Horse Training Principles, DrSid's Q and A

Q: What do you think are the biggest barriers today to horses being trained humanely?

Lack of appropriate socialization during the development phase of the horse's life, birth to two years old. Horses need to first become horses, as taught by the mare and herd, to subsequently become willing learners and partners for folk. Husbandry is also critical. Horses require friends, forage, and locomotion, and often these necessities are restricted by stabling and change, resulting in inability to learn, resulting in heavy handed training tactics. Horses are willing to please those who know how to please horses. Horse lives must be fulfilled and enriched when they are stabled if one expects them to train up and learn willingly.

Q: How can understanding learning theory help the average horse owner?

It is essential to appreciate learning theory, but perhaps more important is to appreciate the social nature of the horse so one can fulfill the needs of the horse before the training begins. Learning theory is only helpful if horses are cared for in a fashion that facilitates and encourages them to be in a learning state of mind when the training takes place. Horses need to be socialized, fulfilled, and enriched, and that requires a knowledge of equine behaviour.

Some horse trainers cannot articulate or explain learning theory, but they do know the fundamentals of shared sociality, and many, although ignorant of the science, apply learning principles properly. Nonetheless, it is preferred to know the science and to understand socialization. Social species require abundant socialization. Some folk, such as Native Americans and those raised by horses through childhood, intuitively know how to train horses, as they were taught by horses. They know the science, they just do not know it as science as they effectively enter the horse's social milieu. No one told them they had to become the horse's boss, only to become the horse's friend, and those folk succeed quite well. Those who have trouble training horses are those who try to establish dominance to an excessive degree. 

Q: What or where do you feel the best source is for owners and trainers to learn more about training and learning theory?

They need to take equine behavior at Equine Guelph, and/or read and study McGreevy's two books, Equine Behaviour and Equitation Science. If the people are young (or agree to take a stance of innocence and open-mindedness), they should observe horses in natural settings, and hang out with horses whenever possible. Horses teach horsemanship to those with the right eyes. Kids often have the right eyes, while adults often lose their capacity to see what horses are saying and feeling. Rather than listening to and learning from horses, they attempt to domineer them.

Q: What do you think is the best recent advance in horse training?

Understanding domestication, which reveals the importance of pair bonding with each horse one desires to teach. It was the horse's idea to take up with mankind, it seems. They showed up willing to please. Other than that, not much else. One must go back in time to find advances that have long since been lost. Peggy Brown felt advances in equipment were the best advances, but I say the less equipment the better, so I do not believe in equipment and tack, especially rigs. The best advances in equine training would be, again, at Equine Guelph where Equine Behaviour is taught as a science based discipline based on the evolution, domestication, and behaviour of the horse.

Q: What do you think is the biggest disservice to horses in the trends of horse training today?

Lack of appropriate socialization is a great disservice to growing horses, as is interference with the mare/foal bond shortly after birth (imprint training is a significant welfare and behavioral insult to foals). The mare is the most qualified teacher of a foal, and teaches the foal to become a horse, as well as to pair bond. For a person to believe they know more than a mare is a mistake. Any child can observe imprint training and know it is wrong to interfere with a neonate and her mother's relationship. After a week, the people can begin training. For the first week, the best way to develop a foal to become a willing partner is to let the mare teach the foal all about willing partnerships.
Once the horse is grown and ready to train at two or so, isolation becomes a big problem for the well-being of the horse. Stabling without 24/7 forage, friends, and locomotion creates all sorts of learning disabilities and unwelcome behaviours. Only happy horses learn well and efficiently. The happiest horses are those allowed to graze together. The unhappiest horses are locked in a stall much of the time, and are the least likely to learn willingly.

 What do you perceive to be a common accepted mistake when training horses?

