The common denominator in all horse training methods - and when it goes wrong
No matter what your preferred style (or your horse’s preferred style) of training is, they all have something in common:
we are always moving them away from something they don't want (pressure or withholding of the treat) towards something they do want (release of pressure, treat or another form of emotional motivation).
When they get the thing they do want they get a happy hormone hit for task achievement. It is ours and their own reward system for recognising they've done something good.
The clearer we are at acknowledging the behaviour we want and reinforcing it, the bigger the happy hormone hit and the more willing our horses become to try again (for a certain period of time).
This isn't without its own problems.
The process of finding the answer and not getting it cause the opposite of happy hormones. The blocking of achieving a task is the cause of frustration and quite often it's us that's responsible for handing out rewards so that frustration can get directed towards us.
The bigger happy hormone hit our horses get for task achievement, the stronger the feeling of frustration when they don't find the answer - and even more so if they think they have given the right answer but we withhold the reward because we think it wasn't a good enough effort. This withholding of reward can move our horses out of frustration into aggression if we are working with a horse of that temperament type.
However we choose to reinforce wanted behaviours we want our horses to find enjoyment in finding answers. This is what creates willingness and cooperation. When our horses find learning fun they more willingly participant and accept bigger challenges as they develop.
The added bonus is that when our horses understand how to seek and find answers, introducing new challenges is easy and we don't have to go through the whole process again.
A lot of the horses I work with don't know how to find the answers and it makes introducing new asks harder because they get stressed not knowing how to respond. Teaching a horse to find the release of pressure both in a physical pressure and in the withholding of reward and guiding them through those emotions gives them the emotional range to deal with the different stressors that come up in training as well as moving them out of a flight brain into a learning brain.
This is why we use the Trainability Program with our horses.
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