HOW HORSES LEARN  PART II

 ©Lesley Skipper 2003

In the last article on learning, I asked readers to think about the difference between a cue and an aid. A cue can sometimes also be an aid, and an aid can often also be a cue. However, the two terms are not interchangeable; some cues are definitely not aids!

           A cue is an action performed to tell the horse what we want him to do. I am sure many people will have ridden riding school horses or ponies who canter when the instructor says ‘Canter!’ and not because of anything the rider has asked of them; that is a response to a verbal cue. You can teach a horse to halt by shouting ‘Whoa!’ (or ‘Ho!’ in some parts of the USA); in some countries riders use a whistle or some other vocal cue. An aid, on the other hand, is something that is supposed to help the horse, rather than simply telling him what to do. This is what I meant when, at the end of the last article, I said that the words themselves would tell you the difference between a cue and an aid. ‘Aid’ in this sense means exactly what it does in everyday life: to help or assist. The old word was indeed ‘help’: writing in the seventeenth century, the Duke of Newcastle reminds us that we train the horse by means of ‘helps and corrections’.

In theory (and in practice) we can teach the horse almost anything we want him to do by use of cues; indeed, many dressage horses are trained this way, which explains why a cleverly trained horse can sometimes make a poor rider look very much better than they really are. For example, you can teach a horse to piaffe quite easily by tapping him with a stick and rewarding every correct response, building up the movement step-by-step; this process is known as shaping. The problem with this is that, used on its own, it bypasses gymnastic development. If you set out to teach the horse ‘movements’ in this way, out of their proper developmental context, you have missed the point, and the result is often a travesty of what it should be.

The other problem with cues is that they may tell the horse what we want him to do, but not how we want him to do it. For example, halting in response to a verbal command is a very useful thing to teach horses, but it is not an aid; it is a cue. It may get the horse to halt, but it does nothing to help him to halt efficiently. So although halting a horse by using vocal cues is wonderful in an emergency, it is no substitute for correct riding!

The greatest masters of equitation realised, long ago, that there are numerous ways in which we can help the horse to perform under saddle. These involve positioning the rider’s body in such a way that the action we want the horse to perform flows naturally from that positioning, together with the use of the legs to stimulate the muscles which propel the horse forward, and the hands to receive and direct the impulsion thus created. These are natural responses, not learned via a series of cues. We are using our own body to tell the horse what we want him to do with his body, and making it easy for him to do so. (For a fuller understanding of these natural responses see Karin Blignault’s  Successful Schooling, Chapters 1 and 4. Sylvia Loch and Michael Stevens have also written eloquently on this subject.)

Effective riding makes use of both natural responses and cues; the latter are a useful way of reinforcing the message, but evocation of the natural responses via the aids must take precedence, or we are doing nothing more than teaching by rote.

The use of cues or stimuli involves conditioning, which I mentioned in the first article. To be effective, this type of learning needs to be reinforced. There are two main categories of reinforcement: negative reinforcement, and positive reinforcement.

Negative reinforcement takes place before the desired response. It consists of some stimulus or cue that the horse finds unpleasant or uncomfortable; once he has done as we wish, the stimulus is removed or the action forming the cue ceases, and the idea is that this constitutes the horse’s reward.

Positive reinforcement, on the other hand, takes place after the desired response; the horse is rewarded by a food treat, a stroke or pat, or verbal praise.

Many people believe that most horse training consists of negative reinforcement, and that the horse learns that in order to avoid something unpleasant (such as bit pressure, the rider’s leg, the whip etc.) he must perform certain actions associated with certain cues or stimuli or combinations of cues and/or stimuli, learned more or less by rote. At the most basic level, for example, this could be teaching the horse to move away from the leg. After some degree of trial and error, involving verbal cues, the horse cottons on that a nudge or a squeeze with the leg means that he is to walk on. The instant he responds, the ‘negative’ influence (the leg) is removed, and this is the horse’s ‘reward’: the removal of something unpleasant In the same way, many trainers maintain that it is the pain caused by pressure on the bit which causes a horse to stop, and that release of the pressure (i.e. removal of the unpleasant sensation caused by the bit) constitutes the horse’s reward.

The problem with this way of thinking is that apart from being unpleasant for the horse, it really only works on a rather crude level. It assumes that the pressure of the bit or the touch of the rider’s leg are always going to be unpleasant for the horse, which suggests a degree of heavy-handedness and/or force that is unacceptable in educated riding. Some horses might indeed stop as a result of pressure on the bit, but many others don’t. In fact pressure on the bit is a very inefficient way of halting a horse, as it does nothing to help him to engage his hind legs for a correct halt. With regard to leg aids, some sensitive horses might breathe a sigh of relief as the rider stops using the leg; others might simply not care very much one way or the other. Where does one go from there? If the horse is ‘switched off’ to the negative stimulus, then how is removing it going to make very much difference?

In any case, things would have to be pretty bad for the simple removal of something unpleasant to constitute a ‘reward’. That’s like saying to someone, ‘Do this and I’ll stop hitting you – that’s your reward for complying.’ That’s not a reward, it’s coercion. Wouldn’t the prospect of receiving something the horse finds pleasurable (whether a tit-bit, a stroke, verbal praise or whatever) prove to be a far more powerful motivator? Most of us – horses and humans alike – tend to prefer something pleasant as an incentive!

Negative reinforcement is often confused with Punishment. The latter, although regrettably necessary in some circumstances (e.g. in response to certain types of undesirable behaviour) is not, and cannot be, a training tool. This is because punishment can only tell the horse what not to do; it can never tell him what he should be doing.

Prolonged use of negative stimuli – including the kind of stimuli often used in negative reinforcement – has been shown experimentally to cause neurosis in animals. So the use of negative reinforcement should be kept to an absolute minimum: positive reinforcement is always preferable.

However, positive reinforcement brings with it its own perils; it is all too easy to reward the horse for doing the wrong thing. If, for example, we habitually reward our horse with verbal praise when he has done well, but use the same phrase or tone of voice when (say) he has ‘acted up’, he may well come to associate ‘acting up’ with verbal praise, and think that as he has done well on that occasion, we must want him to do it again! If we really want to educate our horses, I think we must keep the use of rote-learning (which, after all, does not guarantee understanding) to a minimum, and strive to improve our use of our own bodies – and body language - in such a way as to help the horse to comply with our wishes, and to make it pleasant for him to do so.

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Last revised: May 18, 2004.