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R.I.P Merlina

Poor Merlina didn’t have the best start in life, imported as a 3 year old and jumped early – my daughter Liz and I bought her at 6 for dressage. Mel hated dressage but seemed to like jumping. It wasn’t until we got the BSJA paper work that we found out she had 5 owners and 6 riders since being imported from Holland.

Our instructor thought she had been schooled a lot in draw reins and we went back to basics with her. On arriving her default behaviour was to rear – any scary situation – even on line she was straight up in the air. Ridden she bronced – true rodeo style. Also she would rear and the fly buck.
Oh how I wish we had known then what we know now.

Every physical thing checked and after some physio she seemed fine – went jumping again – up to Newcomer level.

Then she had a slip over a fence and it all started again – £1000’s later, after a bone scan we found she had almost kissing spines and sacro-iliac joint strain.

Liz ran out of money and so sent her to be a companion – unfortunately the person we sent her to was not honest and sold her. It took us 3 years to get her back, her back seemed much better and, after veterinary clearance, Liz started riding her again. Confidence was an issue for Liz as there were memories of hospital visits and back pain. Mel was fine as long as there was no pressure to perform.

Liz made the decision to send her to be re-started by Parelli professional – Merlina came back and Liz did some low level jumping and dressage and then decided not to ride her any more.

Merlina went to be a therapy horse at Equine Partners – an equine assisted learning program in West Sussex. This is run by Liz’s in-laws so Merlina was still in the family.

Last year Liz got her back as Merlina was not longer required by Equine Partners – she has been living happily on the South Downs since then.

A collage of images of Merlina
A collage of images of Merlina.
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Fear

We all know that horses are innately neophobic, any new stimuli or stimuli out of context may well trigger this fear.

We owe it to our horses therefore to learn as much as possible about equine behaviour, body language and emotions. I am just coming to the end of a course on How Horses Learn, Feel and Communicate – run by Jo Hughes.

Whatever variety of horsemanship you follow – it is an excellent course. I have had horses for over 20 years and ridden for 40 years but still learned a great deal.

The module on emotions (affective neuroscience) is fascinating so even if you can’t commit to a 12 week course then there are videos and articles by Jaak Panksepp to explore.

I was not aware of the 7 emotional systems and that any aversive stimulus triggers the FEAR system. So it does seem to bit illogical to train an already fearful animal with aversive stimuli, but this is what traditional and natural horsemanship and even the equitation science people teach.

So if you do nothing else go and learn how the emotions differ between positive and negative reinforcement and decide for yourself. Study equine body language – especially the subtle signs of stress and fear.

No-one is saying you need to change how you interact with your horses but it gives you more tools to decide what is best for any particular horse at any time.

I did find limitations in certain horsemanship programmes when confronted with a horse who so obviously hated pressure (as Benny did). Maybe that was due to my lack of understanding or skill but learning about how pressure/release works and the difference it makes to the horse when you use positive reinforcement made a huge difference to Benny.

Many traditional and natural horsemen and women do use positive reinforcement and the horse world is slowly catching up with the rest of the animal training world.

Science moves on all the time and the Skinnerian models of learning theory may well be superseded, as we learn more about the emotional minds of animals (ourselves included).

So we do need to keep an open mind, don’t be afraid of what you may learn. I learned a lot from traditional and natural horsemanship but it didn’t provide all the answers.

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Emotions in Animals

Do animals have emotions? Wel I am sure most animals lovers would say a resounding yes, but scientists tend to want hard evidence.

On Monday I spent the day at a seminar with Professor Jaak Panksepp, in Oxford. A day full of information which is taking time to process.

Jaak Panksepp has done years of research into affective neuroscience – the science of emotions.
During this time he has discovered brain pathways that are involved in emotions. Using animal models to identify these pathways has led to discoveries that are useful in the field of human psychiatry.

The 7 basic emotional circuits are common to all mammals, human however have greater reasoning powers due to our large neocortex. So horses can’t plot our down fall (which may be a good thing given how some people treat them). Horses are ultimately animals that rely on instinct and reflexive behaviours.

Affects (emotions) produce comfort zones for animals, the core emotions are unconditioned and instinctual. SEEKING, FEAR and RAGE, followed by LUST and CARE as all animals need to reproduce. PANIC is separation distress and PLAY helps young animals learn – they can practice survival skills.

The feel good emotions are those of PLAY, CARE and LUST.
The emotions that feel bad are FEAR, RAGE, and PANIC.

The SEEKING circuit is active all the time and is involved in the animals survival, so seeking food, companionship, safety etc. It is about wanting things not just acquiring them, so the incentive (motivation) is as important as the reward.

PLAY is a big part of learning – children with ADHD benefit from play rough and tumble activities.

Horses play and need to be allowed to play with field companions, social isolation is often associated with displaced behaviours.

