FF R+ dog trainers talk a lot about encouraging people to comfort their dog when they’re afraid. Patting and praising them when they’re scared, wont reinforce their fear.
I’m a FF R+ equine trainer and I say the same about horses. If your horse is afraid, giving them food (or patting and praising them), won’t reinforce their fear.
Similarly, there seems to be a lot of equine clicker trainers that are very much focused on trying to reinforce “calm” when they start out.
I’ll admit though, it does sound kind of convincing.
But as long as we focus on trying to train or reinforce something that the horse feels, by withholding food for that elusive emotion, we stray further away from what we should be focusing on instead.
There are many trainers who are waiting and watching for “calm”. They are withholding food because they are waiting for the emotion that they can supposedly reinforce.
It’s not a good idea because we can’t reinforce an emotion, but it’s not telling the horse what *to do* either.
Waiting and withholding is never a good idea. Worse, it causes the horse to try to figure out what they have to do to get the food. It causes the opposite effect. We end up with unwanted behaviours and often with the opposite emotion to what we actually want. We can cause the horse to feel confused, frustrated and tense – the opposite of calm.
What I suggest is always being generous with food, be prompt and catch them doing good stuff and reinforce those behaviours, before the horse starts improvising and throwing behaviours or worse, starting to try to sniff, nudge and take the food from us.
When we train in a way that they’re successful, there’s plenty of food and there’s clarity about what they’re supposed to be doing, then you’ll get calmness.
Remember, we reinforce behaviour and then we can create happy emotions through good generous effective training.
But do we truly understand them and what their needs are?
One of the most important requirements that is often misunderstood is that horses are complex social herd animals. They would never choose to live alone, they need company! In a herd, they enjoy a rich social life, such as playing, grooming each other and even interacting with horses they may not like. This enables them to develop social skills such as reading body language, learning to be a horse and getting along with other horses.
Herd living provides lots of enriching opportunities. Smelling other horses, their manure, tasting and mouthing each other in play and mutual grooming provides lots of opportunities for enrichment and also for exercise, which is often lacking in domestic situations with lone horses.
Herd living is also important not only for direct body contact, but in order for horses to feel safe grazing or sleeping and getting their REM sleep while others keep watch. A lone horse in the wild would be easy prey and would not last long, so stress levels can be high for horses living alone – they can never fully relax.
I realise that we can only do the best we can, I have horses who don’t necessarily get along all the time or given a choice, would not choose to be together. BUT Positive Reinforcement training can achieve a lot towards helping animals live in harmony.
Classical and Operant Conditioning can be utilised to change emotional responses to other animals and help them get along and enjoy each other’s company. If we can train voluntary blood draws and other unpleasant experiences, I’m sure with a little imagination and lots of planning, we could arrange the environment to teach animals to get along with each other. I taught my horses to like my donkeys and they were terrified of them at first sight!
It’s truly wonderful to watch horses and even more wonderful to see them enjoy each other’s company and just be horses!
One thing that I really love about R+ training is shaping behaviour and putting it on cue and playing around with cues.
I’d encourage all of you to develop your shaping skills, allowing the horse to offer behaviour and most importantly, get those behaviours on cue.
All my horses and donkeys were trained (shaped) to walk on a cue, no gear, all at liberty, no targets and grass is no problem either and then I match their footsteps. In this way, it is a built in start button, because if they don’t move off or are slow to do so, I know there’s a problem. If I’m ahead of them and luring them with the food, I take away choice and autonomy and I also lose valuable information if they are slow to react. The time between a cue and the behaviour being performed is called latency. The slower they are to do the behaviour after the cue, the higher the latency, which is really valuable information to us. What is preventing or punishing them performing the behaviour? ie. high latency.
Can we just stand there and cue our horse to walk or run?
If we can definitely say that we simply stand there and cue our horse to walk and they walk off, we know it was trained and on cue. Our horse understands the behaviour and the consequence is food at the end.
Predictability and understanding how to gain the food (what is the contingency) is what makes it fun. Not knowing and having to follow, to chase and even run, is not fun.