Trying to exert dominance over horses. One must always remember that it is the horse who will always have the last word. 
This mistake of attempting to establish dominance is unfortunately not commonly accepted. Horses are the most adaptable, willing learners on the planet. They are more than happy to be taught and to appease their teachers if only they are allowed appropriate socialization, and subsequent application of learning theory, which includes bonding practices. Coercive training is unproductive. Horses cannot be forced to prevail in athletic competitions. Horsefolk must seek and attain willing partnerships with horses to prevail in athletic competitions. One cannot force a horse to win the Kentucky Derby, one must work with the horse's nature every step of the way. 
It is the herd of horses that teaches foals to run at speed in close company with other horses. It is the herd that gives the horse the confidence to run through and by other horses in a horserace.
One is best served to recreate the learning scenario the mare and herd creates for their foal. Mares teach utilizing pressure, release, reward. As well, the foal learns by mimicry. To learn how to walk the horse talk, watch mares teach their foals. Horsemanship is becoming part of the herd, it seems.

Dr Gustafson is an equine veterinarian, veterinary behaviorist, and novelist. He helps refine horse and dog training methods to accommodate the inherent nature and behavior of horses and dogs. Applied veterinary behavior enhances optimum health, performance, soundness, contentment, and longevity in animal athletes. Natural approaches to development, training, nutrition, and conditioning sustain equine health and enhance performance. Behavioral and nutritional enrichment strategies enhance the lives of stabled horses. Training and husbandry from the horse's perspective result in content, cooperative horses. DrSid provides equine behavior consultations to help recreate the needs and preferences of horses in training and competition.

The Nature of Horses, A Contemporary Approach to Equine Behaviour Education

A Contemporary Approach to Equine Behavior Education

30th World Veterinary Congress 2011

Sid Gustafson DVM

Veterinary Behavior Educator and Practitioner

Big Sky, MT 59716

Abstract:

This is a review of the current behavioral science regarding the horse. This paper is a primer on equine behavior, and portrays the educational approach to help horsefolk fulfill the health and welfare of horses from the horse perspective, rather than from the human perspective.

Behavioral study and appreciation of the evolved nature of horses provide the foundation for the contemporary principles equine welfare and equine behavior education. Friends, forage, and locomotion are the long-evolved requirements for healthy horses, and must be abundantly and creatively provided to facilitate optimum health, performance, and healing.

Equine Behavior Through Time

Horses began their journey through time 60 million years ago. Three million years ago the footsteps of humans were fossilized next to the hoofprints of horses, suggesting that humans have been contemplating horses for some time. But it was not until perhaps ten thousand years ago that human societies began the dance of domestication with horse. Over thousands of years, perhaps tens of thousands of years, the horse herds gradually merged with human societies. A shared language and sociality facilitated the merging of the two species.

There is archeological evidence that humans had formed an intimate and intermingled relationship with horses by 5500 years ago in Botai, where the horsefolk stabled and milked horses, and probably rode them. Horses provided these early horsefolk with much of the essentials they needed for group survival. It is interesting to note that large domestic dogs lived with these early horsefolk as well, but no other domestic animals. To understand the domestication process is to enhance our appreciation of equine behaviour. Horses apparently became domesticated because they found a niche with people long ago on the steppes of Kazakhstan. Both trained and wild horses existed in this realm south of Russia and west of China. A population of horses more amenable to captivity and taming than their wild counterparts likely provided the stock for the first horse societies. Rather than plucking wild horses out of the wild and taming them, it is thought that over tens of thousands of years a relationship developed in a shared niche.

By the early 20th century the closest living relative to Equus caballus, the Tarpan, had gone extinct. No truly wild horses remain. All of today’s caballine horses are descended from an original and possibly separate population of horses that were amenable to be tamed and selectively bred by humans. It appears to have taken tens of thousands of years to fully domesticate the horse, and to eventually attain control of breeding. Breeding initially consisted primarily of selection for docility and amenability to captivity, and later milking, riding, driving, and stabling. In contemporary culture, selective breeding often involves selecting for the best athlete, or attempting to select for the best athlete. In addition to genetics, this presentation will focus on the socialization aspect of raising horses, and portray the importance of nurture on the eventual behavioral and physical health of the adult athlete.

No longer does human society depend on horse society for survival as it once did. Although still bred for trainability, more and more horses are today bred for specific performance goals. These days, horses provide people with entertainment, recreation, sport, esteem, performance, and pleasure, and, as ever, but in fewer and fewer reaches, utility. Other than stockfolk, few others rely on horses for to sustain a pastoral livelihood. This new role of the horse requires renewed studies and considerations of equine behavior.

