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.
Positive Horsemanship. 