Training and clear contingencies for the horse ie. when I do this, that happens (food is given) is what prevents frustration and confusion in the horse.
But if we start walking or running (away from the horse) and the horse follows or chases us, do they understand the behaviour? Or are they just chasing the food that’s moving away from them? Are we just luring them with food?
It’s also important to look at the body language of the horse. Do they look soft in their face? Move with decisiveness and focus because they understand how to gain the positive reinforcement? Does their whole body look soft and relaxed? Do they nicker with enjoyment? Lick their lips in anticipation of the food, not out of tension?
Or do they flick their head, pin their ears? Does their whole face and body look tense? Do they trot, canter, rear and even buck? Do they look like they’re truly having fun?
It’s easy to walk around with a food pouch and your horse follows you around. It takes a lot of good observation, knowledge, timing and skill to shape behaviour without discomfort to the horse and then put it on cue.
This video is a good example of how I have previously shaped the behaviour of walking and trotting using the reverse round pen and now I am then adding the cue for the trot. It would be easy to think she is trotting because I am giving the cue, but that’s not what is happening. When the trot behaviour is offered consistently, then I add the cue. Timing is super important. I need to say the cue the moment she looks like she is committed to trotting, so she makes the association. If I say it too soon, it won’t have relevance and could actually interrupt her wanting to trot and saying it too late won’t be relevant either. The verbal cue is the word “faster” drawn out a little to give her time to fully transition into the trot.
I heard an interesting statement that I want to tease out a little, because I’ve heard variations of this statement many times, particularly from those who are against training with Positive Reinforcement, without pressure or force.
Giving a R+ trained cue and then most importantly, HOW they respond, gives us information. A cue is not a command, it’s not a “do it or else” and it’s not an ultimatum without choice. A cue is a polite ask and it’s their choice if they want to oblige. A cue in R+ training *ideally* has choice built in.
The amount of times I’ve started off posts saying, “what I love about Positive Reinforcement training” is a bit embarrassing.
But there is so much depth and nuance to the training and sometimes it makes me sad that people are so dismissive of something that is so complex, nuanced and organic. It’s also extremely empowering and pleasurable for the animal being trained and it develops a communication between species that no other training can replicate.
What I also like is that you don’t have to be an expert ethologist or reader of body language to train with R+ and know what your animal is telling you in a training session. All behaviour ie. responses that have been observed in an R+ training context, have been analysed and have had a name given to them that we can discuss. It’s not new or magical to observe an animal’s behaviour and identify how they are responding and interpreting our behaviour and our cues in R+ training. Latency is a good example of this.
What I find interesting is that detractors of R+ training claim it is manipulative, coercive, controls the animal and their mind and that there’s no choice. Do it for the cookie or else! R+ training is quite the opposite actually, if done well.
A behaviour trained with R+ and put on cue is not an ultimatum. In the hands of a good trainer, it is anything but.
There is a famous quote attributed to Viktor Frankl which I have since learnt, was a quote describing some of his work, but not actually directly quoted from him, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”. What I like about this quote is that I relate it to choice in R+ training. If the ‘stimulus’ is the cue for the behaviour (Discriminative Stimulus (SD) ) then the space refers to how the animal *chooses* to respond to the SD/cue at that moment in time. HOW they respond, gives us information. A cue is not a command, it’s not a “do it or else” and it’s not a given. A cue is a polite ask and it’s their choice if they want to oblige. This is the opposite of pressure trained cues, worse, the command or demand is the way that the behaviour is elicited as well. There’s not much choice in that – discomfort or what?
But when we train a behaviour with R+ and put it on cue, if we’ve trained it in a way that met the animal’s needs, provided alternative sources of reinforcement, be it positive and possibly negative as well and watched and listened to their behaviour and body language and responded appropriately, then we’ve set the stage correctly. The most important thing in my mind is responding to their behaviour and body language, because that’s where the communication starts and where we can tell them that we are listening, we are responding and we are offering them alternatives and choices.