Horsefolk and veterinarians alike remain enticed and intrigued by horses. The science of equine behaviour attempts to appreciate just who horses are, and from the horse perspective. To appreciate the horse perspective, behaviorists explore the evolution and domestication of the horse. We continue to find ourselves attempting to appreciate how the current human/horse relationship came to be so as to facilitate a smooth trouble free relationship with our horses. As well, appropriate breeding, socialization, and training of horses helps minimize behavioral wastage.

To understand where our relationships with the horses are headed, veterinary behavior practitioners attempt to see where the human/horse relationship has been, and to subsequently help modify and refine the relationship to favor the horse. Humans continue to live with horses and continue to learn from them, as all horsefolk have through time, but now much less time is spent with horses learning from horses, so contemporary practitioners must research and make themselves aware of behavioral principle that were once gleaned from a near-constant exposure to horses through all stages of their development. We study the evolution and domestication of the horse to better help us appreciate the horses we have in our hands today. Evolution and domestication provide a basis for the understanding of equine behaviour. Man has attempted to refine his relationship with the horse ever since the first kid grabbed a mane and swung atop a horse. To become a partner with the flighty, powerful (but trainable and tamable) grazer of the plains remains the horsefolk goal.

Appreciation and sensitivity to all of our caballine horses' evolved preferences results in optimum health and soundness, and therefore optimum performance. A horse cannot be coerced to win the Kentucky Derby. The people must work with the horse, and from the horse’s view. If we understand equine behaviour, we understand what makes horses do our bidding, and do it willingly and well. To this day, horses seek to appease their domesticators much as they appease others in horse societies and herds. Horses are willing learners. This learning behavior is a result of evolutionary development of a complex social lifestyle. More recently, selective breeding has influenced equine behaviour.

The nature of the horse is enhanced by the horse’s social development. Appropriate socialization with other horses in herd pasture setting best prepares horses to be subsequently trained by horsefolk. Pastured horses train up and learn more efficiently than stabled horses. The appropriate, efficient, and considerate training of horses is highly dependent on their previous socialization by the dam and other horses, as well as their current husbandry situation. Trainability is heavily influenced by the intensity and type of stabling and husbandry, not to mention the type of training. In the latest revolution of horsemanship, the area of appropriate socialization and stabling has not received the attention it deserves.

Horses are a quiet species. They prefer calm, and learn most efficiently in tranquil, familiar settings. Horses must know and be comfortable and secure in their environment to be able to learn as horsefolk hope them to learn. Horsefolk all know what we want from our horses, however in this paper I shall present the science of what our horses want and need from humans, the science of equine behaviour. Equine behaviour is not only the basis of training and trainability, but also the very basis of equine health. To succeed in our endeavors with horses (whatever the our equine goals or pursuits), our horses are best served to receive what they preferentially need and require behaviourally, nutritionally, socially, physically, environmentally, visually, and metabolically. In order to properly care for horses and successfully teach and train horses, horsefolk must know horses. They must know who the gregarious grazers of the plains are. They must know how to properly socialize horses through their growth phase to ensure that their horses grow up to be horses. Horses raised out of the herd context are vulnerable to behavioural insecurities later in life. Most behavioural wastage is due to improper socialization and husbandry.

Rather than dissimilar to us, horses are much like us. In this presentation, I attempt to clarify humankind's social and communicative similarities to horses. As with people, strong social bonds develop between individual horses and groups of horses. This herd nature results in intense social pair and herd bonds. Horses need other horses. Horses require other horses for security, comfort, and behavioural health. Horses need friends throughout their entire life, first their teaching mother, and then their teaching herd. Today’s domestic horse needs horse friends and human friends, although horses do retain the wherewithal to survive just fine without horsefolk. Horses need friends so preciously and constantly, that horses allow horsefolk to substitute as friends. This is possible because man shares a sociality with domestic horses. We speak their gesture language, and horses speak ours. We share a language of movement, and language described as kinetic empathy.

