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.

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.

I expect you have seen fields with horses living in them, In the UK, broadly they fall into two types. The first type is probably not that far removed from the equivalent of an internment camp for horses. Usually this is the type of thing that you see on livery yards; sterile, rectangular paddocks divided up by electric fences. The horses, will usually be rugged whatever the weather, – God forbid they should ever get wet or muddy! Divided from other horses and only able to interact with other members of their own species over a live electric fence. Imagine what it would be like if you got an electric shock every time you reached out to touch another human being, what would a few months of that do to your brain, let alone a lifetime? If these horses have any access to wooden post and rail fencing, you will notice that they have eaten most of it. It always makes me wonder what terrible crime these poor horses have committed to be incarcerated like this and to ask when, if ever, they will be released.

More happily, the second type of environment usually looks a bit of a mess, the grass is eaten down and there are a lot of weeds but at least these horses usually have access to shelter and hedgerows and can move about a bit, if they want to, although usually they don’t. Often though, there is more than one horse so that they can be a part of a herd and thankfully, they more frequently escape the relentless rugging of their jailbird cousins.

Neither environment is ideal, in my opinion, by accident, the second option is much better, but still far from perfect. I say, ‘by accident’ because in both cases the owner has given little or no thought to what is a suitable environment for these animals as horses. Ironically it is the owner that puts his or her horses in the rougher environment that is sometimes likely to be charged with ‘neglecting’ their animals.

I once saw one of those programs showing the work of, well-meaning but basically pretty ignorant ‘horse policemen’. He was called to look at one of the weedy environments in which there were several ponies, who had a great pasture of mixed, bio-diverse plant species and a lot of trees which they were happily eating from. Apparently, to his annoyance, the ponies looked in really good condition, even though they didn’t have any obvious feed buckets, they seemed happy. ‘Well’, he said, ‘they haven’t got any food, but they don’t seem to be suffering, there is nothing I can do’. He returned to his van shaking his head cursing the system that wouldn’t allow him to prosecute the neglectful owner.

I nearly threw my shoes at the TV!

If he had been able to see things from the horse’s point of view these horses were living in an environment full of food, almost everything they could see they could eat and because they were fibre digesters they could extract energy from it. This was nothing to do with neglect or even animal welfare this was human anthropomorphism. My doctor has advised me not to watch this type of nonsense in the future, – bad for my blood pressure.

So if neither of these environments is ideal is there something better?

Well, yes, there is.

If we start thinking as our field being the animal’s environment, we should start by thinking about what the horse needs from it’s home. First and foremost, as always, we must understand the horse is a prey animal, consequently it is a herd animal so it’s main emotional need is to be able to feel safe, and the thing that makes horses feel safe is the presence of other horses, so our environment must be a herd environment. The horse, because it is a prey animal, is also a flight animal, so environmentally it needs lots of space to distance itself from threats. The horse is also a fiber digester (lots more on this coming in later posts), it is a creature that goes to look for it’s food, so in this sense, we could say it is a foraging animal, consequently, we need to construct an environment in which it can forage for high-fibre food. While were at it what about the horse’s need for mental stimulation? Horses are relentless travelling animals, 20 miles plus every day in the wild. Not just aimlessly wandering either, they travel around a ‘home range’. The constantly changing scenery of that area it contains enriches their mental experience and knowledge. Knowledge such as: where food is, where water is, where minerals are, where shelter from prevailing weather at different times of the year can be found. Horses need to know safe places to rest up and where it isn’t, they need to have reliable knowledge of where the best escape routes are, this type of experience is something that horses spend a lifetime gathering. Horses when they interact with other herd members frequently play and they need to feel safe to do this. All this stimulates horses mentally. How much stimulation does the unfortunate (but pampered) prisoner in the internment camp get?

By now you are probably thinking, ‘Blimey, all I need is sixty square miles of virgin countryside to keep my horses on’. Not so!

The Solution:

There is a way that you can add lots of ‘horse environment’ to any field of any size or any shape without buying or renting a single, extra square inch of land. Because of this you can also add extra horses to make that herd, – again, without buying more land or significantly increasing your costs. There is a way that will allow your horses to travel as far as they want, whenever they want, thus they will exercise themselves for you and give themselves all the benefits of increased health. Here is a way that will give you the control, and responsibility for your land so that you can manage it simply and effectively in a way that will allow you to naturally control worms and to control things like nutrition, especially important if you have a horse that easily gets overweight and/or suffers from laminitis, the two are often linked. What you need to do is build a ‘Paddock Paradise’.

Paddock Paradise

Paddock Paradise is a simple idea, (first proposed by Jamie Jackson in his book, ‘Paddock Paradise’) all you need is to isolate with an electric fence a track area around your field. The track can be of varying widths but usually 15 to 20 feet is ample. The horses should not be allowed access to the central area, for most of the year. What will happen is that the horses will eat the grass from the track area and yet the central area will be left to nature and will grow you a handy supply of mixed species hay or haylage. So immediately you have created two quite distinct environments, a very short , nutritionally poor environment that is the horses natural home, and a long, undisturbed, nutritionally rich, hay meadow that can be used in any way you wish. Immediately we are creating biodiversity, and that doesn’t just benefit horses it also benefits plants and wildlife. We have also minimized the damage that intensive grazing of grass pastures by horses can cause (Poaching and so-called, horse sick grassland). Best of all we have added this environment to our existing paddock, for nothing more than the cost of some electric fencing.

