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.

There are basically two things that reward horses, the most obvious one is food, the other one is, of course, – sex! These are the two most fundamental driving forces of life. Now I am assuming that we can pass quickly over sex as a practical reward for horses but even so, we can still discuss something that is closely related to sex and is frequently seen by humans as a reward for horses, and that is touch.

Have you ever seen a jockey push his horse to the limit to complete a challenging race ? At the end both horse and rider are covered in sweat, the veins beneath the horses skin are standing out rigidly as the horse’s body desperately tries to lose heat in the form of steam; but the horse has won and the jockey reaches forward and gives the horse a hearty slap on the neck, ‘Good Boy! Well-done!’ This is one of the commonest ways for a human to reward a horse, but is it rewarding?

We know that for something to be a reward it must be emotionally reinforcing and that means it must be something that causes rewarding emotions liable to make the horse want to repeat the experience, so I think you can see that slapping a horse on the neck is unlikely to be such an experience. Of course someone is getting rewarded here and as usual it is the human being, after all he’s just ridden a winner so he is likely to be highly emotionally (and possibly financially) rewarded. It doesn’t make him or her a bad person it just makes them good human beings and predators, remember the first law of coercion is that it is rewarding for the coercer, (see other posts).

So in this case, – and in the the other million times per day that horses get affectionate slaps from their owners, the horse isn’t actually getting rewarded at all, but are there other times when human touch can be rewarding?

Well, for a human to touch a horse and the horse to feel rewarded by it, the horse must know (by learning), that the sensation of being touched by a human leads to good feelings. The horse cannot know this instinctively, he must learn it.

To me, rewarding a horse by touch is not something I assume the horse will like, it is something I teach the horse, very deliberately, and normally I use food rewards to do it, because food rewards are an instant way of giving good feelings. I am not teaching a behaviour or a specific action in this case so I don’t need to mark the activity with a clicker, I am teaching the horse something general, usually, ‘do nothing’ and ‘trust me’. If you have read my post on the difference between treats and rewards you will know that I never ‘treat’ * my horses because that would just be a reward for me, instead I use the food as a reward, because I want more of the ‘do nothing’ and ‘trust me’ behaviour, so I reinforce it.

• OK, I’m only human so when I say ‘never’, I quote Gilbert & Sullivan, I mean it like:

“Never?”

“What Never!!”

Well, – hardly ever… ‘

Some of the natural horsemanship systems like to have the human touch the horse all over it’s body, because they want to desensitize the horse to human activity, they often do this by techniques like ‘approach and retreat’, seeing how far the horse will tolerate their touch and then ‘sneakily’ going just beyond the comfortable area and quickly retreating. This seems to me to be a very clumsy way of going about things. If you use positive reinforcement methods you will have a horse that actually wants you to touch it, because it enjoys it, but even more crucially you will have a horse that is rapidly learning to trust you, because every time it is around you it gets good emotions. Remember trust is built up by teaching your horse to trust your decisions, because your decisions lead to good feelings which lead to good emotions and best of all, trust is a two way thing, the more your horse trusts you, the more you learn to trust your horse.

In a previous post I talked about the popular horse training idea of ‘yielding to pressure’ and I said that if a horse was being trained through the use of negative reinforcement it could not be yielding to pressure, it could only be evading pressure. A horse is only truly yielding to pressure when it is doing it because it wants to. Pressure in this case is a form of touch and the touch is being used as a stimulus to ‘cue’ the horse to produce a behaviour. The difference between doing this as a result of negative reinforcement or positive reinforcement is this:

Let’s say you start applying pressure at a very gentle level, let’s borrow a natural horsemanship term here and call this ‘phase one’.

If your horse does not respond and you increase the pressure to phase two or beyond, then you are using negative reinforcement, even if your timing is perfect and you release the pressure the instant the horse responds, that is still negative reinforcement (taking away something negative – the pressure, from the horse’s environment)

This works because the horse experiences the emotion of relief, and when the pressure comes back because you want to teach it to respond faster or because you want to teach the horse something else, the horse will get confused (it did what you wanted after all) and it will seek to evade the pressure, which means, avoid the confusing thing and get to the emotion of relief faster.