Domestic horse is no longer human prey, and has not been for thousands of years. Horse has been brought into the circle of humanity, along with a dozen or so other domesticates that shared an adequate sociality with mankind to be allowed to develop and mutually beneficial relationship.

Horse and man have co-evolved together for thousands, if not tens of thousands of years. Each knows the other, well, and horses have proven to know the nature of people more consistently than people know the nature of horses. It is paramount that horsefolk appreciate the social and communicative nature of horses, and deal with horses in a fashion that is appropriate to their long-evolved social nature.

In addition to adequate and appropriate sociality and socialization, the importance of constant locomotion is paramount to appreciating equine behaviour and the moving, digestive nature of horses. Locomotion. Horses need movement. In addition to friendship, most all horses require near-constant movement for behavioural expression and health. Interdependence exists between horse health and locomotion. Horses evolved to be near-constant walkers and grazers. The last place a horse evolved to be is alone in a stall. Despite domestication and selective breeding for docility and captivity, horse health remains dependent on locomotion. Locomotion is inherent to grazing. Locomotion is inherent to digestion, to respiration, to metabolism. If horses are not allowed to move about freely and socialize with other familiar horses grazing and chewing as they evolved to do, they become metabolic unstable and subsequently troubled. Horses deprived of locomotion and constant forage ingestion develop strategies to maintain the motion and oral security they feel they need to survive. When horses are deprived of adequate and abundant locomotion, they develop strategies to keep themselves and their jaws moving, as is their essential and inherent nature. Horses deprived of friends, forage, and locomotion are at risk to develop stereotypies to provide themselves with the movements they need to survive.

The primary premise of equine behavioural health is this: In natural settings, horses walk and graze with other horses two thirds of the time. They take a step and graze, then another step or two grazing and moving along, always observing their surroundings, grazing while in touch with other members of the herd unless playing, occasionally dozing or sleeping, but only under the secure and established watch of others. Horses that are not afforded the opportunity to graze and walk much of the time take up with behaviours to replicate essential locomotion. When stabled, some of the horse's long- evolved survival behaviours become unwanted and unwelcome.

Horses require friends, forage, and locomotion to stay healthy and productive. Additionally, horses need clean air and abundant space for optimum health. In rural settings, these requirements are easy to fulfill. Open grasslands and steppes are the geography and environs that the most recent predecessors of Equus caballus evolved. The further we remove horses from their social grazer of the plains preferences, the more health issues develop that require treatment and management by veterinarians and horsefolk.

Stabling, stalling, hospitalization and transport all deprive horses of their preferences for friends, forage, and locomotion. Although convenient for horsefolk, stabling is inconvenient for horses. Stabling limits the resources of friends, forage, and locomotion. Stabling creates bad air, and allows pathogens and parasites to travel easily between horses. When stabling is required, horses are best served to have their natural needs re-created in the stable. The air must be kept clean, and forage must be always available. Opportunities for movement and simulation of grazing with friends must be provided in abundance. Once our horses behavioural needs are understood, appreciated, and fulfilled, the learning and training can begin. Enrichment strategies re-create the needs of stabled horses. Horses deprived of friends, forage, and locomotion are not able to learn as well as appropriately socialized horses. Those strategies that best replicate the grazer of the plains scenario promote the best health, learning, and performance from horses.

Locomotion and socialization are essential for both horse health and healing.

Husbandry, healing, and rehabilitation nearly always benefit from appropriately managed locomotion strategies that are constantly tailored to the horse's healing process. Locomotion is required not only for normal healing, but for normal digestion, respiration, hoof health, circulation, and all other physiologic functions of the horse. Stall rest is at the expense of many systems, especially the hoof and metabolic systems. Digestion and respiration are compromised by confinement and restriction of movement. Metabolic, digestive, circulatory, hoof health, musculoskeletal, and nervous, systems, as well as the all other systems and functions of the horse, are dependent upon adequate and appropriate locomotion for normal functioning and/or healing.

