Each response should be trained and elicited separately (don’t pull on the reins (stop) and kick with the legs (go) at the same time).
Women, it seems, can talk on the mobile, put on their make up and drive a car all at the same time. It’s not terribly safe but they can do it. They don’t need to turn the TV down when the phone rings either. Yet if a man is shaving and you talk to him he is likely to cut himself. Women, it appears, are a rarity in the natural world in that they can multi-task. Men in general cannot and nor can horses. Women’s brains have more fibres connecting one side of the brain to the other, while men’s have fewer. Men’s brains are more compartmentalised which is why men generally find it easier to identify left from right. Well horse’s brains are even less connected from left to right, and they cannot multi-task at all! When you communicate to horses (or men!), you have to issue one command at a time otherwise both commands will result in lowered responses.
This basic psychological principle of one signal at a time is appreciated by professional animal trainers but rarely by horse trainers. In fairness to horse trainers this is largely because the training of other animals rarely calls for two responses at any given moment. While the basic training of the horse involves just single responses (go, stop, turn and leg-yield), training at Elementary level begins to involve blended responses. For example, shoulder-in, travers, then later on half-pass, pirouette, then piaffe and passage all involve blends of the basic responses. In fact these aids should not be elicited at the same moment but consecutively to avoid confusion. The more consolidated a horse has become in his basics, the closer the aids can be brought together. When I use the word consolidated I mean that the responses are automatic from the aid, i.e. rote learned through many repetitions; in other words through countless transitions. Some trainers have long known that the aids should not clash. I remember reading an excellent article by Michelle Strapp describing George Morris’s conviction that the aids should never clash, but can, in an experienced horse come very close together.
HOW CLOSE CAN THEY BE?
In inexperienced horses the aids should be separated to the point where one response is completed before asking for another (by at least 3 seconds). As the horse’s training becomes consolidated, responses can be brought closer together, as by this stage they will be controlled immediately by the light aids and will be automatic habits. In experienced consolidated horses, the closest the aids can be to each other is from one footfall of the beat of the rhythm of the particular gait. Take Shoulder- in for example. The rein and leg aids should not be simultaneous but one after the other within the rhythm of the footfalls. The first part involves the turning in of the shoulders one step to the inside. The second is the forward driving aid of the inside leg. If both the turn and go responses are trained to be in self-carriage then the horse responds to the turning aid and maintains the forequarters to the inside, and the inside leg signals go forward and the horse remains so until signalled otherwise. Yet it is common that during the training of such movements that the aids are not independent.
BUT SOME HORSES DON’T SEEM TO MIND TWO AIDS ON AT ONCE
What happens when two opposing aids are presented at once varies between horses. Some horses seem to tolerate these confusions and all that happens is that they dull to the pressures of both go and stop to some extent. The horse loses his immediate response to the go and stop aids and the light aid gradually transforms into a heavier one. Other horses however may react violently to the simultaneous application of two opposing aids, and may try to run away, panic, bolt, rear, buck or shy. Others might express various levels of conflict behaviour in out-of-context situations such as developing separation anxiety, become hard to catch, difficult on the ground or poor traveling. These out-of-context conflict behaviours are the hardest ones for riders and trainers to diagnose.
The fact is horses can develop these behaviours because they are worried by their confusing training. Dogs and other animals certainly do manifest their training confusions in separation anxiety. In Britain, Dr Daniel Mills performed an exhaustive survey of dog obedience and its relationship to stressful behaviours such as separation anxiety and constant barking. He found that while most owners rated their dogs obedience far higher than independent tests proved, there was also a positive relationship between dogs that were poor at commands of ‘sit’ and ‘stay’ and those that exhibited stressed neurotic behaviours.
It is only a matter of time before most horse trainers will see to their advantage that the same understanding applies to horses. Horses are not nasty, mean, naughty or malevolent, they are just plain confused and the blame rests fairly on our own shoulders. We have a moral responsibility to train as best we can.
