Often when we transition horses over to Positive Reinforcement training and attempt to remove as many, if not all aversives from our horse’s lives, we hit a very big bump!
We can decide that we have turned into a butterfly and everything will be rainbows and unicorns from now on – but our horses don’t actually know or understand this yet.
As far as they are concerned, the world continues to be the confusing scary place it always was and they’ve been conditioned to see humans as things to be feared.
We start to give our horses choices and let them find their voice and all of a sudden our horses are either afraid, angry, out of control, confused, unco-operative or just downright not fun to be around anymore.
This is because we have turned their world upside down. Often the reason horses end up being Learned Helpless and shut down is because they are sensitive, they react to things and being trained and handled in the traditional and adversarial way creates more fear and reactivity, not less. People often don’t actually teach horses, they just expect them to do and be what they want them to be. What people then do is escalate what they are doing, they escalate the aversives, the punishment, what they expect the horse to do and put up with and of course, they prevent escape. Instead of escape and avoidance of unpleasant stimulus (aversives), the horse has no escape and no choice and they shut down.
When we transition them over to force free approaches, they are expected to respond, offer behaviour and just well, learn stuff. Never have they been asked to do that before around humans – it’s very confronting, confusing and just plain frightening!! They must surely feel like the ground has crumbled under their feet.
All the fear, worry, anxiety, lack of control and escape comes bursting out of them in a big surge of emotion and behaviour. It’s important we take things slowly, get experienced professional help and most importantly from someone who understands Respondent, as well as Operant Conditioning. Our horses literally need to learn how to learn all over again. Their brains are musty and cobwebby and their emotions have been bricked up behind a wall. It’s going to take the time it takes for them to learn and feel ok about it all, about everything.
This might mean we give them some down time to just be a horse, it might mean we do some simple basic training such as training behind a barrier and dropping some fibre pellets in a bucket and each time our horse looks up at us expectantly, we click and drop some more pellets in the bucket. Do that over and over and don’t think they are not learning anything, they are learning lots. They are learning you are a good and safe person to be around, you bring nice things and that their behaviour matters. They learn that they can control their environment, such as you, and the outcome of their behaviour, they learn that when they look at you, they hear a noise and they get food. That’s pretty cool and pretty fun and it’s easy. You get to admire their beautiful face and they get to learn to like you and learn to like training as well.
This is an example of some simple relationship building training you can do with your equine. This training can form the basis of some foundation behaviours, such as conditioning the clicker (marker signal), teaching a default ‘standing still facing forward’ behaviour, hoof targets (stationing), you can introduce a nose target and you can teach ground tying by working on duration, distractions and distance.
When we transition ourselves and our horses, it’s a huge learning curve. Be kind to yourself and your horse – especially if you suspect they may be shut down. Horses awakening from a place where they learnt that the only way to survive was to keep their head down and not react and not let their feelings be known, will find their voice in earnest!!
So be prepared and be forgiving. We may be paying for the sins of others or ourselves, but either way, our horses had no choice. All we can do is be kind to ourselves and them and put one foot in front of the other, and clicker train!!
Pauline Keil
Whispering Horse