The track should be continuous in that the horses can travel all the way round in a circuit and you should place forage; hay or haylage around it, this supplies the horse’s need to forage and find the food. This should become the horse’s main source of food and searching for it should be the horse’s main activity during the day. In other posts I will look at suitable complimentary feeds to accompany the forage diet.

If you walk around the track you will notice that different parts of the field now have quite distinct ‘atmospheres’, for example, if the track passes under trees or by sheltered hedgerows or along a river bank, there will be a different feeling at different times of the day as the sun moves round. It is as if you have constructed different rooms within the former ‘empty’ field. I believe horses find this mentally very stimulating, and of course because the barrier is just electric tape you can move this at a later date if you want to.

I have kept my horses like this for two years now and I can honestly say it is the best thing I ever did. I use the paddock paradise system until as late in the year as I can but inevitably the winter rain makes it a no-go area, but by this time my horses have free access to the centre of the field and I am fortunate in that I have concrete areas they can be away from the track, they always live in a herd and are never stabled. In about March the horses return to living on the track and they stay there until the following December depending on weather.

Working with the environment instead of against it

I have found that I can get a lot more out of my Paddock Paradise track system in small ways by using the flexibility of the fencing system. In this section I will look at how I use the fencing system to get:

• the horses to clear undesirable, but harmless ‘weeds’
• to encourage the growth of indigenous native grass species
• to help break the life-cycle of worms
• to enrich bio-diversity of both plant and animal species

Some time ago I came across a system of stocking cattle in the USA called ‘Mob Stocking’, basically this was a grazing technique based on a large number of animals foraging on a small area for a short time and allowing the ground to recover slowly. The original idea came from observing the natural movement of large herbivores such as buffalo across the plains. These animals have a similar nibbling and moving-on type foraging behavior to horses, and I wondered if I could use this knowledge in conjunction with a track system. The principle of mob stocking has four requirements

1. Small area
2. Intensive grazing of mature grass with large number of animals
3. Grazed for a short period, no more than 12 to 24 hours
4. Long recovery period before grazing again

The idea is that the grass recovers quickly because although most of the green part of the plant is removed, the roots of the plant which are extensive and still functioning. The farmer that demonstrated this explained how when he looked at a field of grass he not only saw the grass crop but also imagined the networks of roots, (the biomass) beneath the ground, (or ‘soil horizon’ as he called it). This biomass is important because it is where the bulk of the plant nutrient is stored. It is also an place where carbon dioxide is locked up beneath the ground, – sorry soil horizon.

I tried some experiments on my track by simply moving the boundary fence in over a relatively small area for one day. I found that the horses who were usually reluctant to eat harmless but unwelcome weed species such as thistles would not only eat the long grass but would also clear the land of thistles, furthermore plant species they definitely won’t eat such as docks were left high and dry and it was easy just to dig them up. In addition other invasive species such as buttercups (note: poisonous to horses), were crushed and easily removed. The dung that the horses left could be raked out and spread to dry in the sunshine as it was now back behind the fence. I found that this allowed wild birds to come in and search for tasty insects. I believe that exposure to sunshine desiccated and killed any hatching worm egg larvae that might be present, thus breaking the worm life cycle, all without the use of chemicals.

This system originally appealed to farmers as it allowed them to get a lot of nutrient energy from what was conventionally thought of as ‘poor’ agricultural grassland and a lot of regrowth without the use of artificial fertilizers, using instead the organic material left behind by the cattle. The only problem was that this system was intended to grow ‘a lot of cow’ from the land and that is definitely something we don’t want to do to our horses! I know some people who use a paddock paradise track never allow their horses to graze growing grass, especially if the horse is overweight or prone to laminitis, but the areas I am talking about are literally only a few square feet of grassland, and I have total control of how much they get and for how long. I am a little suspicious of saying the horses should never get grass, as it is the most natural part of their diet and there would be nothing stopping a wild horse from eating as much as they wanted if they came across young growing grass as part of their natural environment*. It seems to me that would just be replacing one unnatural feeding regime with another equally unbalanced one.

*Although under normal circumstance my horses, at any rate, will always eat mature grass in preference to leafy green grass.

One last point, after the mob stocking exercise I have now created a third environment, a short or even bare area on the track, a fully mature area in the middle and partially recovering area between them. All this means greater bio-diversity, more plant and animal species, more insect life etc. And of course, happy healthy horses.

I’ve recently been reading a book on, ‘pasture management for horses’, you might think that’s probably because I have too much time on my hands and not many friends. Neither of which is true, I hasten to add. Anyway, the book has raised some interesting questions. The approach taken by the (otherwise excellent) author is rather conventional. I would describe it, not so much as sound advice to the horse owner more as one way of looking at pasture management. I tend to think of this approach as ‘Penelope’s perfect pasture plan’. – (probably for Penelope to keep her perfect pony in), but enough of this alliteration.

It is based on optimizing grazing, by treating the grass as a crop. Also a great deal of it appears to be geared toward creating a ‘tidy’ appearance to your paddock.