It was interesting that Jaak Panksepp said there was no initial difference between male and females play behaviour but that over time females played rough games less ( due to them being physically smaller and therefore often losing the game). This seems to happen in horses too – mature mares seem to play less than geldings of any age.

The use of aversive stimuli in animal training leads to the FEAR system being activated – as the animal looks to escape and avoid the aversive stimulus. If we do need to use aversive stimuli then we need to put in a safety signal – so the horse has a chance to avoid or escape the stimuli. Often horses will sigh deeply during training – it is a sigh of relief, when they finally learn to escape the aversive stimuli.

As animal trainers and carers the more we understand how emotions help or hinder behaviour, the more we can train empathetically and ethically.

We cannot separate behaviour from emotions.

This all linked in very well with the course by Jo Hughes “How Horses Learn ,Feel, and Communicate”
http://www.equi-libre.co.uk/academy-of-positive-horsemanship/

If anyone wants to learn more then this is a course I highly recommend.

References for Jaak Panksepp
The Archeology of Mind – http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=6850
Video of Jaak Panksepp

Affective Neuroscience – http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3181986/

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Is the avoidance of an aversive a reward?

Is release of pressure a reward?

Following on from the previous post I have been researching the role of dopamine in emotional reactions. A very limited literature search – the subject is vast and I am not an expert. There are of course other hormones and neurotransmitters involved in all processes.

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter involved in movement via the substantia nigra, but dopamine is also produced by the ventral tegmental area of the brain. It is this area that seems to be stimulated when a reward is received or anticipated. Dopamine in these instances make us feel good. (1)

In horse training, when using the addition of an aversive stimulus to initiate a behaviour, e.g traditional and natural horsemanship, it is the removal of the aversive stimulus that is reinforcing. This is negative reinforcement as described in learning theory.

Research has shown that a transient release of dopamine occurs when an aversive stimuli is removed. (1)

So if this is correct then it may be a reward, but horses don’t seem to actively seek the application of an aversive event to gain that “reward”. They actively learn to avoid the aversive stimulus, by complying at the first indication (a cue) that an aversive stimulus might follow if they don’t comply.

Research goes further to explain this phenomenon –

“a new theoretical explanation of conditioned avoidance: (1) fear is initially conditioned to the warning signal and dopamine computes this fear association as a decrease in release, (2) the warning signal, now capable of producing a negative emotional state, suppresses dopamine release and behavior, (3) over repeated trials the warning signal becomes associated with safety rather than fear; dopaminergic neurons already compute safety as an increase in release and begin to encode the warning signal as the earliest predictor of safety (4) the warning signal now promotes conditioned avoidance via dopaminergic modulation of the brain’s incentive-motivational circuitry.” (2)

It is clear from the above that if we use aversive stimuli we must put a cue in place to predict the aversive – so the horse can avoid the application of the aversive.

When we use appetitive stimuli to reinforce a behaviour it is the anticipation of the appetitive that initiates the release of dopamine. (1) So horses actively seek the reward and can get quite animated in doing this and may offer more than we expect.

So in training should we limit the use of aversive stimuli and increase the use of appetitive stimuli?
Horses may feel good if they avoid an aversive stimulus but how do they feel during the conditioning (training) process.

Hence the title “Is the avoidance of an aversive a reward?”

All these are fascinating questions and I do not know the answers – but it does make me more aware of how and why horses learn and how they may feel about the process.

References
(1) https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/mouse-man/200904/what-is-dopamine
(2) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23759871

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What’s in a word?

What is in a word?

Take learning theory and peoples interpretations, some say release of pressure is a reward some say it is a relief at best.

What is certain is that in operant conditioning terms it is negative reinforcement, therefore for the release/relief to happen there has to be an aversive stimulus applied first. Once the animal complies with our request the stimulus is removed.

So it may be leg aids – use and remove as soon as the horse complies, it may be ground work – apply an aversive stimulus to form a behaviour e.g teaching a horse to back up. Often people teach back up using a light touch on the chest – getting firmer until the horse backs, the pressure is removed on the slightest of movements.

I don’t wish to argue about various methods of horsemanship – it is a personal choice but the more I learn about the emotions involved the more I wish to use positive reinforcement as much as possible.

We do live in a world where most people use aversive stimuli to form behaviours, so our horses need to understand other peoples cues.

Dictionary defintions:

Reinforcement – The action or process of reinforcing or strengthening; The process of encouraging or establishing a belief or pattern of behaviour

Stimuli – A thing that arouses activity or energy in someone or something; a spur or incentive; A thing or event that evokes a specific functional reaction in an organ or tissue

Reward – A thing given in recognition of service, effort, or achievement; A fair return for good or bad behaviour:

Relief – A feeling of reassurance and relaxation following release from anxiety or distress; The alleviation of pain, discomfort, or distress

Release – Allow or enable to escape from confinement; set free: Allow (something) to move, act, or flow freely; Remove restrictions or obligations from (someone or something) so that they become available for other activity: Allow (something) to return to its resting position by ceasing to put pressure on it:

Aversive – Someone or something that arouses a strong dislike or disinclination.

