Horse body language: Are they saying no?

Is your horse trying to say no?

We are so often hearing “why does my horse...?”, “Is my horse being naughty?”, “Does my horse hate me?”, “Why won't my horse...?”

This perception and wording of what you ask yourself when you are working your horse plays a significant role in not only how you train but also how your horse works.

If you are trying to find ways to make your horse do something you are inevitably going to come across the argument of who's the bigger bully.

But when you can think of working with your horse in a way where they have a choice to say yes or no then we can start to work together. If we can see that willingness is a yes to our ask and resistance is a no to our ask we can ask WHY is our horse giving us a no (therefore rule out pain and other issues) and ask HOW can get a yes.

One of the ways we do this is by being flexible with our goal posts. Our goal posts is basically getting the yes. And if we can set willingness and yeses as our goal posts, its impossible to come away without a win. Its when we have certain expectations of what our horse should do for us + willingness and yeses that we are setting both ourselves and our horses up to fail.

For example, consider if you are going out to work your horse with the expectation of doing a 90cm gridwork session. You go out to catch your horse and they high tail it to the back corner of the paddock (first no). Eventually you catch them and they are fidgeting and fussing around for the saddle and channeling their inner giraffe for the bridle (second and third no). Then they won’t stand still for you to mount (fourth no). They start mucking up for you in your warm up pulling through the bit, testing and fighting every aid etc. How well do you think your actually training session is going to go?

Now consider your if instead you adjusted your goal posts to have willingness and yes as the goal for the day. You go to catch your horse the go to the end of the paddock so you work on some focus, attention and connection exercises and they hook on and follow you up to the barn. They start fidgeting and fussing around for their tack so you work on getting a yes to put the saddle on and getting them to put their own bridle on. They won’t stand still for the mounting block so you work on getting them to invite you into the saddle. So you can start to see rather than it being an argument the whole way through you acknowledge the no and reshape the exercise to make the yes the goal.

How much different do you think your horse would be by the end of the training session? What about a week of training them like this? A month? A year? How could the relationship with your horse change if the focus of each training session was willingness and yeses instead of task achievement?

Will it take longer? Short term? Yes. Long term? No. If you put the work in at the beginning to set the expectations and the standards it does take a while of you showing up with consistency of your expectations to condition the horses interaction but once this is established the more difficult exercises that become big road blocks actually become relatively easy to progress through.

So rather than getting frustrated, impatient and disheartened because every training session is a battle and you constantly feel stuck, flip the script. Break it down it to small achievable goals, build the yeses and eventually the yeses come easily to the bigger asks. And the best thing is, once this is well established, when your horse does say no, you know their is a good reason and can catch it before it becomes a big problem.

Do you need help establishing focus, attention and connection? Join our free stronger bond community where we give you support for exactly that.

Why we don't teach desensitisation

Teaching your horse to target is one step of teaching them how to investigate scary objects

This might sound a bit controversial but…

…at Equestrian Movement, we don’t use a lot of desensitisation.

There have been plenty of times in my riding and training career that I have questioned myself because I tend not to use it. I’ve often been told I haven’t done my job properly or a horse hasn’t been properly broken in if it hasn’t been “sacked out”.

And this idea that you haven’t done your job right if you haven’t desensitised your horse had me experimenting with it to see if there truly was something I was missing. If maybe I wasn’t doing the best possible job I was capable of for the horse. After some experimentation I still didn’t like the process and didn’t think it was necessary for a “good” horse.

There are 2 big reasons why we don’t “sack out” our horses to “break them in”.

Firstly, teaching your horse not to react to something there are scared of doesn’t make them less scared.

It just teaches them not to react.

It can work for some horses but they really have to have the right temperament. The kind of horse that is already fairly confident in itself, hasn’t had too much trauma in previous experiences, isn’t particularly spooky or easily startled.

Secondly, it can teach them to shut down.

This means that the fear the horse is feeling is too much to cope with. It doesn’t know what to do with it and switches into fight, flight or freeze mode.

The part of the brain responsible for processing, reasoning and learning is switched off. The part of the brain designed for survival is switched on. The 2 cannot work at the same time.

Maybe you’ve experienced this yourself when you’ve gotten a big fright? In the moment you are just reacting and when its over you’ve had to talk it through with a friend or counsellor to process the experience.

There are plenty of reasons a horse could be struggling with its emotional stress response.

Lets face it - most horses have a tough gig. It could have:

• been weaned too young;

• had to live in isolation;

• not been able to integrate and live with a herd

• not had enough time out;

• lived in a box;

• bad experiences with trainers, handlers, being broken in;

• pain… the list goes on.

I’m not trying to make excuses for them, but I am saying that the number of ways a horse could learn how to process an environmental stimulus poorly is profound. Even if it is naturally a confident and secure horse let alone our more naturally spooky horses.

One of our core philosophies at Equestrian Movement is to first do no harm. Harm may not always be something you can see easily. Mental and emotional harm are just as important to address as physical. We want to build our horses up emotionally to be resilient, brave and confident within themselves.

Another one of our core philosophies is to set our horse up for success. I’ve always believed that we are supposed to be the “intelligent” species. We’re the ones who want to ride these horses and yet we expect them to be the ones to figure it out and even reprimand them for anticipating the right answer. So to set them up for success literally means to make the answer easy for them to find and understand.

So if we don’t use desensitisation, how do we deal with spooky horses?

• We teach them to be curious.

• We teach them how to breath through and process their emotions.

