I’ve been working with horses for a long time. I started as a young boy and I’m now in my mid-sixties. I’ve worked with thousands of horses and either worked with or watched hundreds of other professionals. I’ve travelled extensively over the years and observed training in NZ, USA, and Europe. I’ve accumulated a vast amount of knowledge and experience in different training principles, and different methods. I’ve experimented with most approaches to horse training. I choose what I do carefully based on ethics, what I believe works best for a horse, and effectiveness. Everything I do is derived from research, experimentation, hard work, and critical thinking. Nothing I do is just because I read it or was told about it or watched a video. Everything has been researched and thought about from multiple angles, tested, and re-tested many times.
Having said all that, why do I prefer to the use of negative reinforcement techniques in most situations?
Let me say from the outset that this essay is not intended to bag other approaches and principles. So if you feel this is an attack on your preferred training paradigm and want to act offended and defensive, please go elsewhere. If you disagree with me, that's fine - state your case rationally and politely.
I have used other approaches to training with success. Mostly this is when I have worked with a horse that has been badly damaged by negative reinforcement techniques gone wrong. But I keep coming back to negative reinforcement approaches as my “go-to” in most cases. This essay is about why?
Before I proceed I want to say that there are many bad examples of negative reinforcement in the horse world and many horses have been traumatized by them. This essay is not talking about them. I’m purely discussing the principles and not the misuse of those principles.
Horses Know It
Every horse lives in a world where negative reinforcement is pervasive. From the first day of life to the last day of life a horse learns how to find safety and comfort through the principles of negative reinforcement. Almost every life lesson is learned via negative reinforcement. It’s part of a horse’s natural world. They understand it. They understand how to use pressure/feel and they understand how to yield to it. It’s their natural language for learning.
It’s A Spectrum
Pressure can be applied with an infinite range of feel. When we send a message to the horse’s brain the feel can range from “barely perceptible” to “terrifying”. In good training, it mostly ranges from “barely perceptible” to “uncomfortable enough to motivate a search”. Having this range of pressure available means we can adjust the pressure to best suit the horse to cause it to search for a new idea. If we do too little to stimulate a horse to search we can incrementally increase the pressure. And if we do too much, we can dial the pressure down to a more “search-friendly” level. Most other training paradigms are not as easily adjusted in this way.
Smoothness
Going hand-in-hand with the idea that we can adjust the amount of pressure is the fact that when using negative reinforcement we can also modify the abruptness or smoothness with which we apply the pressure. The energy of pressure we use is one important factor, but the speed and smoothness we apply that energy is an equally vital factor in bringing clarity to our pressure. If we apply pressure with snappiness it will have a different effect on getting a horse to search than if we apply it slowly and smoothly. We can adjust the smoothness to best suit the horse in the same way that we can adjust the energy to help with clarity and encourage a horse to search for a new idea.
Moment to Moment
Another important element that makes negative reinforcement such an effective tool in training is that we can adjust the pressure and feel in real-time. As a horse’s mind is searching for a response, we must make micro-adjustments to the pressure/feel we apply to bring clarity to our intention. Negative reinforcement allows us to alter the amount of energy and the smoothness in a fraction of a second as the horse’s thoughts are changing. It allows us to “hand hold” our horse and guide them closer and closer to the idea we want them to have. This is such an important part of what makes negative reinforcement so effective and leads to a better relationship. The pressure/feel is not static, but alive. We are in a back-and-forth conversation with a horse which (when done well) builds a closer and more comfortable relationship.
Releasing Pressure
One-half of using negative reinforcement effectively is the energy we apply to the pressure/feel. But equally important is the other half of releasing the pressure/feel. Negative reinforcement allows the removal of pressure with just as much refinement as it does for applying pressure. I can adjust the timing of the release, the energy of release, the amount I release (all or none or something in between), and the smoothness or abruptness of the release. All these factors can be adjusted moment to moment to add to the clarity and help a horse search and find comfort.
Driving vs Directing
Negative reinforcement gives me the option to use pressure/feel in a driving sense or a directing sense. Driving pressure is sending a horse away from its thought and directing pressure is sending a horse towards a thought. There is a video on my YouTube channel that discusses driving and directing pressure if you want a deeper understanding (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRKgW7TbUuw&t=9s). Both driving and directing are important tools in helping a horse make sense of our intent. We should understand the difference and how to achieve them. No matter what training principle you apply, all of them are either sending a horse away from its thought or towards its thought. In most cases, other training principles rely on sending a horse away from its thought and don’t give you much of an option. However, when using negative reinforcement we can utilize either of them for the best outcome.
Finally
Many people who criticize negative reinforcement have the belief that because it requires the application and then removal of pressure/feel, it, therefore, creates unnecessary stress and is unkind to horses. I believe the opposite is true. I believe, when done well, negative reinforcement evokes the least amount of stress and leads to comfort and clarity which is more difficult to achieve using other principles. Clarity is the most essential element in any method when assessing kindness or gentleness. Without it, no method is kind or gentle. Because of the factors, I have described above, I believe negative reinforcement principles offer the best pathway for providing clarity to a horse. In my opinion, this makes it at the top of the list of kind and gentle training principles.
Phil is using negative reinforcement to train his horse to walk backward from a feel on its tail