The other important thing in providing choice in training is to approach the R+ training with an ‘errorless mindset’. The animal is never wrong, what did we do? When we avoid withholding positive reinforcement (food) for “incorrect responses” and look at all behaviour as communication and that we want to encourage and even reinforce that communication, then we not only open the doors of communication, we tell our animal they have choices.
In practical terms, if I’ve trained a behaviour and I know it’s on a reliable cue and my animal does not do the behaviour when cued, or is slow to do it, or offers a different behaviour or sadly, shuts down, then that’s their choice in that moment, in response to the stimulus. What I do is give them food anyway and then either cue a super easy behaviour, click and feed and end the session, or end the session straight away (possible Negative Reinforcement or Negative Punishment) leaving a generous amount of end of session food, or I might cue the behaviour one more time, in case they just didn’t hear, see or recognise it. But I’ll only cue it one more time. Any more than that and it can turn into pressure or a command or a nag, and that’s not fun. I’ve already done a post on this, focussed on discussing errorless learning.
Then it’s up to me to figure out why the animal didn’t perform the cued behaviour. I often find there is something urgent and important happening for them that over-rides the cue, something like pain. This is another thing that detractors like to say, but good R+ training means we don’t train away fear and we don’t ignore pain. High latency, lack of alacricity in performing behaviours, performing other behaviours or even calming signals, are all signs there is a problem and we don’t keep giving the cue and ignoring what the animal is saying to us. This is where choice comes in.
What happens when the animal has choices in training is that we give them a level of control, IF we listen to them and their behaviour. Choosing to respond in a certain way is controlling their environment.
Helping a horse who is experiencing fear should never be about making them “face their fear” or “get over it”. What can fear look like? It can look like anything from a horse freezing, refusing to go forward, baulking, napping, looking off into the distance, leaning away, rubbing their face on their knee, licking and chewing, yawning, looking generally tense and distracted or trying to run away. Any kind of attempt escape or avoid an object, location, situation etc is a good sign the equine is not comfortable.
The first thing we need to do to help horses experiencing fear, is to rule out pain as a reason. Pain can cause exaggerated or unexplained fear and/or aggression in animals, so it’s a good idea to eliminate it as a reason first.
Then we need to take a systematic approach. This means introducing the fear inducing stimulus at a distance/exposure that the horse only just notices it, no closer or stronger. At that moment, we pair the exposure with food. Incrementally we decrease the distance/ increase the exposure, so that in time after many pairings with food, the stimulus comes to be the predictor of food. This is called Systematic Desensitisation and Counter Conditioning.
We are systematically desensitising them without the horse even realising, keeping them well below their fear threshold at all times. At the same time we are turning their emotional response into a positive emotional valance. The horse sees the plastic tarpaulin for example, as a predictor that good things like food are coming soon and therefore causes a rush of pleasure.
That’s got to be better than being made to “face your fear”!!
One thing that’s very important is that we DON’T try to get the horse to go closer or *do something* for the food. For example, with the tarpaulin, we wouldn’t try to lure them towards it with a nose target and they only get the food when they step towards it or touch it. Worse, don’t scatter food on the tarpaulin and make them “face their fear” in order to get the food. It’s always best to do a simple pairing of food, not make the horse have to do something around something scary, before they can have the food.
Further reading on Desensitisation and Counter Conditioning with thanks and credit to Eileen Anderson at eileenanddogs.com :-
I had a big breakthrough with Paddy, my mini donkey today, but I need to say “we” because it actually revolved around my partner David.
I’d like to define “trust” first though. For Paddy and myself, it means I’m someone that brings him nice things, gives good butt scratches when he asks, doesn’t scare him and helps him feel safe. I’m also predictable and consistent and look for his ‘voice’ in his behaviour and try to offer choices wherever possible. Especially when we play our little games with food (Positive Reinforcement training), I build his ‘voice’ into the training. I wait for him to communicate with me, tell me he’s ready, tell me he’s ok or even more than ok. I’ve worked diligently on developing his belief that I’m a good, and importantly for him, a safe person to be around. I’ve made myself trustworthy.
