environments became more intelligent and a stimulating environment actually caused the brain to develop and learn, in other words animals in a stimulating environment had more developed brains, which made them more intelligent.

How much stimulation does a horse that may spend weeks or months or even years of it’s life confined within a 12 foot by 12 foot stable get? What is really happening during those passing hours physically and mentally? I guess it all comes down to the last principle.

This principle is the key to enlightenment, it is the key to happy, healthy, safe horses, it is also the key to your own happiness, health and safety and for that reason alone is worth writing down somewhere that you can see it every day.

Principle #7.

RESPECT THE HORSE AS A HORSE

Principle #1.

Our management of the horse  must always create good-health and well-being in the herd.

Principle #2. We base or relationship on the Natural Behaviour of the horse. That means: Life in a herd, a life full of natural movement, a diet that closely relates to the natural fibre-based diet.

Principle #3. Horses need to move. Constant movement any time, day or night is a fundamental right of the herd.

Principle #4. Management is based on the environment, – not just the horse.

Principle #5. The opportunity to feed is the main daily activity. Up to 16 hours + per day!

Principle #6. There is always something to look at or do. Horses have a right to live in a stimulating environment.

Principle #7. RESPECT THE HORSE AS A HORSE

These are the basic principles on which we must base everything we do with our horse:

1. How we manage it’s environment.
2. How we feed it.
3. How we regard it’s veterinary treatment
4. How we breed it.
5. How we train it.
6. How we ride it.

These principles must be applied throughout it’s long life.

These principles are the responsibility we accept as horse owners.

• When we look at the typical relationships between horses and humans, it is sad to see how often they are based on misunderstanding and human convenience, rather than human intelligence and the needs of the horse. When we deal with traditional models of thinking as in the utility model, or modern methods based on rewarding the human such as the anthropomorphic model, we can see that the root cause of conflict between the two species are dogmatic human ideas about the horse, based on our beliefs about what the horse ‘is for’.
• Because this approach will always lead to the suppression of the horse and the reward of the human, I have developed a new set of principles a new basis for our relationship and this time they are based on rewarding BOTH the horse and the human.
• We can still get what we want from the horse but this time the horse gets something out of the deal as well, the horse gets to live the life it was designed for, to be rewarded with the emotions that every prey animal seeks, to be safe and live in the company of other members of it’s herd.
• This can only lead to horses that are:
• Happier
• Healthier
• Safer
• Longer-lived
• Easier to train
• More intelligent
• More willing to be trained
• More rewarding for us!!

These principles are the seven principles of natural horse keeping.

If I said to you that a stable is also in many ways nothing more than a cage. You might disagree, – but before you stop reading, here is a dictionary definition of the word ‘cage’:

• A structure for confining birds or animals, enclosed on at least one side by a grating of wires or bars that lets in air and light.

So, is that not also a (crude) physical description of a stable? Well perhaps not. Most people would agree that a cage is a ‘bad’ thing as it has all kinds of negative connotations with human imprisonment, zoos, suffering animals and even torture but surely a warm, cozy stable is not really a cage is it?

Cage or Stall?

The Element of Choice

One of the weirdest human oddities about the difference between stalls and cages is that we see cages as being bad because there is no element of choice. Animals or even humans confined in a cage have no choice about whether they are there or not, and bizarrely, somehow stalls are seen as a ‘good’ place to be even though there is exactly the same lack of choice! Humans truly are, the strangest animals on the planet.

So, stables and stalls give us generally good feelings and cages give us bad feelings so the only real difference is not physical at all, but it is a matter of mental perspective. It is possible to argue that these definitions really depend on your moral or ethical view concerning putting animals in cages or ‘housing’ them in stables, but whether you see it as a stable or a cage both are used to confine animals and the effects of confinement have very serious physical and mental implications for your horse.

First some basic observations about stables.

Stables are very convenient places for humans to keep horses, after all, the horse is, by nature, a flight animal and flight animals tend to be very a very inconvenient asset if they decide they don’t want to be caught. Historically, horses have been a mark of high status in human society and so it is a fairly natural wish to protect your valuable assets from exposure to the climate, death from other predators and of course theft by your enemies. In addition to this stables give you control over the horse and it’s behavior, they make the horses needs fit with to your time and your resources. Most owners would say they stable their horse because only stables can offer protection, warmth, and comfort to the horse within. You would think that protection, comfort, security, a regular temperature, (not too hot, not too cold), a regular food supply, water and all those other necessities and even luxuries, that life within four walls can bring, would be exactly what any self-respecting equine would want, wouldn’t you?

But you would be wrong – very wrong, because these are all things that humans want in their lives and from their homes and, as you probably know by now, when humans start putting human thoughts, feelings, instincts and emotions into a horses head we are dealing with the old enemy of anthropomorphism. In this post I will deal with the link between the idea of the human home and the horses ‘home’. I also hope to show that far from providing protection for your horse confining herd animals in stables could be exposing them to risks and pathogens that they would never deal with in a natural situation and consequently to which, they have very little natural immunity.

