“What time is your cross-country round? I want to watch near the start box so I can see all the bucks!” This was a request I heard more than once when showing my leased pony Brigg, a 14.1/2 HH Welsh Cob known for his extremely athletic bucks. Sometimes it seemed like he was trying to set a record for how many bucks he could fit in coming out of the start box, and right to the base of fence 1 or 2, at which point he would usually settle into a nice gallop. Brigg came to my coach with some trauma in his history, which manifested in some very loud opinions, an absolute terror of spray bottles, and a tendency to try to attack any person attempting to lunge him. After a lot of hard work on the part of my coach, and if I’m remembering correctly a broken collarbone, he became somewhat more fun to ride and be around. He had a trot to die for, as well as being objectively shockingly handsome, so I was elated when presented with the chance to lease and compete him. Despite his many quirks, he quickly became my absolute favourite.
During my years riding him, a number of us tried to work on the spray bottle issue, but he never really became comfortable with it. One of the only methods I knew to try at the time was to attempt to spray him, and then when he tried to protest by running the holder of the spray bottle over or kicking them, the whip would inevitably come out to avoid being completely trampled in the process. It was stressful for horse and human, and it didn’t particularly solve the problem. Sometimes after arguing enough times, he would somewhat tolerate a little bit of fly spray, but then every 10th time or so the protest would happen again, and the cycle would repeat.
After being separated for quite a few years, I was lucky to have the chance to own Brigg, and to bring him to live at home for his senior retirement. In the intervening years, I had worked with many more horses, and learned a few things. I had also earned a certificate in dog training, which involved learning about operant conditioning and learning theory, including positive reinforcement-heavy methods such as clicker training.
Something that struck me when I took my training for my certificate, was how heavily traditional horse training methods seemed to lean in to Negative Reinforcement over any other quadrant. Looking back at my own experiences, if I had to pick a close second in terms of frequency of use it would be Positive Punishment. Positive Reinforcement seemed to be limited to a quick pat at the end of a jumping round, or even at the end of a ride, where it had no bearing whatsoever on the horse’s understanding of what the reward was for exactly, being that a reward has to come within 3 seconds (and ideally closer to instantaneous) to the desired behaviour.
Armed with my knowledge of operant conditioning, I decided to take a different approach to see if I could get Brigg over his lifelong fear of spray bottles. First, I introduced the concept of the clicker, which he took to with all the enthusiasm of a typical pony who would do just about anything for a treat. We used the clicker to shape a few fun tricks such as “look left/right”, “bow”, and “smile”. This brought us both to a place where training was seen as something fun and engaging to be looked forward to. Next, I began to spray the spray bottle (filled with water, to avoid any stress around wasting expensive product!) while standing just outside Brigg’s space, aimed so the spray would go away from him. He was free to move away, which he did quite a few times at first. But the first time he chose not to move away, I clicked to mark the behavior, and rewarded with a treat. Being the clever learner that he was, it didn’t take very many sessions until I was able to spray him all over. While we had a few setbacks wherein Brigg had to remind me about horses’ inability to generalize the way humans do (it turns out not all brands of fly spray sound or smell the same, and thus are not to be automatically trusted!), his newfound comfort with the dreaded spray bottle lasted the rest of his days. I was elated to have found another method to add to my training toolbox, which was not rooted in problematic dominance theory, had a good success rate, and seemed far less stressful for everyone involved.
What I didn’t expect to feel alongside this elation, was an uncomfortable knot in my stomach when thinking back to some of the more forceful and stress-filled scenes with Brigg, and with many other horses I had worked with over the years. I now understood that when I had previously thought the times where the punishment-heavy methods were working with the fly spray, it was in reality just him going into a temporary state of freeze. It was a difficult thing to dive into, my own behavior and some of the more aggressive techniques that I had used in the past, and to deconstruct some of the things that I had internalized as the unquestionable truth. When we see trainers using such techniques, it is often explained with things such as “the horse has to RESPECT you as his BOSS” or “this is the only way that he will understand, this is how horses communicate with each other”. The thing with respect is that it is something that is earned, not forced, and it is something that goes both ways. (Not to mention it requires a vey developed frontal lobe, which horses do not have, to fully understand the concept of.) Imagine if you had a new manager at work, who barged in and immediately began pushing you around aggressively, without so much as a please or thank you, or any explanation as to why they were doing this. Imagine if you told them they were making you uncomfortable they ignored you, or got you in trouble, and if you questioned them their reply was “because you must RESPECT me, because I SAY so!”. Would you respect them? Would you feel respected?
While horse’s brains don’t run quite the same operating system as ours, their physiology and nervous systems are very similar. Think of the way your body and nervous system might react in the scenario with the pushy manager. There is no reason to believe that horses bodies and nervous systems wouldn’t experience something similar in a situation in which they feel confused or stressed without having a chance to process and feel heard. Animal behavior experts at the Universities of Sussex and Portsmouth conducted research in 2018, that showed horses are adept at reading facial expressions. After being shown a photo of a person with an angry or happy facial expressions, the horses were later introduced to the person from each photo, who remained completely neutral. What they found was that when meeting the people from the “angry face” photos, the horses showed elevated heart rates, and increased stress and avoidance behaviors. From a previously shown photo! Just imagine how much the horse is picking up on when we exhibit aggressive or forceful body language or energy towards them!
Now I am not saying that pressure of any kind is inappropriate when training horses. Of course, safety is always the primary consideration (although I could go on a whole other tangent about physical safety vs emotional safety, and who has more right to safety given that our horses aren’t asking to be put into these situations we are putting them into, but I digress.) What I will do is ask a question. When you apply pressure of some kind to your horse – be it applying leg, pulling on the lead, tapping with the whip etc – does it create yielding, softness, and connection, or does it create tension or pushback? If the latter, it is worth evaluating why that is, and exploring how pressure might be used to create a willing and engaged partner, vs an anxious, explosive, or shut-down one.
To get back to the research: There is plenty of research out there to show that the way horses interact with one another and with us, is far more nuanced and subtle than previously believed. With the rise of social media, and the entire internet at our fingertips, as well as many trainers and other professionals offering in-person lessons and clinics, there is ample opportunity to continue educating ourselves on scientifically supported, humane, empathetic, and ethical methods. If we are unsure of how we feel about a particular method or trainer, it may be helpful to tune into our felt sense and ask ourselves how we feel when watching them work with a horse. Do we have a nauseous feeling in the pit of our stomach? Do we feel tense? Or do we feel relaxed, warm, curious?
Looking back on my training journey with Brigg, I am grateful for the lessons that he had to teach me. I think about things that I might do differently even now, only several years after our fly spray victory. (Probably start from a relational place before even adding the operant conditioning, more pauses to give the training room to breathe, and to give him time to process and communicate with me). Knowing what I know now about saddle fitting, and the prevalence of ulcers in ridden horses, I can’t help but wonder how many of those famous bucks were Brigg’s way of trying to communicate pain (although there was that one show in the interior where the bucks were definitely his way of saying he hated the dressage arena footing after a rain!) I think some important things to keep in mind as we go on our learning journey with horses, are to always be open to new things, hearing new ideas and viewpoints, to stay humble and to always listen to the horses. But also to be gentle with ourselves and others, wherever we are on that journey, and when looking back at where we came from. We only knew what we knew back then. Today we know what we know now, and tomorrow we may know different. Horses are remarkably forgiving creatures and are usually willing to work with us as we show up that day. I think they tend to see beyond our clumsy cues or sudden changes of approach and see the intent that we show up with in the moment. The most crucial thing we can aim for is that once we know better, we strive to do better.
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