I’ve seen this type of thing before, way back in the 1970′s when I was a young agricultural student. The advice given is really designed to maximise production from a single grass species, because that will in turn maximise the production of meat and milk and wool from a given area of pasture. Being at Agricultural college at this time was both exciting and terrible; exciting because we were told we would be entering a brave new world of agricultural production, and terrible because in many ways we were being taught how to tear down an agricultural system that had been in place for over a thousand years. Everything in those days was about the movement away from mixed species farming on small family farms towards bigger and more mechanised and more profitable farming methods, or as we call it today ‘agribusiness’. Worst of all was the utterly profligate use of chemicals to impose man’s will on the environment. I remember being issued with a big blue book published by, Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, it was a long and comprehensive list of sprays and fertilisers we could use at will to control our environment. Almost all of the chemicals listed in that book are now illegal. I would also go on to say that almost all the techniques we were taught have now been discredited and we are still paying the price for the appalling mistakes we made. For example demolition of hedgerows, draining of wetlands, dissolution of mixed farms. Yet, we still see the legacy of those times in our countryside today, as farms get bigger, machinery gets bigger less and less people actually work on the land and not only people, but even livestock become further removed from the environment. This was a BIG mistake.

Before I finish this rant, you might like to know that on a Wednesday afternoon we were allowed to do ‘options’, for example you could work towards your sprayer certificate qualification, or improve your pig keeping skills (no, really!) but I, and two others chose this new option called ‘conservation’ – much to the amusement of my fellow students. If you go to my old college today it is no longer an pure agricultural college, now more or less the whole college is devoted to that one subject of conservation, I think they call it something like environmental management, – but they mean conservation.

To return to the subject of pasture management for horses, the point of all this is to show you that most equestrian pasture management, in the UK at least, is still using that old thinking from the nineteen sixties, seventies and eighties. People are still trying to control the environment using weed killers, still dishing out nitrogen based artificial fertilisers (a by-product of the oil industry), still killing unwanted insect species using insecticide, still trying to maximise what they consider to be ‘good grasses’, and still trying to create a uniform productive, efficient and above all, tidy field in which to keep their horses.

But nature doesn’t work like this.

Nature produces riotous, untidy, vigorous, environments, that work and interact and have a life-cycle. Plants work with insects, insects feed predators, fungus and bacteria breakdown and recycle nutrient and energy back into the soil. Animals, feed and graze, they break up and aerate the soil with their feet allowing air, water and sunlight in. The cycle of birth life and death functions continually throughout the years and throughout the seasons.

There are no weeds in nature.

A farmer will tell you, that horses ‘impoverish’ the fields, they will tell you that the activities of horses always lead to over-grazing and ‘horse-sick’ pastures and weeds. If you leave your paddock they will bring in their machinery and sprays etc. and attempt to return the pasture to agricultural mono-crop sterility as quickly as they can.

As I said, that is one way of looking at it, another way to look at it is that horses do exactly the opposite! They enrich pasture, that is they create areas that are more or less grazed, (micro-environments), these increase the opportunity for plant and animal species to colonise the field so that there is an actual increase in the number of grass species, Mature grasses bring increases in the biomass (roots) beneath the ground. This biomass is store of nutrient and other chemicals such as nitrogen and carbon dioxide. The natural activities of horses create space for wild plants and indigenous, hardy, native grass species to grow, horses also produce large amounts of processed plant material in the form of recyclable, organic droppings. So they increase the number of insect species, fungus and bacteria and this, in turn, attracts in more birds and mammals, and even reptiles and amphibians. In other words, if managed properly, horses can give us a greatly increased biodiversity of our countryside, a huge helping-hand for nature and a chance to put right some of those post war agricultural mistakes and all as a by-product of keeping horses . And if you extrapolate this across the countryside as a whole think of the accumulative effect this could have on our countryside, not to mention the health of our horses.

That I would say is another way of looking at pasture management. In the next post I will look at practical ways of using your paddock paradise arrangement to control weeds (in a good way -absolutely no chemicals)! A simple technique to break the life-cycle of intestinal worms and generally help the hedgehog and butterfly populations live happy and fulfilled lives. Until then…

Strangely enough I also own a cat but nobody ever asked me what I do with it!

Let me explain why.

Of course, the root cause of this thinking comes from the ‘utility model’, see loads of other posts on this site if you are not sure what that means, but briefly, this thinking comes from the idea that the horse is defined by it’s function and purpose, in other words how it can be useful to us.

This kind of thinking was of course perfectly reasonable 150 years ago when all domestic horses were defined in this way but since the end of the second-world-war the role of the horse has changed and we no longer keep horses to ‘use’ other than leisure and pleasure, which ironically, – usually means riding them. But the reason I keep horses is so much more than this.

You might be aware of a natural horseman called Pat Parelli, now Pat is a great horseman and teacher and just like me, has a love of words and Pat is never afraid to reject a good phrase or slogan, to the extent that the phrase ‘Parelliism’ has now entered the language, anyway here is one of my favorite parelliisms:

It’s way more than Riding!

This sums up how I look at my relationship with horses, riding is only about 2% of the whole thing. I am really much more interested in things like:

• Understanding how horses behave, their psychology, their emotions, their basic nature
• How they ‘work’, for example how their digestive system works,or how their feet can be allowed to function as nature, rather than humans, intended.
• How to help them live longer, healthier and happier lives!
• To truly understand how and why they interact with humans and the implications for both species.
• To try to discover better ways of caring for them, better management systems
• Better diets
• Environments that allow and encourage them to be horses, rather than ‘things’ or possessions.
• Practical environments that are created around the natural behavior of the horse rather than the demands of human beings
• Better ways of training them on the ground, in the saddle and within their environment.
• Better tools and equipment, bitless bridles, treeless saddles, by which, I suppose I mean better communication,
• and so on…..