Anthropomorphism is the desire to see our horses as ‘being like us’. We consider that a roof over our head is a basic human right and so we imagine it is also a fundamental thing that our horses should have. Many of the extremes we inflict on our horses,for example, the wearing of clothes, shoes, the idea of regular hearty meals and so on is an extension of this basic human desire to house our horses but it is also the at fundamental root of so much conflict and trouble in our relationship.

A conflict of environments

First of all, the horse is a herd animal and very much a creature of of the outdoors, a macro-climate. If you live outdoors you live in the fresh air, the stable is obviously the opposite of this, effectively a micro-climate. Even with the very best ventilation the stall environment is prone to dust. This dust is unavoidable and is a by-product of the bedding and forage feeds such as hay that horses live on. Horses that are confined are usually provided with bedding as the horse moves and air circulates and recirculates, it carries this dust upwards into the air the horse is breathing, and it is this air that often carries with it viruses and bacteria. These are breathed-in along with dust that aggravates the horses airways, this aggravation causes the horses upper respiratory tract to secrete mucus over and above natural levels. The effect of this can be seen in a disorder called, inflammatory airway disease (IAD). This disorder and others like it ,have a measurable detrimental effect on the horse’s performance.

This dust also carries with it something known as endotoxin. This is a protein derived from the cell walls of bacteria as they die. Endotoxin is found in large quantities in hay, straw and fecal matter. The endotoxins stick to dust particles which are then inhaled. The trick here is that the body is fooled by the alien protein into thinking that it is being invaded and so the airways become inflamed, ultimately causing the horse to experience increased difficulty in breathing. When the body’s defenses are fooled like this we call it an allergic reaction, in one sense it is an allergic reaction to the dust in the air but in a bigger sense it is an allergic reaction to the horse’s environment.

Allergic Respiratory Disease

This is very common in stabled horses. This condition used to be called COPD or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, It is now more properly called recurrent airway obstruction (RAO) and many years ago was know by the old name of ‘heaves’. Some researchers have found that up to half of all stabled horses suffer from this disease. One of the recommended ways of managing this condition, by the way, is to return your horses to living outside, – funny that.

The horse is by nature a fiber-digester. And as fiber becomes more mature and dries out naturally it begins to break up and produces small dusty particles. For horses living outdoors this is not a great problem as the action of the wind carries these particles harmlessly away but for horses confined in the limited micro-climate of a stall the horse cannot escape them and so must attempt to adapt to the contaminated air by attempting to produce more mucus and to continually be fighting what it’s body sees as an attack by foreign protein particles (endotoxins). Simply attempting to increase ventilation is only a ‘sticking plaster’ solutions (humans love sticking plaster solutions), the real problem is an underlying conflict of environments.

Before we leave the subject of air circulation we must realize that there is also an anthropomorphic element to what is happening here. Humans are house-dwellers and before that were cave-dwellers. One thing that both these environments have in common is that they have a very small range of temperature change. It is strange that wherever you travel in the world you will find that either the heating or the air-conditioning are set to provide an environment of somewhere in the region of 21 degrees Centigrade or about 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Anything either side of this and we usually feel too hot or too cold. But horses as I said, are outdoor animals they have evolved over millions of years to exist in a variable temperature, think how much the day/night temperature can vary at certain times of the year. What horses are not designed to cope with, is an environment in which the temperature never changes and the air remains relatively still, – but this exactly what we see as the ‘right’ state of affairs.

Confinement and the digestive system

Horses are fiber-digesters, although technically, that is not quite true, the microbes in the gut are the real fiber-digesters and horses are then able to utilize the nutrients they release. This means that the horse’s digestive system is far less adaptable to different types of food and this is the reason that any changes made to the horse’s diet must be introduced over a long period of time i.e. slowly. Because the horse needs time to adapt or rather the bacteria need time to grow and adapt to the change. A great example of this is the old horseman’s myth that bran is a laxative that should be fed once a week, to ‘clear them out’. Original this probably evolved as an idea that was a protect against colic. There are several types of colic with many causes but possibly the most serious and consequently most feared is called ‘impaction colic’, this is basically a blockage of the digestive system. Horses are unusual in that they are unable to do something most mammals can do, that is, they are unable to belch or vomit, this makes their digestive system effectively a ‘one-way street’, consequently any blockage is a very serious matter and potentially fatal. It is understandable that 100 years ago if your very livelihood depended on your horse you would be very careful to avoid something like your horse coming down with colic. So the practice began of feeding bran as a laxative, (strangely enough in the human, bran can also work in the opposite way and cause constipation, (or compaction), for the very reason that we are not fiber-digesters.