Using positive reinforcement you apply a touch cue at phase one again, but let’s say you are in a clicker session, as soon as the horse tries to avoid the pressure it is rewarded by a click and a reward and therefore good feelings. Now let’s say you reapply the stimulus, this time because the horse is actually seeking to find the thing that gets the click, so your stimulus no longer needs to be at phase one, it can be at phase three-quarters, in other words it is decreasing or as I like to think of it, it is being refined, because you get the same behaviour repeated, but for a smaller stimulus or cue. Each time you refine the cue you still get the same behaviour, so you rapidly get to phase one half, then phase one quarter and how about this, – phase zero?

Phase zero is of course when you have a horse that will respond to a hand signal, (and even that can be refined to a tiny hand signal), then you get a horse you can dance with! AND, who gets good feelings when you are around, who is rapidly learning to trust your decisions and to trust you and you are learning to trust the horse, etc, etc…

now that is a relationship and that is the power of positive reinforcement.

Footnote:

The very next day after I wrote this post I received notification of an article called ‘Training: Food rewards are more effective than physical contact’. Now that’s spooky! Read all about it here:

http://www.thehorse.com/ViewArticle.aspx?ID=16878&src=fav

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.

It was a beautiful, warm, sunny day and I found myself watching a demonstration of Parelli Natural Horsemanship. The clinic was being given by a Parelli five star instructor who was in the middle of a tour of Europe, and had probably got to the stage of jet-lag and fatigue where he was forgetting which country he was in, but nevertheless, he came across, (as is so often the case), as a thoroughly nice human being. He had that understated, unassuming energy that is sometimes called calm-assertive, that all animal people have, a quiet, confident authority around animals and situations. The students also, seemed perfectly pleasant and several of them had brought along their horses who I’m sure were all very nice equines. So all was set up for a thoroughly enjoyable experience, a great opportunity for learning and progress, but unfortunately that was not the impression I eventually left with.

Now before we go further I want to make it clear that I didn’t witness any terrible calamities, no horses or humans were harmed during the making of this event, no one got ‘roped and choked’ and no battles ensued, but sadly the one word that kept turning over and over in my mind as I drove home, it was the word ‘confusion’. If it had been my confusion, then I could have understood it, – but I was not confused at all, I had understood everything I had seen, no, the confusion was all on the part of the students, their horses and the teacher. This is why.

Problem number one:

Jargon and communication

The entire Parelli system is disappearing under the weight of it’s own confused jargon. Pat Parelli and I share (at least) one thing in common, we both love words, but the Parelli system has become so chocked with clever phrases and alliterative catchphrases that something very important has been lost, – communication. It is almost impossible in the Parelli system to get a clear definition of what even major principles on which the system is based, actually mean, for example, it sounds really cool to talk about ‘Love, Language and Leadership’, but what message do those words really convey? I’ve been around the Parelli system for years and never yet found a clear definition of this, – sounds good though.

I noticed during the initial, lecture part of the day that as the horseman asked questions there were instant stock responses from the students, not thought-out, appropriate and accurate responses, just clichés from the great book of Parelli-isms. It is no wonder that PNH is sometimes accused of being a cult.

Problem number two:

Threats

This is really the big one, the great misunderstanding that lies beneath the whole, ‘natural horsemanship’ movement, that misunderstanding is called negative reinforcement. The myth is based on the observation that horses use negative reinforcement on each other all the time, which they do. Unfortunately the problem with Neg R is that it is linked with something called positive punishment (Pos P), this means that the main use of Neg R is as a threat.

NOTE: Negative reinforcement is when a negative stimulus is removed from the subject’s environment, it works closely with positive punishment where a negative stimulus is added to the subject’s environment. Put another way, if you say to your horse , ‘do what I want or else suffer the consequences’, you are using Neg R. Positive Punishment and all that goes with it , are the consequences.

The key difference between the way humans and horses use Neg R and Pos P is that humans use it to get the horse to do things, horses use it to get another horse to avoid things. Horse society is controlled by the rules of Negative Reinforcement just as ours is, but whereas we use it to confront and control others, horses use it to avoid confrontation. Physical confrontation is a very bad thing in the horse world because it carries with it the risk of physical injury, potentially fatal for any prey animal.

So why does this lead to confusion?