References
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com

http://www.equitationscience.com/aversive-stimuli – some are challenging the notion that horses are not safe unless we use negative reinforcement.

Connection Training
Academy of Positive Horsemanship

Read and decide, which would you prefer for yourself? Also worth looking at the emotions involved in negative versus positive reinforcement.

http://www.thehorse.com/articles/33927/study-human-interaction-shapes-horses-negative-emotions

Jaak Panksepp describes the 7 basic emotional systems all mammals exhibit.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3181986/

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How Horses Learn, Feel and Communicate

This is the feedback I gave Jo Hughes about the course I am studying:

How Horses Learn, Feel & Communicate

I am studying a course run by Jo Hughes of the Academy of Positive Horsemanship, on how animals learn, feel and communicate.
This is an extremely useful course for anyone who has contact with horses, we all need to learn to communicate and ethically train horses. Horses are learning all the time – whether we are actively doing a training sessions or just taking them to and from the field and stable.
This course is a mixture of video presentations, articles from various websites and questions to get us thinking about why we do what we do and how the horse may feel about this. The scientific content is at a level anyone can understand.
One example is looking at videos of flood desensitisation and assessing the possible emotions felt by the horse. Then we had to find videos to illustrate this technique. It was a bit daunting as sometimes it is difficult to decide what is or is not flooding. P.S flooding is not a technique that is recommended.
Jo is very patient and makes excellent videos presentations, she is always willing to answer questions, and assist in our training problems.
I can whole heartedly recommend this course.
Gill Langridge

If you wish to know more go to her website and sign up for the next course.
Academy of Positive Horsemanship

We owe it to our horses to learn as much as possible, the more tools in our toolbox the better able we are to pick the best for our horse.

There are no rules or methods, only principles – every horse is different and we need to be flexible in our handling and training.

The more I learn, the more I realise there is to learn, happy learning to everyone, where ever you are on your lifelong journey of never ending self-improvement.

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Tolerance

Tolerance
1.
“a fair, objective, and permissive attitude toward those whose opinions, differ from one’s own.” online dictionary definition.

Whilst my understanding of how animals learn gets deeper I find it really difficult to be tolerant with some aspects of horse training.

People who don’t understand the reasons for how a horse learns have some excuse for using techniques that may cause the horse distress. However there are people who understand operant and classical conditioning but still deliberately train horses using aversive stimuli.

Some say horses can’t be trained any other way – but why is that? All other animals on the planet can be trained using appetitives rather than aversive stimuli.

Take trailer loading – I hear people say make the outside of the trailer more uncomfortable than the inside. Why not turn it round and make the inside of the trailer more appetitive than the outside?

We can alter how the horse feels about anything using systematic desensitisation and counter conditioning.

This is not to say we must all be “fluffy bunny huggers” and let the horse do exactly what he wants without due regard for our and his safety.

We can train safety using positive reinforcement just as well, if not better, than if we use negative reinforcement.

Given a choice what would your horse choose – the relief from something he doesn’t like or a reward of something he likes.

It is the horse who decides what is aversive and what is appetitive.

Anytime you train and trigger a flight response (fear response) then you have used an aversive stimulus. I hear people say we don’t train with fear but how do you get a horse to do something he finds innately frightening, if you don’t use positive reinforcement? You add a more aversive stimulus than the stimulus of the frightening thing. How can that be good for the horses emotional wellbeing?

If you know please tell me!

The next module in Jo Hughes’ course is on affective neuroscience – how animals express emotions.

I am also going to a lecture by Jaak Panksepp in April – really looking forward to learning more.

Jack Panksepp has done a lot to help people understand emotions, and many have come to accept animals as sentient beings.

P.S I still use some negative reinforcement, as I ride other peoples horses, but it does not feel right to me to tap a horse with a whip or to use spurs.
Conventional aids can be taught using postive reinforcement.
The world is changing, as we know more about how animals feel and learn.

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Flood Desensitising

Learning theory is fascinating as is equine behaviour analysis. Learning to look analytically at horse behaviour and the interaction between horse and humans is a sometimes distressing process, seeing videos of flood desensitisation and realising that at some point in the past you have done a similar type of training is very upsetting.

Flooding is a form of habituation and is classical conditioning, designed to stop a horse reacting to a stimulus. Horses are neophobic so are innately afraid of any new stimulus.

Even done well with animals it may never work, we have better ways to desensitise and habituate horses to novel stimuli.