That was very evident today during our training, when I worked on introducing David to my donkeys in a training scenario. They’re all a bit wary of him and Paddy is flat out scared of him, so I need to change that. I need David’s help for upcoming vet visits and it’s good for all the donkeys to learn to trust other people, not just me and this is especially true for Paddy.
All the other donkeys are pretty cool with David if he has food. Seymour, who used to be the most fearful donkey, was very happy to interact and train with David. He even marched up to David and gave his Start Button (a head nod) as a kind of greeting and demand in one, it was pretty awesome! David then did some leading with Seymour and it all went beautifully, I was so pleased (with them both!).
Next was Paddy and he was very scared of David in his space. Padd was moving away, avoiding him, circling in a very wide berth and did a liquid poo, so there’s no way he’d go anywhere near him, even for food. But did I need to use Negative Reinforcement, approach and retreat or CAT? Definitely not.
I started by asking Paddy to station on his mat, where we do most of our training. I then asked David to stand a long distance away, roughly 5-6 metres and every time Paddy looked up at me and tilted his head inquiringly, to tell me he was ready (his Start Button), I dropped food in his bowl. That’s it, I’m focusing on Counter Conditioning, no behaviour required from Paddy, apart from his Start Button and I was carefully reading his body language every step.
Next session, David started in the same place, but when Paddy looked around at me expectantly, David took a step towards him and I and then I dropped food in his bowl. Now we are switching to systematic Desensitisation and Counter Conditioning. We did that slowly step by step, til David was standing at my shoulder and I was standing at Paddy’s shoulder. It was interesting to note that if David got too far in front of me, Paddy would back up and put me between us. I’m his safe person, of course.
Next session, David was able to take his place at my shoulder after a few steps and we did a few reps of him just standing there. Paddy would give me his Start Button, his ‘I’m ready’ look and I would drop food in his bowl. Then I suggested that when Paddy gave me that look, could David reach out his arm a little towards Paddy with a closed fist, and when Paddy looked at it, I marked that behaviour and dropped food in his bowl. Now we’ve switched to Positive Reinforcement! We did that a few more times with David raising his arm a little higher each time and offering his fist and trying not to bend over, as Paddy finds that super scary. Then the next time, Paddy carefully stretched his neck and reached his nose forward and tried to sniff David’s hand from a distance! I marked/clicked that behaviour and dropped food in his bowl! I suggested David put some food in his fist and next time, offer his fist and if Paddy is close enough, flip it and open it to reveal the food.
One of the early behaviours I taught Paddy was that if I backed away and he followed, I offered my closed fist with food in it and if he nudged it with his muzzle, his behaviour caused the fist to open and he could eat the food. One of the most powerful things I’ve learnt about training fearful animals is that teaching them their behaviour matters, that they have control over consequences, is a very powerful thing. It’s what opens the floodgates of behaviour and the light bulb goes off for the animal. They realise that we know how to communicate with them in a way they understand AND we give them a measure of control. Something they may never have experienced before. For Paddy, it’s always a game we play whenever he’s unsure and any time I back away from him, that’s his cue to follow me and there’ll be food in my fist, if he gives it a little nudge.
When I saw Paddy reach forward to sniff David’s hand, I saw curiosity replace fear. He was wondering if he could make the food appear as a consequence of his own behaviour, even with this strange scary man! It was exciting!
After Paddy gave his Start Button, David reached his arm forward, fist with food inside, closed, and we watched, holding our breath. Paddy reached forward and did his adorable little sideways muzzle nudge of his fist and David flipped his hand and omg there was food and Paddy ate it!
We were so happy, we smiled at each other and I said to David, you’ve done it, you’ve cracked the code with Paddy! Hooray!
Then of course I said, do it again, wait for his Start Button and David offered his fist and he did it again.
We got excited and I suggested backing away a few steps and then doing it again and Paddy followed us – he knew this game!
We were ecstatic. We backed up a few more times and finished on that high note.