Well I guess that quite small list is a beginning and certainly covers the idea of being ‘Way more than Riding’.

Of course, the discovery and gathering of this information leads me to a different personal philosophy about horses, it also leads to a desire to change things in the light of new and better understanding. For example, many of the ‘comfortable’ ideas that people hold about horses based on little more than historical superstition and the relentless fulfilment of human pleasure become more and more disturbing and unacceptable, especially as I come to understand more about the emotional reaction of the horse and the consequent suppression of natural behavior that involves.

This is the effect of true learning, it is the personal change that occurs as knowledge expands. There was a time when I knew all about the things that went on in English riding yards but I didn’t really care because they seemed to work, for instance, I ‘knew’ that horses lived in stables, they always had done, hadn’t they? It was obvious, of course. Yet, I saw on a daily basis, highly disturbed behavior, drooling dribbling, aggression even self-harming and I was able to ignore it because I ‘knew’ I was doing the right thing and on a practical note I could still get my pleasures from the riding thing. But now I know differently, horses live in herds not stables.

So forgive me if we ever meet personally, and you ask me that question that I dread so much, I will not answer you but instead I’ll just remind you of the quote and say:

‘You know, it’s way more than riding’.

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.

The Politics of Join-Up

For many people the first time they became aware of any kind of alternative methods of dealing with horses, it was when they first saw Monty Roberts demonstrating ‘join up’ ® . Until that time horse training methods had all been based on traditional knowledge, which usually meant doing what everybody else did, – because everybody else was doing it. As you will now know, this is what I call ‘utility model thinking’, based on the idea of the horse being defined by it’s function or utility. See other posts for more details on the utility model.

If you have no idea what ‘join-up’ is, you can check it out on www.montyroberts.com

It is not necessary for me to go into detail here about the process here but I’m sure you can find a lot of resource material on the Monty Roberts site and in the various publications and videos available on the internet. But I can explain the principles behind the process.

Negative Reinforcement

Essentially join up is a way of interacting with horses based on the behavioral principle (law) of negative reinforcement.

Negative reinforcement is defined as: taking away something negative from the horse’s environment.

There has been a great deal of debate over the years about whether this is an ethical way of training horses, those in favor of its use argue that horses use negative reinforcement on other horses all the time, and they do. Some alpha horses will use negative reinforcement to get other horses to move their feet several hundred times per day! Horses are masters of the subtleties of negative reinforcement they are highly skilled in it’s use. Another huge appeal for human beings who want to use negative reinforcement is that it is a natural tool for any predator. So much of using negative reinforcement involves driving and yielding from pressure, all of which are highly instinctual, and therefore highly rewarding, tools for a predator to use when they are around prey animals. Negative reinforcement works really well as a threat, it is therefore a form of coercion, (‘comply with my wishes or else suffer the consequences’), it consequently has many of the negative side effects of using coercion. It is highly reinforcing for the coercer, the amount of coercion used will naturally and easily increase. Adverse reactions such as flight, fight and compliance will be invoked.

But there are some advantages:

Negative reinforcement is a rewarding behavior, it will cause a behavior to increase, and so surprisingly, it will eventually build trust in the relationship between the coercer and the coerced. ‘I may not like you very much but at least I can always trust you to be consistent’.

Negative reinforcement works from a distance and is always available to anyone, (who truly understands how to use it).

The reward of negative reinforcement is instantaneous and clear.

Negative reinforcement does not require any third party items, such as, rewards or bridging signals.

An understanding of negative reinforcement is part of the instinctual behavior of horses, it’s use is ‘hard wired’ into their minds.

Negative reinforcement works with any horse from anywhere in the world, horses of any breed or social status will respond to its use.

Simply put, negative reinforcement is effective.

So, should I use it?

To my mind if you are going to use N.R. techniques then you MUST understand what you are doing. I have seen too many people jump on the bandwagon and rush out and start driving their horses around a round pen and attempt to join-up with them. Unfortunately most people who use techniques like join-up really don’t understand what they are doing because to get really good at this, is a learning process and that requires lots and lots of repetition, in other words most people get it wrong many times before they start to get it right. I think this is one of the biggest disadvantages of using negative reinforcement. Negative methods have negative side-effects, – despite your best intentions

The first time I saw join-up with Monty Roberts was on video, many years ago and I have to admit I was amazed, especially given the context of what was around at the time, – conventional horse breaking. The strange thing was that although, this appeared to be a more efficient, gentle and much less coercive way of achieving the goal of starting a horse, yet, the world did not adopt it en-mass, in fact, in some people’s minds join-up has always been quite a controversial way of training horses. I felt rather like this and so reluctantly, I decided for many years, not to use it.

Why?

Because when I saw some trainers (not Monty!) attempting this technique, it seemed very far from a gentle and natural way of training horses, in fact what it looked like to me was nothing more than a predator animal driving a horse to the point of surrender and the horse simply giving into it’s fate. I realize now that these trainers were not bad human beings they simply were not in the same league as horses that use N.R. all day and every day and someone like Monty Roberts who has performed this many thousands of times.

