29/11/2023
Horses whisper before they yell, it is up to us to hear the whispers before they yell. This post makes good points about being aware of the cues your horse is giving and how to respond. When we know better, we need to do better.
What triggered this post is an earlier post of mine about certain R+ trainers promoting the idea that it's great if their horse walks away in a training session. I can tell you, any experienced quality R+ trainer I've learnt from, has never said to me that this is ok.
It's really not (for the horse), and as I've said in my previous posts, you are potentially in Negative Reinforcement territory and worse, shrugging our shoulders and saying that’s ok, doesn’t encourage us to train better and find answers to prevent them leaving.
I needed a good example video and I've been seeing a lot of videos lately of other trainers doing this thing that I want to talk about, but obviously I can't use their video. But then I came across one of my own videos that is close to what I want to use as an example of what I'm talking about. To set the scene, I've seen many trainers lately doing this exact thing, from a tiger trainer who kept giving the cue while the tiger snarled in her face and when the tiger finally did the behaviour, she then asked for an even more challenging behaviour. To a trainer whose horse gave a calming signal after the cue and they cued the behaviour again and the horse walked away. To a very big name horse trainer, who is very new to R+ training, whose horse repeatedly walks away during sessions and that trainer, much like the tiger trainer, cues more challenging behaviours, instead of easier behaviours, which makes the horse more likely to walk away in the future.
For me personally, walking away is not ok or what I want to see in my training sessions as a R+ trainer, it means I made a mistake. Accepting it’s ok doesn’t motivate me to train better and make it a better experience for the learner. It’s strange that a culture can be developed for the wrong reasons. If a professional coach trains so poorly that their horse leaves or finds the grass on the edge of the arena or path more interesting and reinforcing than what they are offering, look for a better trainer/coach. We want to train to make things better for our animals and accepting our training as so unpleasant that we cause our learner to leave, is not something we should celebrate or aspire to doing.
To quote Eileen Anderson:
"Building escape behavior into a protocol can provide a disincentive to the human to make the process as pleasant for the dog as possible. Rather than working harder to create a situation where the dog doesn’t want to leave, the trainer can focus on saying that the dog is “empowered” by the ability to leave. On the contrary, some trainers, including myself, consider a dog repeatedly leaving as evidence that we have not worked hard enough at making the experience pleasant. It’s a failure, not a goal. It means we didn’t set up our antecedents and graduated exposures well enough."
You can read my previous post about this subject here
https://www.whisperinghorse.com.au/clicker-training-mythbusting-they-can-just-walk-away/
Therefore I thought it might be interesting to do a post to try to address this issue. In particular, what people are doing or not doing, when a horse doesn’t respond to a cue and is either walking away in a training session, or seeming disinterested or disengaged or frustrated or doing some other behaviour or just grazing.
There are quite a few causes and strategies, it’s not straightforward or black and white, but I thought perhaps addressing one of the main antidotes to these problems might be helpful.
The thing I’d like to focus on specifically, is what to do when your horse doesn’t respond to a cue for a known behaviour, trained with Positive Reinforcement and/or appears disinterested in the training or walks away.
I’d like to preface this discussion by saying that I understand there is a lot of old mindset to undo and a lot of old muscle memory to unlearn. This takes work and it takes determined focus and self awareness and I would go so far as to say that these two attributes are some of the most important ones to develop, to be a good trainer. What that means is that in our old ways of doing things, when we gave an (aversive) cue, we expected compliance and if we didn’t get it, we asked again and again and started to insist and to escalate. So it can be challenging to give a R+ trained cue once and if it’s not responded to straight away and with alacrity, instead of asking again and again, we need to pause and question why a horse would not want to do an appetitively trained cue. We want to avoid continuing to ask and worse, ignore any body language that shouts that they are really not comfortable with the situation (which is what I’ve been observing in videos I’ve watched).