Bran (also called wheatbran) is fiber, so the idea that horses can’t digest it and it should pass straight through (hopefully!) is a little strange. What was really happening here is that the occasional introduction of a different food caused a disturbance in the microbial balance of the gut bacteria, which was temporarily unable to deal with it and so it passed through the system relatively undigested, leading to the mistaken idea that it was acting as a laxative.

Back to the stable…

Recently, imposed stall confinement has been found to be associated with 54% of impaction colic cases and other studies found that 62% of colon impactions occurred within two weeks of significant management changes, such as being brought into a stable or a change of yard (environment) or diet. So horses do not like changes to their diet or their environment. Yet this is exactly what they get when they are taken in and out of the stable during the summer or confined for long days and nights in the winter. This is also what they get when their natural foraging (browsing and moving-on) behavior is swapped for the anthropomorphic idea of ‘mealtimes’. Foraging animals spend most of their time feeding, up to 75% of their daily ‘time budget’. Animals fed ‘meals’, (a predator concept by the way), spend only a fraction of their day eating and this leads to the typical ‘bored horse in a stable’ syndrome.

Most owners comfort themselves with the idea that their horse will at least get a good nights sleep, except that horses don’t sleep for 8 hours a night, no prey animal would adopt such a strategy, horses only doze for a short periods on and off throughout the day and night.

Note: There is a disorder called equine sleep disorder where horses actually lose the ability to lie down and enter REM sleep (usually about 40 minutes in 24 hours) This is thought to be because they are too afraid to relax. This is another little ‘benefit’ of living in a stable. See other posts under category, sleep.

What we take away

If we consider the effects of what we add to the horse’s environment when we confine them, we should also consider what we are taking away. Horses are creatures of movement, in the wild this may be up to 20 miles per day. Horses in confinement get almost none of this. Fortunately, we are able to measure this accurately nowadays with the use of GPS devices. Pastured horses (24 hour turn-out) have been recorded as traveling about 6-7 miles per 24 hours, in contrast to horses in confinement with some exercise travel 2.8 – 3.2 miles. It is interesting to note that horses that were outside also had a greater increase in bone density, significantly different from non-exercised stalled horses.

Movement and Digestion

Movement and exercise also increase metabolism, even simple walking stimulates the movement of food through the digestive system (gastrointestinal motility). Fiber digestion is reported as increasing by as much as 20% in horses that can exercise. In other words, movement is an important part of the digestive process, horses need to be able to do this in order to function at the most basic level. Because movement has this effect it, increases the movement of digestive material through the body and therefore lowers the risk of impaction colic.

Exercise for Growth and Development

The correct musculoskeletal development in young horses has been shown to be detrimentally affected when they are prevented from exercising properly. One area that suffers is the animal’s joints, because lack of exercise inhibits the adaption of cartilage to supporting the growing weight of the body. Once again this is a situation where the horse fails to adapt to an unnatural state and an unnatural environment.

Confinement and Behavior

For me, and for the horse this is the really big reason for not confining horses, horses are herd animals, they need the presence of other horses to feel safe, by confining, and inevitably isolating them in stables we are putting them in a state of constant emotional fear and frustration and we are doing this both for our own convenience and because of our own misguided (albeit usually well-intentioned) anthropomorphic ideas. This means that whenever we confine a horse in a stable we are placing it in an environment it was never designed to cope with, and because the horse is constantly trying to cope it is constantly in the mental state of stress. The physiological implications of long-term unavoidable stress are well known, they include things such as allergic reactions to the environment, ulcers, gastric disorders and severely abnormal emotional responses such as stereotypical behaviors (AKA stable vices). We are also putting horses in situations from which they can never escape through flight – their natural, first-line defense, consequently we see animals turning to fight reactions in which they become aggressive and dangerous, or even the form of mental flight I term ‘compliance’, where they cease to interact with their environment in any way – a severe and potentially life-threatening response in a prey animal.

But my horse isn’t like this…

I know some people would argue that their horse has lived happily in a stable all it’s life and indeed it may seem to them that that is the case but this is because of the overwhelming feeling of emotional satisfaction that behaving anthropomorphically gives us. Anthropomorphism is intrinsically rewarding for the human being – it gives us good feelings about ourselves and only about ourselves. It actually causes us to distort what we see happening and most of all it causes us to distort our belief system. So for example we fail to see any difference between a horse ‘housed’ in a stable and an animal trapped in a cage.

Horses behaving badly

Some people will admit that their horse is, ‘lively’ or difficult to handle or aggressive or impossible to load or difficult to train, but they will always see this as the horse’s ‘fault’ or because he has ‘bad manners’ or ‘misbehaves’, they will never see it as a consequence of their own actions or their misunderstanding of even the most basic requirements that the horse needs to be a horse. They will never see that the alien environment of the stable is the root of so many problems that would disappear in an instant if we realized that horses should live in herds not in houses.

Finally, it is ironic that the most iconic symbol of freedom, majesty and power and free spirit, the wild horse, is the one animal we consider it most necessary to keep in a cage.