But join-up kept nagging at my mind, I wondered if there was a way of achieving everything that is achieved in the process, but by using other more positive methods. So I revisited the join-up process and took a second look.

This was what I found:

First there were some universal constants:

It seems join-up is something that all horses will do, whether they are wild or domesticated, male or female, regardless of geography, a Chinese horse will do this, a German horse, an American horse, a Mongolian horse will all do this.

Horses will do this regardless of their ‘horse-anality’, regardless of their history, regardless of their social rank within the herd, regardless of their breed. And here is the really interesting part; other species will also do this, for example other prey/flight animal species such as deer will also do join-up.

The behaviour is so constant that it is predictable and in a sense ritualized.

The conclusion I draw from this is that somehow the set of behaviors that we interpret as join-up are hard-wired into the heads of all these animals, a behaviorist would say they were part of the ‘Ethogram’ of the species.

When a human attempts join-up they are therefore accessing a set of natural behaviors, already hard-wired into the minds of these animals, the questions I now asked myself were, why are these behaviors there and what purpose do they serve? I realized that finding the answer to these questions could be the key to accessing a great deal of useful behavior, that the horse already knows about and understands and that must serve an important purpose in it’s life.

Politics, Politics, Politics

When two horses that are strangers approach each other for the first time, or when a new horse approaches an established herd that it would like to join there is always a period of what I call ‘politics’. You may have seen this….

There is a lot of movement such as circling and herding, a lot of approach and retreat, there is snorting, prancing, squealing, if there are mares involved there is probably spraying of urine in the air, (don’t worry we won’t have to use that one!). There is also a lot of feigned aggression, kicks at the air and threats to bite, there may actually be biting or kicking involved. Crucially the whole energy of the original herd is changed and has gone from a calm equilibrium that is the normal and desirable state of affairs to a rushing excited energy. This does not last long, usually a few hours at most and frequently the horses will take time off to graze quietly. Most of the work is done by the leaders of the herd and the bachelor males. Gradually things start to settle down and the amount of disturbance becomes less and less until the stranger is accepted as a new herd member and joins-up as another follower within the herd.

In the human world we have a similar, but hopefully less dramatic equivalent, if a new member joins our own family, it might be a visiting relation, a new puppy or even a new baby. The arrival of the ‘stranger’ unsettles our routine, (the energy of our family). It takes a while to for us to get used to the new behavior and the new energy, it may even result in tension between us, but we soon become used to it.

This is the politics stage, so if we think about this, what does all this disturbance achieve? For horses, I believe that all the politics and behavior rituals, answer two fundamental questions, first, the most important question for any prey animal:

1. Are you friend or foe?

You may look like a horse and smell like one, but are you a threat? Secondly:

2. Who are you?

When horses ask this question they do not ask ‘what is your name’? Because horses do not have anthropomorphic names, but they are still recognizable to us and to other horses as individuals, the more accurate interpretation of this question would be, ‘What is your energy’, by which they mean are you a leader or a follower?

In the world of horses there are really only two types of energy, the energy of the leaders and the energy of the followers. Some humans use the inaccurate terms dominant and submissive, I never use these terms because they are so open to interpretation. This is energy we are talking about not names, so what is leadership energy?

Leadership energy is calm – assertive energy.

Follower energy is calm – submissive energy. OK, I know I used the term submissive there, but submissive energy is not the same as being a submissive being.

For more detail on calm-assertive and calm-submissive energy see other posts arriving soon at this blogsite.

Back to join-up, I wondered could it be that the behaviors common to all horses that we call join-up could mean that the human was somehow accessing the pre-programmed behaviors all horses understand and use when they encounter a new horse? In other words, – were join-up and the political stage both aspects of the same thing? Could it be that the act of joining-up with the human was a similar experience for the horse as that of being accepted into a new herd? Was there even some unspoken agreement between the two parties that was achieved during the process? And if this was so, would this explain how when humans did not understand what they were trying to achieve by using join-up the whole process became simply the pursuit and capture of a prey animal by a predator?

The real purpose of join-up

Is it possible that when we behave like this, we are really asking those two vital questions, 1. are you friend or foe and,

2. who are you/what is your energy?

When I saw the predator prey animal version of the process, I started to wonder if, even though the horse was giving all the right responses, the human was not recognizing them because they were trying to achieve something human (start the horse) but the horse was really asking ‘this is my energy, this is who I am, are you asking me to join your herd’?

So how do we get a horse to ask this of us and why would the horse allow us to do it to them?

I think when we approach a horse correctly in this way we are behaving exactly like an alpha horse checking out a new member of our herd. We act in a way that is highly assertive by doing exactly what a leader will do to a potential follower, by driving the horse using calm but assertive energy. Testing the new horse to find out if it is friend or foe, then when we have driven the horse to the limit of our herd we stop pursuing it. We have made the decision for the horse and we are asking the horse to trust us as a decision maker. Gradually we approach the horse, (it should not approach us) our calm energy shows the horse that we are ready to accept it into our herd and when we finally turn and walk away the horse accepts our leadership and follows us. That is the moment of join-up. In the next post I will look at the consequences of all this and explain how the horse sees this as an advantage, I will also show you a better way of achieving join-up without the controversy, stay tuned.