THE HORSE’S VIEWPOINT
We have to remember that the horse doesn’t know or care for the goals of our training. You should try to see the problems of training from the horse’s point of view. Dr Paul McGreevy, a pre-eminent equine and canine behaviourist and lecturer at Sydney University understands the predicament horses and dogs face in training. To teach his veterinary students to appreciate this conundrum, he gets them to play the ‘training game’. One student leaves the room and the others decide on a task that they want that student to perform. Like standing with the left foot on the right knee and the right hand on the head. Then the student re enters the room and training begins where the student is ‘trained’ to perform the task that he has no comprehension of. Only progressive approximations of the correct response are rewarded until the student gets it right. Students suddenly realise the frustration that occurs when you don’t actually know what a right response is and what isn’t.
CLARITY
As trainers, you have to be clear to reward the same response each time. Furthermore you need to ensure that the goals of each response are sufficiently different from each other. For example you have to be careful that the release of the reins doesn’t mean go. This is very confusing for the horse because the same stimulus (reins) elicits two opposite responses. Around one hundred years ago, Pavlov showed what happens when the right and wrong response begin to merge and become too similar. He trained dogs to discriminate between a circle and an oval shape whereby one shape was punished, the other rewarded. He then gradually merged the two shapes until the dogs could no longer discriminate between the two. These events induced aggression and tension in some of the dogs; others responded randomly to all stimuli regardless of shape, and others just fell asleep. Most were unable to participate in the experiment any further. Constant confusion has that effect – it lowers the animal’s tendency to offer responses in the future.
Another scientist, Masserman, trained cats to open a box when a light signal flashed to obtain a food reward. Later, when the box was opened the cats received a strong blast of air in their faces. Under these conditions the animals became severely disturbed. Some became hyper reactive and aggressive, others became dull and almost all of them showed signs of acute stress, with raised blood pressure and gastric disorders.
As I have mentioned previously, animals are wired to associate a stimulus with a particular response. Clear light aids that lead to clear consistent responses naturally result in calmness because they afford controllability and predictability to animals with regard to their behavioural world. The importance of clarity has been known for centuries in horse training. In the classical academic riding of the 18th century, a vital maxim was known as ‘the independence of the aids.’
Francois Baucher was the first to elaborate on this with his principle of “Jambes sans mains, mains sans jambes” (leg without rein and rein without leg). In other words no simultaneous use of opposing aids.
In 1977, Professor Frank Ödberg and Dr Marie-France Bouissou pointed out the high wastage rate of performance horses in a presentation to the Waltham symposium. These researchers revealed that one study showed that 66.4% of horses sent to slaughter were sent there for behavioural reasons and were between the ages of 2 and 7 years. In another study they showed that of 2970 horses sent to a Munich slaughterhouse, between 25% and 50% were there for non-medical reasons, and most were less than 3 years of age. On the basis of their findings, Ödberg and Bouissou called for a return to the classical principles of academic riding of the 18th century. They were specifically referring to the importance of principles such as ‘leg without rein and rein without leg’. The aids can come close, but it is bad horsemanship if they clash, especially for extended periods.
The demands of horse training are complex. While it is possible and desirable to train more than one signal for a response, it is important to understand that there is a priority in training.
The first priority is to train pressure release first so that the first light aids the horse learns are the light versions of the pressure aids such the light rein aid for stop and the light leg aid for forward.
The horse naturally transposes these to secondary signals: seat and weight aids. Once these aids are consolidated some trainers like to use voice aids for various responses. This is now a problem as the horse is able to easily learn a number of signals – the important thing is that the signals always lead to the same response, and that opposing responses are not asked for at the same time.
If your horse shows some kind of resistance or evasion, take the blame off the horse’s shoulders and ask yourself how you managed to produce this kind of conflict behaviour. Honesty is the best policy, but in horse training it’s also the safest and the kindest as well.
Next I will describe the Shaping Principle which is all about breaking training down into separate units and training them one by one.
This article was originally published in the October 2004 edition of The Horse Magazine