Through many years of living and working with horses, people have developed lots of theories on how to teach and educate our equine companions. Many of these theories, however, were based on success with perhaps a specific horse, or worked well for a specific trainer in specific circumstances.

It is very important to bear this in mind while training horses, as we need to respect the theories for what they are – ideas or models that might have only worked and came together for a situation with a specific individual. The truth is that so many of these methods are not truly the best for most horses in the world when we try to train them.

Owners come to me with questions on why their horse seems to struggle to learn the routines for dressage or they own a horse that is claimed to be uncontrollable. Sometimes their horses have performed certain movements before, but now they refuse to attempt it again. Many of these owners have tried everything from changing tack and trainers, to expensive medical research on their animals.

The root problem very often is that we, as trainers and handlers, misinterpret the problem, because we don't know the underlying motivation, learning and physiological aspects of the behaviour.

So often we try so hard to understand our horses, that the only way we can make sense of their behaviour, is by using anthropomorphisms – is the attributions of human characteristics or behaviour to an animal or object. We try to understand how our animal might feel or why they behave in the way they do. Some of us struggle to find good reason for most things we see in our animal's behaviour, while others claim that they have their horses all figured out …

But more often than not, we totally misinterpret our animal's behaviour. We need to understand the motivation of the displayed behaviour before all our time and effort will end up being just like a band-aid over a very deep infected wound.

Understand how they learn

Horses learn through association, by pairing the information they receive from their environment. They pair things that happen together or in a sequence or with some connection to each other. If the horse does not learn which aspects of his environment he needs to pair with danger, he might get himself seriously hurt or even killed.

The part of this incredible learning ability which affects us as trainers the most, is how quick they are able to learn the consequence of a specific behaviour. A horse will, for example, learn that while he walks and the rider puts pressure on his sides, that he should stop walking and start trotting. As soon as the horse starts trotting, the rider will release the pressure on his sides.

Horses learn at different rates, some things in the blink of an eye and others seemingly taking forever. Three factors play a crucial role in the rate at which a horse will learn something:

• Saliency – How important is it for the horse to learn about the event or behaviour. It is about the value the horse will get from learning. Getting shocked by an electric fence will serve as motivation for the horse not to touch the fence again, as it is just too uncomfortable.
• Frequency – How often the same events occur in relation to each other. Every time the horse gets a shock when he touches the fence, he will learn to anticipate a shock from the fence if he touches it.
• Contiguity – The time period in which the behaviour is followed by the consequence. The shorter the time period, the quicker the horse will learn.

If there is a direct consequence to a specific behaviour, the horse will make an association. The consequence of behaviour can either be of a motivational nature or discouraging to the horse. If the horse does something that we like and the trainer/handler rewards the behaviour immediately with something that the horse values, e.g. release of pressure or access to food, he will be more likely to perform the behaviour again in the future.

When we dislike a behaviour that the horse offers us and we react to the behaviour with immediate punishment, the horse will be less likely to perform the behaviour again. The more valuable (salient) the reward or punishment is for the horse, the faster he will learn about the behaviour, as he will perform the behaviour to avoid punishment or receive reward.

Reward and punishment

When we train our horses, we have four reinforcers at our disposal to tell the horse what we like or dislike as a direct consequence of his behaviour.

• Positive reinforcement: This is simply when we reward the horse for what he does right. We in effect add something nice to his environment, for example, when the horse approaches us when we arrive at his paddock, we give him a carrot.
• Negative reinforcement: This will be when we take something uncomfortable away or out of the horse's environment. While we are riding our horse in a walk, for example, we add pressure to his sides with our legs to ask him for a trot. As soon as the horse starts to trot, we take the pressure away.
• Positive punishment: We add something nasty or uncomfortable to the horse's environment. When the horse stops in front of the jump, for example, the rider gives him a smack with the crop.
• Negative punishment: With negative punishment we take something out of the horse's environment that he really enjoys or values. As soon as the horse decides to jump the jump, for example, the rider stops hitting him.

I would like to make it very clear that all four these reinforcers work. It is up to our personal ethics which we use and to what extent when we train our horses.

Positive and negative reinforcement increases the likelihood of the specific beha­viour occuring again in the future.

Click for correct behaviour

In clicker training we use the sound of the click to mark the behaviour that we like. We will choose the behaviour that we want the horse to perform and provide a cue to the horse. While the cue is present, we will click for the right behaviour and reward the horse with a small portion of food for every small behavioural attempt which he performs in the right direction.

When we ask a horse to walk forward onto a tarpaulin, our first click and reward would be as soon as he moves his weight forward. Later we will build on that weight shift until we have a horse that walks over the tarpaulin.

In this situation we used positive reinforcement to guide the horse into doing the behaviour we like. The horse has learned what he needs to do to earn a morsel of food and will continue to perform the behaviour when we ask it of him.

We can train our horses to do a whole sequence of behaviours before rewarding them with a morsel of food. With the clicker we are even able to train emotion for a horse and we can change his physiology (hormones and stress) within minutes.

Horses are very intelligent animals, a lot more than some of us like to give them credit for. They have incredible abilities if we train and understand them correctly.