When we clicker train an animal we are using two types of learning. Don’t worry too much about the names but it is important to understand the principles here. The first type of learning is called classical conditioning. You will have seen the effect of classical conditioning many times, for example when you go to your horse in the morning and the horse hears the rattling of the gate or the clink of feed buckets you will perhaps hear a whinny or snicker, you will see the horses behaviour change as they anticipate the arrival of the morning feed. An even better example of this might be if you own a dog and the dog sees you go to the cupboard and get the dog lead/leash. The dog will respond with a change in behaviour as it anticipates setting our on it’s walk. What is happening in both these cases is that some event is predicting an expected behaviour. The rattle of the gate, the sound of feed being prepared, the appearance of the dog lead, the time of day, are all predictors of a coming event. This phenomenon was first described by a Russian scientist called Ivan Pavlov, you may have heard the phrase ‘Pavlov’s dogs’. He noticed this idea of predicting a coming event, when he went to feed his dogs and observed that they would dribble (salivate) in anticipation of the arrival of food. He realised that the the predictors the dogs were responding to were random or general events occurring accidentally in the dog’s environment and he wondered if he introduced a deliberate event, such as ringing a bell he would see the same effect. It did. Once the sound of the bell had been linked to the event as a predictor of getting fed, he found that simply ringing the bell by itself was enough to start the dogs salivating. This simple pairing of ideas became known as classical conditioning.

The second type of learning we are dealing with in Positive Reinforcement Training (PRT) or clicker training is called operant conditioning. By the way, the word ‘conditioning’ is just a scientific way of saying learning, the operant part is when the subject, (the operant) actually takes some action in order to try to get a behaviour to occur. So if your dog gets excited when you get the dog lead, that is classical conditioning, but if it goes and gets the dog lead and brings it to you in order to initiate a walk, that is operant conditioning. We use both types of learning in clicker training/PRT.

We begin with classical conditioning, by linking two ideas together a click (predictor) and a reward. Usually the reward is a food reward as this is something that the horse wants and it is something that it is willing to work for. Some people like to use a ‘reward’ such as a voice reward (Good Boy!) or a touch or a scratch but to me this is not effective at all, for reasons you will see in one moment and it brings us to a very important point. Before we go any further, we must make something very clear, – the difference between a treat and a reward.

Drum this into your head!

Rewards are NOT treats and treats are NOT rewards.

This is the main stumbling block to anyone who starts using PRT and this is the reason people try clicker training and drop it again. I never treat my horses. This is not because I am some hard, unfeeling person but because treats are NOT designed to reward the horse! They are designed to reward the human, and like most things that are designed to reward the human they are basically anthropomorphic in nature. People give treats to horses because they want to make themselves feel good. Now it may be that horses find the treats pleasurable but that is irrelevant, when we act like this it is because we want the horse to think we are a nice person and if we believe our horse thinks we are a nice person then we get good feelings. This is putting human ideas into a horse’s head, (anthropomorphism) and horses don’t think like this. When people think of treats they usually think of food rewards but treating horses also extends rather bizarrely, to physical possessions, for example we might ‘buy our horse’ a new grooming kit or a new rug or a new food bucket. It should be fairly obvious that animals don’t understand concepts like possession and ownership. What is happening of course, is that the human is trying to buy the affection of the horse and thus buy themselves good feelings.

The Treat-aholics Test

Here is a little test for all you treat-aholics out there. I might say to you, ‘carry on and give your horse all the treats that you normally do, – in fact, give more if you want to, but here is the rule: instead of dishing them out randomly throughout the day, I want you to just add them to the normal bucket feed’. Most people think about this for a moment and then say, ‘What’s the point of that?’ what they mean is ‘where is the reward in that?’ What this rule does is take away your pleasure in giving treats and shows them for what they are, just extra food that the horse doesn’t really want or need.

The way this applies to clicker training and when people get confused, overwhelmed and give up is because they don’t realise that their horse doesn’t understand what they are asking for because they have turned it into an experience based on giving the human good feelings not rewarding the horse. In this situation you will find people always get confused and forget what it was they wanted the horse to do because they are effectively clicking themselves!

Rewards

I have a very narrow and precise definition of a reward:

A reward is a very specific event in a horse’s life, intended to encourage a repeated behaviour.

That’s it, so while I say I never treat my horses, I do reward the behaviour I want, and I reward it often. The way I do this is to offer my horses choices.

Choices

All the training I do is based on me making decisions and presenting my horses with choices based on those decisions and then simply rewarding the right choice.

When I present a choice to the horse there are many different ‘wrong’ answers the horse could give me. This doesn’t matter! The wrong choice has no consequences. To the horse the wrong choice is simply a chance to learn what gets a reward and what doesn’t, so the horse naturally tries again. Eventually this process of refinement will produce the right choice and CLICK! The right behaviour is rewarded.

This is the absolute opposite of conventional training that is based on correction, where the instructor waits for the horse to do something wrong so that behaviour can be corrected. In other words the wrong choice always has a consequence, a negative one. This is not only very, very inefficient but emotionally it is very coercive and will produce negative reactions such as flight, fight or compliance. This is systems thinking in action where the student is forced to adapt to the system and why do humans think like this? Because that is exactly how they were trained when they were in the education system, and that kind of thinking comes ultimately from the military.

If your training is focused on rewarding the right thing instead of correcting (punishing) the wrong thing you are telling the horse something very profound at an emotional level, you are telling the horse that your decisions lead to good things, which in turn leads to good emotions. Each time you reward the right thing you are teaching your horse to trust your emotions and therefore your decisions. This process rapidly builds that bridge between the predator and the prey animal, the bridge of trust.