For one very simple reason, because we are attempting to ‘reward’ an animal by using threats.

This is the root of the problem, this is why the horses, students and teachers were all confused. If I say to my horse, ‘I’m going to threaten you until you do what I want, then I’m not going to threaten you any more’ then the horse has at least some chance of learning, (a pretty miserable) lesson, but then what do we do? We decide to teach the horse something else by threatening it again, we moved the goal posts but the horse has no way of knowing this, all it knows was that it did the ‘right’ thing but then the threats came back, not surprisingly the horse is confused by this and doesn’t know what to do, – the result of this confusion? The threats increase. It is the nature of using negative methods that threats always increase, what is the consequence of this? The horse is now being punished for being confused! Quite quickly the horse will resort to it’s instinctive strategies of flight and fight, but these will just result in more punishment, all that is left to the horse is the state of mind called compliance or learned helplessness. Negative methods always have negative side-effects.

Problem number three:

Humans

While I was watching the students with their horses I was struck by how often adverse reactions in the horses were caused by the ‘wrong’ energy in the human. Yet not once was this pointed out, the whole demonstration was about correcting the horse, never the human, one example was that the horseman walked around waving a ‘frightening stimulus’ a plastic bag tied to the string on the end of a stick. Yet in every case, the human had their back to the frightening thing and was focused on getting the horse to lower it’s head by pulling it toward the ground, needless to say the horse was ignoring it’s human and focused like any good prey animal on the threatening stimulus and prepared for flight.

In the same situation I would simply have turned round brought my energy right down to super-calm, made my body language as relaxed as possible, possibly cocked one foot, breathed very deeply and maybe even yawned with boredom while the stimulus passed. That would have shown the horse that this was not a frightening thing. This is how you teach a horse to be calm, by example, not by using ‘martingale-mentality’ to try and force the horse into a relaxed position when all it wants to do is get away.

This kind of exercise also has long-term effects as well, real goals for a teacher and a student, this really builds a bridge between the prey animal and the predator because this is what natural horsemanship and our relationship with horse should really be about – TRUST.

Problem number four:

Desensitization

When natural horsemanship methods (not just Parelli) try to train using threats they get the opposite of what they really want, because they focus on negatives like ‘desensitizing’ the horse, that’s exactly what they get, compliant horses that have learned to be helpless are desensitized horses. I would never want a horse that is desensitized, I want a horse that is totally in tune with it’s environment, that is actively and positively interested in what is going on around it. Nature spent 55 million years of evolution sensitizing horses to potential threats so that they survived, we should accept that, and work with it instead of using our clumsy ‘threat-training’ to try to force the horse to ignore threats. More confusion for the horse and more confusion for us.

I actively expose my horses to frightening stimuli that I wanted them to get used to but here is the key thing:

I always make sure there is something in it for the horse, by which I mean something that is emotionally rewarding for them and if I can get them to link the emotionally rewarding thing with my presence then I am actively building trust between us. Simples!

Problem number five

Food is ‘bad’ mentality

This was probably the most shocking thing I learned that sunny day, the bizarre idea that for some reason certain horses do not respond to food. Well I’m sorry, but this is like saying of all the species of animal in the world some horses do not need to obey to the law of gravity! One woman told the story of how she had given food to her horse and although it took the food in it’s mouth it wasn’t interested in being rewarded by food and just let it drop out of it’s mouth. Her conclusion was that her horse was of a personality type, sorry horse-anality type that didn’t respond to food. This is really just more confusion and relates back to the misunderstanding due to jargon, it is also a great example of superstitious learning.

Superstitious learning is when a subject comes to ‘believe’ something that is emotionally rewarding but logically wrong.

I presume that this horse was not unique in the history of the world in that it did not eat at all, in fact I suspect that left to it’s own devices it would spend up to about 16 hours per day happily foraging for food, – like any other horse. Animals eat because finding and eating food is instinctively rewarding, – emotionally rewarding. There is a time though when no animal will eat, that is when it is under conditions of extreme stress or fear, you might have heard of horses taken to a show, who although provided with adequate food and water will not eat, drink or defecate until they return to the relative safety of their yard or have you ever felt unable to face food yourself because you were about to undergo some trial, such as a public exam or a visit to the dentist? This is why the horse didn’t eat, because it was too afraid to, because it had just been exposed to the fear and confusion of being trained by threats, not because of some anthropomorphic quirk of it’s ‘personality type’. But the explanation expressed by the owner was one that she found emotionally satisfying because she wanted to believe what she had been told rather than thinking logically about things.

