The first principle is that the removal of any pressure reinforces the behaviour immediately before the removal.

This is the principle of negative reinforcement. I think what we need to recognize, is that when we train horses we are duty bound to perform negative reinforcement correctly, because we have a bridle on the horse’s head and we have our legs wrapped around the horse – by the nature of the gear we use, and how we sit on the horse, inevitably we are going to use negative reinforcement.

When we get the pressures wrong, the horse is reinforced for the wrong behaviour. We easily make mistakes – we can apply pressure on the horse’s body and maintain it, even when he has given the right response, we can release the pressure on the wrong response, which is also the wrong thing to do. Or we can intermittently release the pressure, sometimes for good things, and other times for not the right things. Then we can really confuse the poor horse.

We have to be careful whenever we use pressure to use it exactly when we want to use it.

Read More:

https://www.horsemagazine.com/thm/2014/12/the-principles-of-horsemanship-part-2-pressure-release/