The Magic of Operant Conditioning

I said at the beginning that PRT involved something called operant conditioning, where a subject tries to make something happen by performing a deliberate action, another term for this might be ‘problem solving’, with clicker training this is where the magic really begins, you will find that your horse will actively start participating in the process and will actually start offering you behaviours to see if they elicit a reward! This is when your student really takes off and starts learning independently a moment that most teachers dream about. Be careful though when this happens recognise it for what it is and stay focused. It is all too easy to start clicking random behaviour, a process known as shaping, to start developing new behaviours. But there is one big problem here the horse is actually training you! Beware, this can be a tricky side effect of the clicker, in that it not only rewards the student but also the teacher as well! My advice is when this starts happening to treat all these promising behaviours as ‘wrong answers’ and stay concentrating on the path you were already on, keep on rewarding what you do want and don’t get distracted by what you don’t. The horse will not forget that it offered a particular behaviour even if it didn’t get rewarded that time, there will come a time when that behaviour will be exactly what you want, but not now.

In the next section ‘ Clicker training 4 we will look at some specific things we can do to rapidly build that bridge of trust, in the meantime remember:

It’s not about training, it’s about TRUST.

The definition of positive reinforcement is a simple one: positive reinforcement happens when something positive is added to the horse’s environment.

Clicker training or PRT is not a training ‘system’ it is a mechanism or process that we can use to communicate with the horse, but here is the crucial difference between conventional systems-based training and PRT. As discussed in previous posts, systems force the subject to comply with the rules and objectives of the system, PRT works in completely the opposite way, which means the process adapts to the individual. The result of this is that we do not have to spend time trying to decide what horse-anality we are dealing with, we don’t have to concern ourselves with the horse’s history and background and all the previously learned behaviours (mental baggage!) that go with that. PRT works with any horse and any human because all individuals are unique. PRT even works with any species, for example PRT was first developed for training dolphins. Training using positive methods is now the main way that dogs are trained, because it works.

The reason we don’t have to worry about what happened in the past is that nothing in the past needs to be unlearned. PRT simply adds to what is already there and if what is there already is negative emotion, these negatives will be over written by positive emotions. This means that every time we train we are just adding to the horses natural strengths and talents. Consequently the ‘end product’ of our training is, every thing that went into the process comes out at the other end but more so. So our sensitive horse that will turn on a hair trigger doesn’t lose that sensitivity by having it ‘trained out’ of him, he still has it and he will now be one of those great horses that seems to have a relationship with it’s rider that is almost telepathic. The horse and rider appear to have an invisible connection with each other and are able to harmonize together in graceful flowing movement based on complete mutual understanding and trust. In conventional training these horses are usually the ones that end up with all the ‘tools and equipment’, martingales, severe bits etc. all of which is used to control the unpredictable (flight) emotions of the horse. A good example of a system of training where the subject is literally forced to comply with the rules and objectives of the system.

If the horse is of a type I call the choleric type and is a horse with great personal presence and charisma, usually a horse that is socially an alpha horse or herd leader. Yet, using PRT this horse can safely be partnered with a child rider because once again, nothing of the original has been taken away and the horse human relationship is one based on perfect mutual trust, respect and positive emotions.

The real secret here, and it is one that even people who have been around PRT for years, I think, fail to realize, is that clicker training works directly, and positively with the horse’s emotions. This is what makes it so powerful. This is what makes it so effective. Also because clicker training is something that appears so simple, (you can learn how to do it in a few minutes), it is vastly underrated, almost as if something that simple is of no importance because of it’s simplicity. However, I would say that although you can learn how to do it in a few minutes it will take you the rest of your life to master it. It is a bit like dismissing playing the piano as no more than pushing down a few keys in the right order!

If on the other hand you don’t feel like investing the rest of your life in understanding PRT let me offer to be your ‘piano teacher’ for a bit. I think the least I can offer to help you by pointing you in the right direction.

The Bridge

I mentioned that PRT works directly with the emotions and you might be wondering why we would want to do this. The answer is simple, the aim of all our training of a horse is with the aim of building TRUST. Trust is not something that is based on reason and logic it is something that is pure emotion. We talk about the feeling of trust. The reason we must build trust with our horses is that we and the horse are fundamentally different animals, as I’m sure you know by know the horse is a prey animal and we are predators. Total opposites. Our instinct is sadly, all too often to communicate with the horse in a way that is instinctive to us i.e. as a predator, our instinct is to control prey animal behavior. But certain humans have found different paths, we sometimes call these people ‘horse whisperers’ or ‘natural’ horsemen and women. Both of these names imply something away from the ordinary, logical, rational world and of course these people have special abilities with horses because they understand the importance of communicating emotionally with horses in a way that makes horses trust them. I call this building a bridge of trust between the two species.

If you are a prey animal the single most important decision you will ever make in your life is the decision you make about who you trust.

Trust

What do we mean by the word trust? Well if we trust someone, horse or human, we trust their decisions. Horses are herd animals, this means they trust the decisions made by the leaders of the herd, because those decisions keep them safe; and the greatest emotional need of any prey animal is to feel safe. We might suppose that decisions are logical and rational, they are not, they are always emotional. We humans always make our decisions emotionally but we then justify them rationally. If you think back to any major decision of your life you will realize that you made that decision emotionally, you decided emotionally who you wanted to be your friend, who you wanted to marry,who you wanted to divorce! Where you wanted to live or work. You decided emotionally what car you drive, what clothes you put on this morning, and how about this one? You decided emotionally what horse to buy. Decisions are always emotional.