To sum up, with really fearful animals, there’s no need to scare them or make them feel unsafe to get behaviour and then remove the scary stimulus to reinforce that behaviour (R-/CAT). Just because they’re scared of us, doesn’t mean we need to use that fear or deliberately scare them to get some kind of behaviour to reinforce. They know the difference between being scared and being able to create distance or run away and having control that way, and someone deliberately invading their space and repeatedly scaring them. We can instead take the time the animal needs, meet their basic needs, provide the safety of a herd or at least a companion, give them space to move around and then thin slice the Desensitisation steps and be generous with the Counter Conditioning (food).
I didn’t get any photos or videos, there was so much focus on Paddy and ensuring he was comfortable.
But I’ve got this brief video of Paddy doing his cute little nose bump of my fist for some hay. He was terrified of me at the start and wouldn’t even eat anything else besides hay or eat if I was nearby, or out of a bucket or my hand when he first came. So I had a lot of training to do just to be able to deliver the food in an expeditious and contiguous manner.
Click on the link to watch Paddy doing his little nose bump:-
Positive Reinforcement is one of the processes known as Operant Conditioning. It’s a way we learn by operating or behaving in our environment in a way that we try to gain things we like. When we do that and are successful, we enjoy that or it benefits us in some way and therefore it reinforces/strengthens our future behaviour, we are more likely to do it again.
Classical Conditioning, you might know it as Pavlovian or Respondent Conditioning, (also known as Associative Learning which is more self explanatory), is another type of learning that is related to unconscious or reflexive type behaviours (salivating, blinking, sweating) and happens at the same time as Operant Conditioning. Some types of reflexive behaviours are innate ie. we are born with them and are known as unconditional and some types are a learnt response to a stimulus (but still reflexive) and are called conditional responses. How the conditional responses are learnt is via the pairing of two stimuli.
One of the first conditional responses we teach is when we pair food with the sound of the click or whatever marker you use. Click – food, click – food, click – food, means the click becomes a conditional stimulus when paired with an unconditional stimulus, food. Remember, conditional is learnt, unconditional is innate or reflexive. The sound of the click will trigger salivation.
To prevent my post becoming a novel, I encourage you to read more about Classical Conditioning. I find it is little known or understood in how it relates to our R+ training. This is a good description:-
Once this association has been made between the sound of the click and food, the Operant component kicks in, whereby the animal is listening for the click because they’ve learnt it predicts food is coming. Once they consciously make the connection that something they do, the way they “operate”, ie. some kind of behaviour, will cause the click to happen and food to arrive, then we can click to mark a specific behaviour and reinforce it with the food.
Just as buckets become Conditional Stimuli, so do lots of other things when they’re paired with food, which is what happens when we train with Positive Reinforcement. The sound of our clicker or marker sound becomes conditional, but we become conditioned too! Also our food pouches, the jangle your clicker makes on your wrist, the mat your horse stations on every time you train, or the cone or target stick they target each time does too. Anything can be conditioned!
What also happens is that there is an Operant component as well. When we repeatedly train with Positive Reinforcement, we build a reinforcement history on behaviours, places, things, ourselves!
It’s like a wonderful double whammy of goodness!
But this also means if you withhold food or even stop food altogether, you weaken and eventually break the association between the stimulus and the response, the Classical part, because the pairing is not maintained. With the Operant component as well, the behaviour goes into Extinction when it is no longer reinforced.
In a practical sense in our R+ training, I tend to see a lot of things in pictures, colours and diagrams. I can see scales being weighed up by my animals, which is illustrated in their behaviour and their enthusiasm or not, to do behaviours. I can see glowing red dots in places that have a strong reinforcement history and have been conditioned to be associated with things of value to the animal – food!. They remember and so do I.
I’ve trained in places that had no obvious mat or cone and yet they remember and will go back to that spot.
Just like we teach a horse “manners” around food and feed in a certain place away from us, they remember and will keep their mouth at that spot in the future and not in our food pouch.
Just like my clicking more than once at a certain place in my arena or point in the reverse round pen, guarantees my horse will slow or stop at that point, there’s another glowing red dot of reinforcement history and Classical Conditioning pairing happening there.