• We teach them how to deal with stress, fear, anxiety, frustration and anger so that they aren’t taking it out on us.

• We want them to build the confidence up in themselves first, and then their trust in us so that they can investigate for themselves something that has them spooked and learn from the experience that it wasn’t so bad.

This has lead to our core training principles in our course Training Trainability, where we teach our horses how to learn.

Leadership, communication and curiosity.

When we start implementing these training tools our spooky, sensitive, reactive horse starts to:

1. trust us to look after them and not put them in situations that are going to end badly for them, whether physically, mentally or emotionally.

2. be able to communicate they are having a problem, before the problem escalates out of control.

3. be curious and investigate potentially scary objects. The best part about teaching curiousity over desensitisation is that you can never desensitise a horse to every potential thing it may ever be scared of (for example the bubble machine in side show alley starting up and blowing across the show ring and bubbles popping on your horses nose). So instead you are teaching them to investigate things they are scared of rather than run away.

Desensitisation is one small piece of the training puzzle too often used incorrectly. While teaching a horse not to react to certain things and then to react to other things is an important part of their education, it is far more important that they know how to process their emotions.

Only then can the horse understand how to find the right answer and how to ask questions.

Are you curious about how we work these principles into our training?

Is Negative Reinforcement Really So Negative?

Have you ever wondered if the training you are doing with your horse is considered positive or negative?

Have you ever heard someone strongly debate the fact that negative reinforcement used in training is a form of punishment and therefore cruel?

Negative reinforcement does offer some confusion, given the name implies it is already unpleasant. So let’s delve a little deeper into what it is, how it differs from positive reinforcement and punishment, and when you may be using it with your training.

What Is Negative Reinforcement

Negative reinforcement is a training tool that SUBTRACTS an stimulu, usually a level of discomfort, in response to a desired learned behaviour.

AHA! There it is, that word! Discomfort!

But let’s delve a little deeper into the that as well.

The adverse stimuli, or discomfort, doesn’t necessarily mean HARMFUL. Let’s think of a few human experiences where negative reinforcement comes into play:

• On a certain day of the week, you leave home earlier to avoid particularly bad traffic. Leaving home early is the learned behaviour, and bad traffic is the negative stimulus or discomfort.

• You partner or housemate rinses their dishes in the sink before loading the dishwasher, to stop you from complaining. Washing the dishes is the desired learned behaviour, your complaining is the negative stimulus.

• You grab a child’s arm (negative stimulus) to stop them from going near the kitchen near the stove, and release when they go the other way (desired behaviour). (Note, this may take many tries. Thank goodness I work with horses, as they are usually quicker at catching on!)

When we apply these examples to horse training, you get:

• Pull on the reins (negative stimuli) to make the horse stop (desired behaviour). When the horse stops, we stop pulling on the reins - thus, making it negative reinforcement.

• Applying pressure with the legs to make the horse go. When the horse moves, we stop applying that pressure.

See where I’m going with this?

The big issue is when people confuse negative reinforcement with punishment, and vice versa.

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What Is Punishment?

Punishment, on the other hand, is the infliction of discomfort in RETRIBUTION for an offence, which, in the case of training, is not complying with the desired behaviour. The level of discomfort is also usually excessive than required if negative reinforcement was used.

To take one of the human examples, punishment would be to continue to shout and nag at your partner/housemate regarding the dishes, even after they get up and do them. Or to continue to shout and nag at them because it’s not “good enough” even though they are trying their best. And then continue to hound and nag at them for more tasks to be done with no appreciation of the effort they’ve already given.

In the case of the use of punishment in horse training, I can see you now conjuring the trainers or riders using excessive force with whips and spurs, buying stronger bits and nose bands and generally bullying into submission. Perhaps even using whips around the head for a horse not behaving, or locking the horse up and not feeding them. Not only are these methods unethical, but you cannot teach a behaviour using them - in fact, you weaken the behaviour, or weaken the personality that will exhibit the behaviour.

And this isn’t what horse training should be about.

What About Positive Reinforcement?

This one tends to make us feel warm and fuzzy, simply because of the word positive. And to be honest, it is a critical tool in the trainers box that shouldn’t be overlooked.

Positive reinforcement is to use a REWARD for the application of a desired behaviour.

In people world, when someone thanks you (hopefully) for holding the elevator doors open, that is positive reinforcement. You are more likely to repeat the behaviour as you received a positive stimuli in response.

We use positive reinforcement with our horses when we:

• Give them a treat for standing still when catching them in the paddock

• Give them a pat and a kind word for trying or executing the requested exercise.

To use solely positive reinforcement with an animal that outweighs you 5 to 1 is unlikely to succeed quickly (or safely), but a combination of positive and negative reinforcement, with the exclusion of punishment, will provide a safe, stable and comfortable training experience for both horse and human. Therefore, the correct use of negative reinforcement can be classified as positive training.

One last thought…

The trick to using positive and negative reinforcement correctly is to not become emotionally engaged in your horses behaviour or results (i.e. frustrated and angry) this creates a situation where either you must win or the horse will win. We are creating a situation where we both win because what we want and what the horse wants are the same thing.

Be clear in your own mind about what you are trying to achieve with your horse, the purpose of the exercise, what the pressure will be applied for and what it will be released for.

Be ready to adjust your expectations to what your horse gives you willingly.

Timing and follow through. This is key to the success of negative and positive reinforcement. We have to time the release and reward for the behaviour we want and maintain the pressure for the behaviour we don’t want.

Comment below with your thoughts!