So all in all, a confusing but also very interesting day, but the final question I asked myself on that long drive home was, where is this all going? The conclusion I came to is that Natural horsemanship, Parelli or otherwise, ultimately has no future if it continues to head down this route of negative reinforcement. The recent PR disaster at Stoneleigh with the horse Catwalk showed that even a highly experienced horseman such as Pat Parelli can get things wrong, not because he is a bad person but because this is the where negative reinforcement and positive punishment will ultimately lead you. This is also the reason that all over the world you meet people ‘who used to be in Parelli’. One other negative side-effect of negative things are that they ultimately repel, they leave people feeling emotionally uncomfortable, usually the very opposite of the emotions that got them into PNH in the first place. This is of course the human flight reaction, ultimately we avoid things that make us feel uncomfortable.

So Mr Parelli, here is my personal challenge to you and your organisation, learn to leave the negative reinforcement behind and get positive. I believe that the next big evolutionary step in the relationship between horses and humans is the ‘trust revolution’ in which trainers will only focus on building that bridge between the prey animal and the predator and you can only do that by using positive reinforcement, there are only three catches really, they are: that it is a simple concept, easy to explain and not at all confusing.

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!

This was a nightmare not only for the horse but also for Pat Parelli, we are assured by veterinary experts that the horse suffered no physical damage but nightmares of course are not physical things they are mental and emotional.

I was not actually present so it is not fair to rake over the details of what actually happened, but I was first made aware of what happened by someone who was in the audience and saw the whole thing. So based on that and what I’ve seen and heard from other sources, I will give you my interpretation of this event.

First I would like to say that I’m not ‘anti-Parelli’, or anybody else for that matter, the Parelli organization does a lot of good work that benefits horses and humans all over the world but what I believed happened was based around two factors, firstly, Pat Parelli got a reminder that just like the rest of us he was a human being and that means his fundamental instinct is that of a predator. The second factor is that many natural horsemanship ideas from many systems are based on a principle called negative reinforcement. In it’s simplest terms negative reinforcement used when you take something negative away from the horses environment, so you will hear lots of ideas such as increasing phases of pressure, approach and retreat, teaching by the release of pressure, yielding to pressure and so on. The reason these techniques are regarded as ‘natural’ is because horses use them all the time, literally hundred of times every day, so we reason that if we use them too, we are behaving ‘like a horse’. Incidentally, modeling our behaviour on the behaviour of another species is a subtle, albeit reversed form of anthropomorphism.

The basic problem that Pat Parelli had was that he tried to use negative reinforcement to overcome a fear, in this case the fear of the bridle, and this can never work! It is not that negative reinforcement as such, doesn’t work it is just that negative reinforcement will never work with an emotional issue like fear. It is the wrong tool for the job. It is a bit like trying to drive a screw into a piece of wood using a spoon, by which I mean, it will take you a long time, (the Catwalk demonstration took over two hours), you will get tired, frustrated, angry and mean and ultimately you will give up.

And this is what happened to Pat Parelli.

The other issue I mentioned was that Pat behaved like a predator, here are some examples:

• He stopped communicating with the audience (quite an issue for Mr Parelli I understand ) This means he went into a focused state like any good predator.
• He took away the horses options for flight, ropes, twitch, hobble.
• He used physical tools, ropes etc.
• He cooperated with other predators, to bring down his ‘prey’
• He opposed the horses fight reaction, usually done with equal of greater force.

Perhaps in Parelli terms you could say he went into ‘right-brain mode’, that is his behaviour became instinctual, he did what he ‘felt’ was the right thing to do and what is the right thing for a predator? To go on the hunt.

So was Mr Parelli cruel in the actions he took with Catwalk? No, I don’t think so. Pat Parelli didn’t do anything that isn’t done a thousand times a day all over the world by people who are acting like predators and following their own instincts. He just made a mistake, OK, a hugely public and embarrassing mistake and I’m sure it is not something that he would gladly repeat. And what about Catwalk, has he been ‘ruined’ by this experience? Probably not, he might have been traumatised if he had been a human being but he is not, he is a prey animal and as such he will most likely have his suspicions confirmed about the behaviour of predators, he will move on probably thinking he has had a lucky escape.

