Principle 4: Shape Toward What You Want

Break down complex behaviors into individual elements and teach them one at a time.

In the first three principles, we covered:

• What causes our horse to choose a behavior – Understand Motivation
• How to flip our mindset – Look for Your “YES!”
• Why we use positive reinforcement tools – Create Opportunity

It’s a long way from a horse just touching a target with its nose to a complex behavior like jumping a course or performing a piaffe or roll back! But by using our first three principles, we give ourselves a big advantage.

When trained using positive reinforcement, a horse wants to get the right answer because it’s rewarding. So they’ll seek and try to predict what behavior to offer. In essence, the trainer and horse play a game of Hotter-Colder as the trainer rewards and reinforces small moves that are closer and closer to the final behavior. We call this “Shaping.”

Lumpers and Splitters

When you think about behavior, are you a “Lumper” or a “Splitter?” For instance, think about making a meal. Lumpers might say, “I’ll cook vegetables,” while a Splitter would say, “First, I’ll cut up some vegetables, then I’ll put them in a skillet, then I’ll turn on the stove,” and so on. A Splitter can look at what appears to be a single behavior and recognize the individual elements that make up the whole.

When it comes to shaping behavior, we want to be Splitters. By breaking down complex behaviors into individual elements and teaching one element at a time, we’ll help our horses understand what we want. We may even teach these steps out of the final order, creating a whole set of small, well-practiced behaviors that will be the building blocks for our final goal. All the positive reinforcement tools and skills come together to help shape a final behavior, with lots of small successes along the way.

All of these repeated rewards can mean that even a behavior the horse didn’t choose at the beginning is backed up by so much success that it becomes rewarding in itself!

Where Science Meets Art

The key is teaching small, attainable steps to bring clarity as we progress. This is the shaping process. We teach the horse each building block that creates the final behavior.

When we shape behavior using positive reinforcement, it’s all about opportunity instead of compulsion. It is a fun and rewarding process for the horse, but it takes some planning by the trainer. The more clearly you can break down the final behavior into small steps, the faster your horse will learn.

When using the marker signal, which we reviewed in Principle 3, we can help the horse focus on the smallest steps or specific movements that are part of the behavior. This allows the horse to understand a key piece, and then we can build upon it, raising criteria as we aim toward our final behavior.

The trainer’s ability to break down behaviors into small pieces is an essential part of good R+ training.

The trainer’s ability to break down behaviors into small pieces is an essential part of good R+ training. It creates clear steps that minimize frustration for both horse and human. The results are an engaged horse who enjoys playing the game and solving the puzzle. This makes all the difference! At Via Nova, we focus on creating a solid understanding of shaping behavior and how to achieve our training goals successfully utilizing R+ training.

But…what if our shaping process doesn’t go quite as we hoped? In our final Principle, Set Up for Success, we’ll help you focus on how to get back on track.