For horses that are hospitalized, paddocked, stabled, and corralled; active implementation and re-creation of the social pasture setting is required to optimize and maintain health and promote healing. Medical conditions are apt to deteriorate in the face of the deprivations of forage, friends, and locomotion created by stabling and hospitalization. Re-creation of a natural setting in the stall is the biggest challenge veterinarians face in maintaining the health of stabled horses.

Stalled horses not only heal poorly, they learn and train poorly. Locomotion, social, and forage deprivations create problems for horses. In addition to appropriate medical treatment, veterinarians and stable managers must creatively provide horses with abundant socialization, forage, and locomotion to maintain health and facilitate healing within the parameters of acceptable medical and surgical treatment. Restriction of locomotion to facilitate healing necessitates the implementation of enrichment strategies to simulate locomotion, including massage, passive flexion, and a wide variety of physical therapies.

Horses also heal horsefolk, and those horsefolk that implement these healing strategies often experience a sense of healing themselves, it seems. The human/horse bond runs deep. Domestication of the horse is a co-evolving evolutionary process. The human perspective is being shaped by the horse's perspective these days. Appreciation of the science of equine behavior and equitation is encouraged to support the renewed interest in equine medicine and welfare, and to facilitate the veterinarian’s role of providing horses with their essential needs.

References

McGreevy, Paul, (2004) Equine Behavior: A Guide for Veterinarians and Equine Scientists Philadelphia: Elsevier Limited. ISBN 0 7020 2634 4

Olsen, Sandra, Horses and Humans, The Evolution of Human-Equine Relationships, 2006, Sandra Olsen, Grant, Choyke, and Bartosiewicz, BAR International Series 1560, Archeopress, England, ISBN 1 84171 990 0

McGreevy, Paul; McLean, Andrew, Equitation Science, Wiley Blackwell, UK, ISBN 2009048321

McGreevy, P.D. et al, (2007) “Roles of Learning theory and ethology in equitation” Journal of Veterinary Behavior 2, p. 108-118.

McGreevy Paul D., (2006) “The advent of equitation science” The Veterinary Journal 174 p. 492-500.

Waran, N., McGreevy, P., & Casey, R.A., (2002) “Training Methods and Horse Welfare”, in Waran, N., ed., The Welfare of Horses, Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers (2002) 151-180.

Magner, D. (2004.) Magner’s Classic Encyclopedia of the Horse. Edison, New Jersey: Castle Books, 2004.

Dr Gustafson is an equine veterinarian, veterinary behaviorist, and novelist. He helps refine horse and dog training methods to accommodate the inherent nature and behavior of horses and dogs. Applied veterinary behavior enhances optimum health, performance, soundness, contentment, and longevity in animal athletes. Natural approaches to development, training, nutrition, and conditioning sustain equine health and enhance performance. Behavioral and nutritional enrichment strategies enhance the lives of stabled horses. Training and husbandry from the horse's perspective result in content, cooperative horses. DrSid provides equine behavior consultations to help recreate the needs and preferences of horses in training and competition.

Dr Gustafson's interview The (Behavioral) Life of a Racehorse

The Behavioral Life of a Racehorse, interview with DrSid regarding the welfare of racehorses and foals
http://pondside.cachefly.net/equinely-inclined.ep107.mp3
Dr Gustafson's interview begins at 25 minutes remaining.

DrSid provides equine behavior consultations to help enrich the lives of horses in training and competition.

Appreciating Horses Farm.tv video

Dr Gustafson is an equine veterinarian, veterinary behaviorist, and novelist. He provides education and presentations regarding equine behavior and equine welfare. Dr Sid helps animal folks refine their horse and dog training methods to accommodate the inherent nature and behavior of horses and dogs. Applied veterinary behavior enhances optimum health, performance, soundness, contentment, and longevity in equine and canine athletes.
Follow DrSid to learn how to effectively implement natural approaches to development, training, nutrition, and conditioning to sustain equine health and enhance performance. Behavioral and nutritional enrichment strategies enhance the lives of stabled horses, and leads them to the winner's circle. Training and husbandry from the horse's perspective result in content, willing horses.
DrSid provides equine behavior consultations to help recreate the needs and preferences of horses in training and competition.

Contact Dr Gustafson