If you’ve been riding for awhile, chances are great that you’ve found yourself traveling down the wrong training path at some point in time. Perhaps you have useda training technique into your routine that resulted in horse behavior that wasn’t quite what you had in mind. Or maybe a few overzealous reprimands on your part resulted in some unforeseen, undesirable modes of misbehavior in your horse that you’d like to eliminate.
I recently heard a profound statement that I think says it all: When treated unfairly, the horse will never forget the trespass, but it is within his capacity to forgive it. An Arabian gelding I once owned and started under saddle had a small problem with trailer loading; he’d simply plant his feet and refuse to get in for a long time. Sadly, since I seldom needed to haul him anywhere, I neglected this weakness in his training. After a few months of patient and consistent under-saddle training, he was once again trustworthy to ride.
Two fundamentals of behavioral modification therapy, desensitization and counterconditioning, had been applied to retrain this horse with a successful outcome. Desensitization is the process of making an animal less reactive to a situation by accustoming him to the fearful stimulus. Praise and other reinforcers were delivered in abundance for appropriate behavior, while the potential for a swift correction kept inappropriate behavioral tendencies in check.
To Know that consistent, appropriate training can eventually turn most of our mistakes around shouldn’t be taken as license to experiment with different training tactics. The fact is, it’s very difficult to undo a horse’s initial training, regardless of whether those early lessons were correct or incorrect. In a 1994 study, which was presented in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science, I taught 17 previously untrained yearlings and 2-year-old horses to discriminate between a black and a white feed bucket for a food reward. In other words, if black had always been correct for that horse, once he developed consistency at choosing the black bucket every time, I stopped giving food for choosing black and instead started giving food only for choosing the white bucket.
Think of the implications of the fact that most horses tested were not able to reverse their initial training. In fact, in similar studies of other herbivorous species (such as cattle), similar results were obtained, lending support to the theory that first training experiences are of critical importance in the overall trainability of domestic prey species. Of course, in actual horse training the rider improves the potential for retraining by guiding the horse through the learning process, whereas in these studies the horses had to try to figure everything out by themselves.
Not only are the content and consistency of the horse’s training important, but so is the frequency at which the lessons are delivered. In a Cornell University study, 15 ponies were trained to clear a small hurdle on three different time schedules; group I ponies were trained seven days a week, group II ponies were trained two times a week, and group III ponies were trained just once a week. After this trialexperiment, the ponies were reassigned to two different groups and taught to back up, and once again the ponies trained just once a week learned the task in fewer sessions. It seems that horses, like humans, don’t learn as efficiently when things are drilled into them as they do when they have adequate downtime between sessions. To train horses effectively, we should try to allow enough time between the lessons to maximize learning.
In her book The Problem Horse, Karen Bush suggests that training should follow a steady, logical progression, as attempting to teach more in a session than the horse is mentally capable of learning can lead to resistance and confusion-based behavioral problems, and ultimately to vices and evasions. The rider should achieve dominance through an intelligent approach, rather than through force, which breeds distrust and increases the potential for violent behavior. She further states that horses have excellent and long memories, particularly for unpleasant experiences, and that many behavior problems can be traced back to past events.
Trainers should never consider it too late to repair the destruction of a misguided training attempt. If the training problem has been going on long enough for undesirable habits to be ingrained, it will just take more time and patience to undo the damage. Sometimes the assistance of a professional trainer may be required to help turn around a longlasting behavior problem. For example, one of my horses is normally willing to cross water on the trails. When we moved to a new stall, my husband and I rode the horses out together to explore the trails in the area. We had been told ahead of time by the barn owners where the best place to cross a 4-foot deep, 20-foot wide creek would be, and as we approached the area, we discovered that the banks descending to the creek were quite steep. Since the horses had many previous experiences with water crossings, I took the mare I was riding immediately into and across the creek. The mare Steve was on balked at the steep bank and deep, murky water below. I decided to climb on and give the water crossing a try myself, planning to get the mare into the creek and then to steer her upstream until she finally relaxed.
After time we went back (this time without any sedatives on board), I once again led the mare into the creek and then climbed back on and rode her into and out of the stream.
Why did the new skill work when the first one did not? The new technique resulted in success because we recognized the initial training problem early (and rather significantly), before bad habits were set in stone, and thought out an alternate approach that alleviated our horse’s agnst and cultivated her trust. It pays to step back and reassess training situations where the horse’s behavior indicates that something in your approach just isn’t working. It’s never too late to try to rectify your training mistakes-some just take longer to resolve than others.
For more information on horse trainning, go to http://horse-training-made-easy.blogspot.com/
About the Author: My name is Dwayne Steves and I am a non-professional horse trainer from Colorado. Animals, and in particular horses are a real passion for me.
Like I always say, Horses are like people; only better.
http://horse-training-made-easy.blogspot.com/