This can also work the other way around. Have some trot poles on the ground and your horse pointedly ignores them like they’re invisible or worse, walks around them and avoids them. Then you’re looking at “bad Pavlov” where there is an unhappy association made with the poles and they are operantly avoiding an aversive stimulus.
So next time your horse does something strange, think about Operant and Classical, about the pairing of stimuli and the Positive (or Negative) Reinforcement history of a behaviour.
Finally, emotion is something that also becomes paired/associated with persons, places, things and behaviours. There’s always a feeling when they see the bucket, hear the click or stand on the mat or nose target the cone. Same goes for when they see the whip, the bit or the round pen.
The reason I started thinking about this was because my partner David was doing some training with Seymour. They were doing some lovely leading and I just had to film it. But unfortunately David doesn’t know about red dots, reinforcement history and Pavlov and he walked up to the mat and stepped over the bucket and Seymour stopped dead in his tracks. The R+ history that I’ve built with Seymour around walking up and stationing on that mat, in front of that bucket, is ridiculously huge. I’ve done that on purpose, to make it Seymour’s happy place for things like hoof care, eye care, trimming, vet visits, x-rays etc. Lots of things that Seymour felt uncomfortable about, can be made that little bit better because of all the pairings with food and the R+ training history.
I filmed a brief moment of leading before Seymour parked himself beautifully. If you’re super observant, you’ll notice he’s not actually on the mat, but he’s on the ‘red dot’ because I moved the mat sideways to let the grass grow.
Who has heard this statement? I have, many times and it always gives me pause.
I find with equines, that they don’t usually leave to enjoy their alternative food, which I always recommend having nearby when training. There’s a funny saying we use for clicker trained horses, we call them “velcro horses” and there’s lots of reasons for this!
Often if they’ve had any kind of traditional/aversive training or handling, they can be afraid to leave. A horse or pony or donkey walking away from a human would be prevented or punished for a variety of reasons. Swinging their butt to a human as they depart is often labelled “disrespect” and a threat to the human. Or it could simply be a matter of Negative Punishment, they don’t want to leave the immediate and closest food that is on offer. They need to learn they have choices and can look for reinforcers elsewhere, it’s often something they don’t know and it has been drummed into them that they must never walk away from a human.
They may not want to leave if they’ve commenced Positive Reinforcement training and the first thing we do is some basic static training such as teaching “manners” around food. This means we are highly reinforcing the horse’s behaviour of staying with us. Also, when we start each session, we often start with some simple behaviours and all of these are usually with the horse right beside us. Standing next to us becomes the “hot” behaviour, ie. the most recently reinforced behaviour is what the horse is most likely going to offer us.
They also stay because often what we are offering is higher value than their boring hay in a net that they get every day.
There’s also the possibility of contrafreeloading making the food we are offering more valuable, even if we think it is of equal value to the alternative food nearby.
I find that horses stay, but give a lot of hints with their behaviour (latency) and/or body language that signals their displeasure, rather than just walking away. You might see pinned ears, tense face/lips, flared nostrils, whites of the eyes, they might circle you, push on you, take the food roughly from your hand or do a double bite down when they take the food from your hand or the bucket. There are many behaviours and indications of their discomfort that they are shouting at us. In my experience, only super fearful equines tend to walk away and that’s usually if we’ve tipped into R- and they’re trying to remove the aversive stimulus, which could possibly be us!
I find that more experienced R+ trained equines can learn it’s ok to leave, but it is a learnt skill. It’s not really something I want to see the horse resorting to when I’m training, it means I’ve made a pretty big boo boo If I’m teaching people in person and my horse leaves the student and comes to me, it’s a good sign that the criteria is too high and/or RoR is too low, so my horse goes elsewhere to find reinforcement. I love that about them, it’s a pretty clear message with their behaviour. But it is something they need to learn and feel safe to do.
At the end of the day, Positive Reinforcement training should be fun. If we set the bar so low as to think that if we train poorly or muck up, the horse will just walk away, then we really need to train better. If the horse we are training tells us in their behaviour and body language that the training is not fun, it’s best we listen and endeavour to be better trainers.
One of the most popular questions on clicker training groups is – what treats do you use?