So when a horse trusts us, it trusts our decisions and that means it trusts our emotions.

This is why acting like a predator animal around prey animals never works it will always produce the emotional response of the prey animal, flight, fight or compliance and you will spend your whole time when you are with your horse attempting to control those emotional instincts.

And your horse will never trust you because it cannot trust your emotions.

Respect

Human trainers are often focused on having their horses respect them. And their highly trained horses do respect them because they know disrespect can hurt them. I respect the law because I know the consequences of disrespect can hurt me, I respect fire in the same way and I expect you do too, but this kind of respect, I call it negative respect, is not based on trust it is based on fear, a negative emotion. True respect is an aspect of trust. Trust and respect follow each other automatically as night follows day. Respect really means respect for the decisions that you make and that, as we have seen, is based on a deep and fundamental respect for your emotions and the emotions of the horse. True respect is never given, it is earned, and it is a two way process, which is why respect is always mutual.

The Pay Off

If you take this approach in everything you do with your horse, you will be moving towards the one thing that is the BIG pay off for humans. It is the one thing that every person that works with animals is desperate to find, it is the reason we humans are so anthropomorphic with animals, anthropomorphism is really an attempt to short cut the process of building trust and respect. What we humans want above all things is the ‘special relationship’ with our horse. We want a horse that acts like our best friend, we want a horse that willingly leaves the herd to spend time with us, we want a horse that responds to us as if we were the most important thing in it’s universe. In short, we want our horse to ‘love’ us.

I don’t care if you are the most disciplined Teutonic dressage ‘God’ or the most flee bitten western horse wrangler, you still want this from your animal, despite the rational arguments you might make about the animals purpose and function, because a horse that responds to you in this way is satisfying you emotionally. And that is something every human being on the planet finds rewarding.

Why is this?

It is because systems force ‘students’ to adapt to their rules and regulations to the system. The system never adapts to the individual. Let’s look at a couple of examples:

The first one is one we all know about because we have all been through it. It is the education system. In the UK the education system is defined as the ‘national curriculum’. It is a whole group of rules, regulations, knowledge, opportunities and targets that over a course of twelve years (!) is applied to children. The well intentioned aim is to produce young adults that are literate, numerate and socially skilled, ready to join adult society. And every academic year this system produces hundreds of young adults that are just this sort of person, the trouble is that every year this same system produces thousands of young adults that are none of these things. For these students, school years are not happy years because the nature of systems are coercive. You will see in these kids, all the signs that coercion is being used, you will see flight (truancy) you will see fight (disruption, both physical and mental). But most important of all, you will see compliance, a minimal effort produced in order to survive. All of this because the system that is put in place is, from day one, designed to force individuals to conform and adapt to the system. They have no choice in this.

For the second example and to keep the horse theme going, let’s look at an old system but a totally inflexible one. The military system of 100 years ago, used to turn raw recruits and raw horses into disciplined cavalry units. Once again the input into this system is made up of unique individuals, different backgrounds different abilities, different personalties and horse – analaties. The system then works on the horses and the recruits, driving them all towards conformity with the system. Flight (desertion) or fight (indiscipline) is never tolerated with severe penalties for those that use it. The compliant reaction was seen as an acceptable outcome as it was usually interpreted as obedience although the consequent minimum effort was also frequently punished. The output from this system was deliberately designed to suppress individuality through the use of unavoidable coercion.

So what can we learn from these examples? We can learn that systems thinking although producing a small number of ‘successes’ will also usually produce an even greater number of ‘drop outs’, unless the coercion used is extreme and flight, fight or even compliance is not an option. Systems are therefore very inefficient in the sense that, although a great deal is put into them, the output is minimal in comparison and favours only those students that are able to adapt to it.

If we wish to use systems to train horses we have to realise we are using something that is likely to be only minimally successful and therefore we are unlikely to be ultimately satisfied with the result. And the odds are stacked against us making it very likely we will ultimately ‘drop-out’ (flight). We are using something that will take enormous comitment in terms of time, effort and money and we are frequently going to have to overcome the consequences of flight, fight and coercion. Doesn’t sound too promising does it? Be we still like the idea of having a system to take the responsibility away from us, after all, if it doesn’t work we can always blame the system!

So if a system forces an individual to adapt to it’s rules, could it be possible to develop a process that worked the other way round, and actually adapted to any individual? If we could discover such a process we would have something that was open to all, a system that was independent of an individual’s background, ability, experience and so on. Such a thing would be highly efficient, because it would be inherently rewarding, therefore drop-out rates would be minimal and successful outputs would be maximised. After all, why would anyone want evade a process they found rewarding? This would be a process that would work with only minimal inputs because the willing efforts of the individuals would make success an automatic outcome of the process.

There is such a system, and it has been around for many years. It is called Positive Reinforcement Training (PRT), you might know it as ‘clicker training’. Now, before you think something like ‘Oh, that old idea, I tried that once on my dog and it didn’t work’, think again. I want to take a fresh look at clicker training and, hold onto your hats, because I believe what I have to tell you is revolutionary.