Flooding entails applying an aversive (remember this is anything the horse perceives as a threat) stimulus at full intensity for as long as it takes the horse to habituate. Take note of the word perceives – it is the horse, not us, who decides what is aversive.

Inadvertant flooding can be as simple as clipping a horse whilst restrained – if he calms down during the process he may habituate or he may be worse the next time you try to clip. Many sedate to clip but the fear is still there, this happened to a horse I know – he had been twitched by a previous owner to be clipped, he is now so sensitive to the sight and sound of the clippers it is going to take a long time to regain his trust.

More extreme examples are putting a saddle on a horse whilst it is still anxious about the process and sending him round an arena – so he can buck if he feels the need to get the aversive stimulus off his back.

When watching horses see if they do that to each other and the answer is no – a horse may move another horse from a resource he wants but the pressure is not unrelenting – horses are gentle creatures and really just want to survive with out us chasing them round.

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Habituation in Horses

Just starting the third module on Jo Hughes Learning Theory course, I think courses like this are a must for all animal trainers, owners and those who have any interest in ethical treatment of animals. Along with the ethology of the species with which you intereact.
This module looks at habituation, desensitisation and the fine lines between this and, flooding and sensitisation.
I know I have been guilty of flooding a horse – e.g trying to desensitise Benny to wormers did not go well when I first got him, made him a lot worse.

If you put a saddle on a horse for the first time and allow it to buck it out or run until he accepts the saddle – with no means of escape – waiting until he is calm and has given in – that is flooding. That may seem obvious but there are much more subtle examples of flooding and some of it goes badly wrong.

Liz admits she flooded Smoke trying to clip him the year before last – it has taken a while to undo. Failed flooding usually ends up with a horse even more sensitised to the fearful stimulus.

Horses are neophobic so any new stimuls invokes the startle/fear respones. They do need to habituate and be desensitised to our envirnoment for them to be and feel safe. Desensitisation is a form of habituation in a controlled manner – stimulus at very low levels and gradually increased so as not to trigger a flight respone.
Flooding triggers a flight response with stimulus at full strength, with no means of escape, until the horse habituates – which may be never!

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Thoughts on Desensitisation.

As I am doing a course with Jo Hughes of The Academy of Positive Horsemanship I am reading Dr. Jenifer Ziligs book How to Train Animals 101. The more I learn the more there is to be considered when training horses. Everything we do with them is teaching them something.

Although the course hasn’t got to desensitisation yet I have been seeing more and more videos of people flood desensitising horses.

Some ways to desensitise:
Habituation – exposure over time, also called passive desensitisation. A horse over time habituates to his environment and the weaker the stimulus the more rapid and persistent is the habituation.
This process can be very slow and if we wish horses to habituate to aversive stumuli e.g for possible medical intervention then counter-conditioning with systematic desensitisation is useful.

Counter-conditioning – this is classical conditioning using a reward to change the horses perception of a stimulus. “associating stimuli of opposite value, the combination of which acts to nullify the value towards neutral” (Dr. J. Zeligs – Animal Training 101)

Also 2 ways to approach stimulus exposure:

Systematic desensitisation – using small approximations of the stimulus, can be used with counter conditioning.

Flooding – unrelenting exposure to the stimulus – this is not a recommended technique.

More on flooding by Helen Spence – Flooding and Learned Helplessness

Also from Dr.Sue McDonnell about “sacking out” often used as a euphemism for flooding.
“Unpredictable Fear”

Recently I read this statement:

“Sometimes a horse will put up the greatest resistance just before he comes through. I call it ‘the darkest hour before the dawn’. When the horse has tried all the avenues of his natural instinct of self-preservation and puts up its greatest resistance; is when people will usually give-up or get mad. If they would just be patient, the horse is about to come around.'” – Tom Dorrance.

I would like to deconstruct this statement and ask why the horse feels he needs to take flight or to fight.

The horse has 4 reactions to a fearful situation: first they may freeze – look at the threat, then they may try to flee, if flight isn’t successful – as in a confined space – they may try to fight the threat.
If the threatening predator is still present after all these attempts the horse may give in and freeze or try appeasement behaviours to look less of a threat to the predator.
Then they appear submissive but can actually be in a state of learned helplessness.

In the above scenario the human is the predator – so what happened to the natural horsemanship principle that we should not act like a predator?

The above is a classic way to flood desensitise a horse – don’t give up until the horse gives in – as we all know flooding done incompletely may make the horse put up an even bigger fight next time. The problem is that flooding may never work even if done to the point of the horse giving in.

Why put a sensitive animal like a horse through such a process? If this was done to a deer or other prey animal it would be called cruelty.

So next time you go to a clinic or watch a video of horses being trained try to analyse what is actually happening not what the trainer says is happening.