What ensues is a barrage of helpful advice about things people feed their horses, which range from Cheerios, peppermints and sugar cubes, to grapes, carrot coins and chamomile flowers, eek!
One thing I always like to highlight to people new to Clicker (Positive Reinforcement) Training, is that we are not treating or rewarding the horse, we are reinforcing behaviour.
“I resist saying the word reward, the word reinforcement means something different than reward, reinforcers strengthen the behaviour they follow.”
(Susan G Friedman Ph.D.)
Something I learnt early and has been reinforced by my own training and by numerous trainers since, is that low value, low sugar/starch foods are best for training horses. Use their regular feed or carrier for their minerals, something with good chew, something species specific like chopped hay or grass pellets and most importantly, be generous!
Due to their prior history, many horses suffer from issues around food; not having enough food causing resource guarding and/or pain from ulcers are just a couple of examples. Therefore, being generous during training is vital, as is offering alternative food of similar value during training, as is training in Protected Contact (behind a barrier) and training in short sessions of only a minute or two when first starting out.
Having low value, low sugar/starch food with good chew, has a number of benefits. We need to feed what is appropriate for them as a species, if we want to have our horse enjoy optimum health and sugar is the enemy of good hooves. Many horses also struggle with weight and metabolic issues and have restrictions on what they can eat, so their regular (safe) feed is always the best option. Good chew means the horse enjoys lots of great mouth frothing pleasure. Chewing is relaxing and pleasurable in itself as well and these type of things contribute to a great training experience for the horse. If you want to offer variety and enrichment through food, take your horse foraging or forage for them and find (safe) weeds, herbs, branches, bark and leaves for them to enjoy instead.
Lastly, whenever there are problems around training, always rule out pain first. After that, look to the 3 basic principles of training; Rate of Reinforcement, Criteria and Timing. These are the things that guide us towards better training and problem solve when there are issues. Horses walking away from training is not an issue with food, it’s an issue with the training, they are finding walking away is their reinforcer of choice, not what we are offering.
“Animals don’t make mistakes, what did we do?”
(Ken Ramirez)
Finally, checking the value of reinforcers is important too. Every animal is an individual, has different tastes and preferences, it is always a “study of one” (Friedman). Try setting up some fun sessions where you offer a variety of horse appropriate feeds and see which your horse prefers, sometimes they can surprise us and may choose lettuce over celery, or hay over pelleted commercial feeds.
I’ll leave you with the image of Milo the cat, who clearly thinks he is a horse, because he loves carrots too!!
Some of you may have heard of the 3 Fs or the Five Freedoms, maybe even some of you have heard of the Five Domains, if you’ve followed my page for a while. The problem with the Five Freedoms is that it focuses on the absence of negative states ie. hunger, thirst, cold, etc. It doesn’t really address whether all the animal’s needs are being met and how they feel about their life. Not just the physical, but mental and emotional as well, more than just covering their basic survival.
I think the Five Domains is a really excellent model to gauge the welfare status of our animals; to assess as best as we are able, if they’re “happy”.
Professor David Mellor: “Keeping social animals with congenial others in spacious, stimulus-rich and safe environments provides them with opportunities to engage in behaviours they may find rewarding, in other words, it provides opportunities for them to experience “positive affective engagement”. In general terms, the associated positive affects are considered likely to include various forms of comfort, pleasure, interest, confidence and a sense of being in control, and, more specifically, may include the following feelings: being energised, engaged, affectionately sociable; rewarded maternally, paternally or as a group when caring for young; and being nurtured, secure or protected, excitedly joyful, and/or sexually gratified.”
If you’d like to read more about Professor Mellor’s Five Domains, you can follow the link here:
We did that a few more times with David raising his arm a little higher each time and offering his fist and trying not to bend over, as Paddy finds that super scary. Then the next time, Paddy carefully stretched his neck and reached his nose forward and tried to sniff David’s hand from a distance! I marked/clicked that behaviour and dropped food in his bowl! I suggested David put some food in his fist and next time, offer his fist and if Paddy is close enough, flip it and open it to reveal the food.
