Fight, flight or freeze?
Horses never do anything without a reason. If they buck, bolt, rear, bite or kick they are not just being “naughty”.
It may be FEAR due to pain, or FEAR due to being asked to do something they don’t understand, or even FEAR due to being unbalanced. It is up to us with our bigger brains to do the detective work and find the cause. It may be they have been inadvertently reinforced for a behaviour we don’t want. So kicking the stable door at mealtimes may increase if we always feed that horse first. The horse associates the kicking with the food.
Behaviour is the way horses communicate. Just because another horse bites, kicks or pushes another horse does not give us permission to do the same to them. We are not horses and horses know that, if we treated them as a another horse then we would need to let them recipricate. We do not want horses to bite us, kick us so we don’t allow that. Horses do not bear grudges, they push another horse and that horse moves – it is usually associated with resource guarding and is quickly forgotten.
We must get away from using labels too, horses are not “naughty”, taking the “p——“ , or any other label we might use.
Use the ABCs of behaviourism to observe what they do:-
A = Antecedent – what happened before what happened happened.
B = Behaviour – what the horse actually did in physical terms, but don’t ignore the emotions involved.
C = Consequence – is the behaviour increasing or decreasing, if it is increasing in frequency it is being reinforced by something, if it decreasing it is being punished by something.
The more we can use these criteria to describe behaviour the less likely we are to ignore what the horse is trying to communicate.
Learn to read the subtle signs of distress and defuse the situation before they become over their fear threshold.
Adrenaline (epinephrine) is the main hormone of the FEAR response, with a half life of 2-3 minutes, so we need to wait and let it dissipate before asking them to do something else.
Punishing an already fearful horse (and it can be just mild anxiety) is not at all helpful. We need to help them cope with our environment.
Horses react in several ways to threats to their safety, they look and may just freeze. If the threat is disregarded they will go back to base line, if the threat seems real they will flee. If they cannot flee they may well fight, so kick, bite, buck.
If we punish a horse who is threatening to kick or bite then we are taking away one means of communication, eventually the horse may not give a warning but just attack. This is often how aggressive horses have been treated in the past.
If we don’t go slowly enough to habituate them to saddles and having humans on their backs they may well go over their FEAR threshold and try to escape. IT IS FRIGHTENING FOR US TO BE OUT OF BALANCE AND FEEL LIKE WE ARE ABOUT TO FALL. Check this next time you trip and feel your heart rate increase. Some horses in this situation stop (FREEZE), some try to run to regain balance and may well go in to full FLIGHT mode. Some with an unbalance object (person) on their backs will buck to try and remove the object (FIGHT).
Positive Horsemanship. 