It’s not Magic It’s Behavior

It’s a game changer to see horse training through the behavioral lens.

What do I mean by that? Each time you give an aid, you cue the horse to do something, right? Looking through a behavioral lens means studying the horse’s response, good or bad, to your cues.

When you start observing the horse’s response to your cues, you can start to clearly understand and examine what is motivating the horse’s response to what you asked them to do.

There are two elements of using the behavioral lens to evaluate the effectiveness of your training.

• First, you can assess and understand what the horse is doing in response to a cue, whether an environmental cue or human interaction. It allows you to evaluate what motivates the horse to respond one way or another.

• By understanding what motivates the behavior, you use something the horse finds rewarding to shift the scale towards what you, the trainer, want from the horse – either something you want more or less of. 

  • In the traditional training sense, this is typically about removing something that is pressure, something aversive that the horse wants less of or to stop. For example, if the horse trots off when I give him a little kick or squeeze in the ribs, I’ll stop squeezing or kicking. (This is called Negative Reinforcement, or R-)

  • But with Positive Reinforcement (R+), I can add something valuable for the horse to reward the behavior I want. When he trots, I’ll give him a pat or a treat.

    • In addition, R+ uses a marker, which brings clarity and precision to the training interaction. Read more about the marker here.

One of the most amazing outcomes of training with a behavioral lens is that you create a partner who understands the results of their decisions. 

When you shift to looking at training through a behavioral lens, you can evaluate what influences and motivates the horse to behave the way it does. This means you can take control of the consequences to help create more or less of a desired behavior. It could be trotting off a light aid or accepting the bridle when it is presented.

Let’s apply this lens to the real world. How many times have you gone to a clinic, watched an amazing trainer, and just thought to yourself, “This is magic.”

It’s not magic. It’s behavior.

Recently, I attended a Master Class with Ingrid Klimke. I have tremendous respect for her training and horsemanship, and she did not disappoint. I saw very fair and passionate training where the horse’s well-being was the priority. 

One of the things that Ingrid often said to various riders was, “Don’t pet him when he spooks or balks—just carry on.”

To someone watching this through the traditional lens, it seemed a little confusing. “Why wouldn’t you want to soothe the horse when he was a little nervous? Why would you just carry on?”

However, when you consider this through a behavioral lens, I could see the answer quite clearly. If you pet the horse when he spooks or balks, you’re rewarding him, and you could very easily communicate, unintentionally, that that is what you want, so he should do more of that.

The “just carry on” kept the opportunity for a reward for the horse in the desired work itself. That is where the opportunity for a pat or walk break for a job well done could be earned, and it hadn’t been yet.

While we can’t read their minds to know exactly what is reinforcing for the horse, we can observe if the desired responses increase or decrease.

The rule is: You get more of what you reinforce; you get less of what you don’t reinforce.

We owe it to the horses to reliably predict the outcome of their responses to our cues.

When I train through the behavioral lens, I am constantly asking myself, “Does he understand? Is he strong enough, and have I created value for him to try?”  It is my job to make my choice the easiest and most rewarding option for him. That means that I might not get the half-pass I want because I haven’t broken it down into small enough pieces so I can build it in a way that he understands it clearly. I might need to work on his strength so it is easier. I might need to change the reinforcement to something he values more. Sometimes, a walk break might be enough, or it could be a tastier treat as a reward. The way I know he values the outcome is because he repeats the behavior I’ve asked for.

I can create an engaged, invested learner by focusing on what the horse desires rather than what the horse wants to avoid.

By simply keeping this lens in mind, you can create and modify behavior. You can take your ego out of it and be able to assess things more strategically and create a plan to develop a horse that can predict the outcome of choices and decisions. It challenges me to be creative and not just raise the pressure. I am constantly trying to see things from the horse’s perspective.