So to return to the original problem of a head-shy horse, what could have been done? Well, as I’ve said this problem is a fear-based issue, it is likely that Catwalk had learned this fear previously in his life it is a very common fear and it starts like this:

Horses have a ‘mechanism’ in their minds that allows them to decide very quickly whether an object is safe or dangerous, if horses did not have this mechanism and they were not very good at using it then they would literally end up afraid of their own shadows, this can occasionally happen to horses and this is called sensitization. The crucial thing that allows a horse to decide if an object is safe is, if there is no reinforcement of fear when the object is first encountered. If there is fear and if, even worse, that fear is compounded by pain, especially sudden pain then the object will become deeply associated with fearful emotions. Here is a possible scenario:

A horse has become very apprehensive about the bridle and proved to be increasingly reluctant to have it put on. The human predators start by taking away the flight animal’s escape route, they try to put the bridle on over the stable door, the horse reacts by jerking it’s head upwards and striking it on the top of the doorway. This pain is them associated in the horse’s mind with the bridle and becomes an object of fear.

A second scenario might be that the use of the bridle and associated bit if it is severe or used roughly as when for example the rider gets behind the action in a jump and the full weight of the rider and his momentum are carried on the horse’s jaw, ouch! (Catwalk is a show-jumper). This association of fear and pain leads to deeply-rooted emotional fear.

However it happened, negative reinforcement is never the way to go with an emotional fear. Negative reinforcement is a form of coercion, the trainer effectively says, ‘do what I want or else suffer the consequences’. The pain or the increasing pressure and fear of those things are the consequences.

There are always three reactions to coercion, they are flight, fight or a state I call compliance, behaviourists also call this ‘learned helplessness’, all of these strategies are reactions to fear and coercion. If they do not result in avoidance of coercion they will result in the intensification of fear. Negative reinforcement is coercive that is why it is the wrong tool for the job it will always result in more fear and more coercion. So what is the right tool for the job? The answer is the opposite of coercion, positive reinforcement. One simple and effective positive reinforcement method is clicker training.

Whenever I am with a horse I am always looking for ways to strengthen the bond of TRUST, everything I do has this goal. If a prey animal gives me his trust then it means he trusts my decisions, he trusts my decisions because they always lead to good things for the horse. If you use positive reinforcement you get positive side effects so the way to deal with negative emotional fears are to replace them with positive emotions, in the case of the head-shy horse make lowering the head and touching the feared object the rewarding thing, that way you do not need ropes, round pens, twitches or hobbles or the assistance of fellow predators. Here is one way of tackling problems like this:

• If you can, get the horse to touch your hand, click and reward this (C/R)
• Have the horse touch your hand while you hang the bridle from your shoulder, (C/R)
• Have the horse touch your hand while you hang the bridle on your arm, (C/R)
• Have the horse touch your hand with the bridle across your palm, (C/R)
• Have your horse touch the bridle, (C/R)

By this point you should be able to touch the horses head because the horse will be concentrating, (willingly) on what gets the reward, its emotions will now be positive, things like, enthusiasm, interest, curiosity, problem solving, cooperation and of course the horse will be developing trust of you and your decisions. You could do all this sitting on a barrel, that would impress the audience!

One last point on this matter, in his open letter, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzOqBZRjYoY Pat Parelli said he was, ‘trying to match his energy to the horse’, I never do this, it is bit like two people arguing, have you ever noticed how their voices get louder and louder, their body language gets more and more aggressive? That is two people subconsciously matching each others energy, when I am with a horse I always get the horse to match my energy, which is always calm, positive and assertive, by matching Catwalk’s fighting energy Pat, as I’m sure he realizes, was digging himself into a deep, deep hole, but this is the risk you run when you choose negative reinforcement methods. I don’t blame Pat for being a human, we all fall back on our predator instincts from time- to-time, if there is any blame to be attached it was because he forgot what Catwalk wanted to teach him, that a horse, even a big powerful impressive stallion, is still a prey animal.

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.