In practical terms, this means that we may think we have trained a behaviour well and think we’ve put it on a solid cue and proofed it, but what the horse is telling us is that we haven’t. OR that there is something else happening for that horse, that overrides the appetitive cue we are giving and that most likely will be something they are finding aversive and is interfering with their ability to do the R+ trained behaviour. It could also be that something else is more reinforcing to the horse and has a stronger R+ history, like the bits of grass around the edge of the arena. Lack of generosity, low Rate of Reinforcement (RoR), not reinforcing small enough approximations or asking for a lot of behaviour or even a chain of behaviours for little positive reinforcement, without building up enough of a R+ history on all the behaviours, can all contribute. You are always working within a number of different laws in relation to learning, Matching Law in particular can often trip you up, if your RoR is too low.
We need to be able to think on our feet. It’s all a learning process and we need to be kind to ourselves and accept when we’ve made a mistake and try doubly hard next time. This is also what I love about R+ training, because we develop so many amazing skills and really, they become super powers. Self awareness is key!
Ok, what to do when our horse doesn’t do a cued behaviour that was trained with R+ or seems disinterested or walks away or ignores us?
There’s a couple of options in the moment:
- Cue an easier well liked behaviour (with a strong R+ history) as soon as you realise
- Give free food anyway and then cue an easier well liked behaviour
- Give free food and give the horse an end of session signal, end of session food and give them a break
- Use a Least Reinforcing Scenario (LRS)
- Give the cue again and if nothing happens, go back to the top of this list
What not to do:
- Give the cue repeatedly
- Cue another behaviour of similar difficulty or challenge
- Withhold food for non-response
- Stop training or give the horse a break without giving the end of session signal and food
- Use any kind of sound or movement that indicates the horse was “wrong”
- Use Punishment (“correction”) as a Consequence.
This list is not exhaustive, but gives you some clues as to the way you want to head.
I’ll also add this excellent and comprehensive blog about training behaviours, putting them on cue, Stimulus Control and more. All these things should be trained and in place before we give a cue and expect the behaviour to be performed. Sometimes people think that for example hoof lifting is just about telling the horse to lift their hoof and then you put it on a cue and they’re done. All behaviours need much more than that to be well trained and also safe and in doing so, you build that R+ history which makes the behaviour well liked, fluent and more likely to be performed, more than walking away!
You can read the blog here:-
https://www.clickertraining.com/node/2279
What I’d like to focus on is the LRS, as there is lots of great information out there about it and it’s an extremely useful tool for your R+ force free tool box. Good trainers with an errorless mindset often use it instinctively, I know I do and it’s very useful to keep the horse engaged and feeling successful.
For a great explanation and discussion of the LRS, I’ll put a link to Jose at Train Me Please’s video, that explains what it is. It’s also a very interesting video about how training has evolved over time and the reason for the LRS. There is some focus on the use of the LRS to address problematic or unwanted behaviour, but my main focus and the way I learnt to use it from Ken Ramirez, was as a technique for trainers, when a cue was missed for whatever reason. There’s also some problem solving covered in the video as well.
You can watch it here:-
https://youtu.be/QcYcgIFVgeM
I want to highlight that the amount of time for your LRS can vary depending on the species and the individual learner. Ken Ramirez talks about a micro pause and if you watch him train, sometimes the pause is so small as to be nearly imperceptible. This is because he trains so fast and his animals respond fast, therefore a 3-4 second pause would be way too long. Similarly with horses, a pause that long for many horses is just too long and borders on withholding food. We also want to avoid them inserting any other behaviour in the pause, apart from what should be their default Calm Attentive Behaviour (CAB) or what I like to call ‘standing still and doing nothing’. Obviously this needs to be an established behaviour first, with a strong R+ history already, so that it becomes the horse’s default behaviour, when in doubt and we instigate the LRS.
I’ll add some further links about the LRS that I really enjoyed listening to and got a lot out of, if you want to dive a little deeper into the LRS.
The one mentioned in Jose’s video I found super fascinating. That was the podcast by Zoo Logic, featuring Grey Stafford, who chats with Chuck Tompkins and Ted Turner, who were some of the early R+ trainers who helped develop the LRS. Again, some interesting insights into the early days of R+ and how women and their softer science based R+ approach influenced the industry a great deal in the early days.
You can find that here:-
https://zoologic.libsyn.com/the-least-reinforcing-scenario
The other super interesting discussion about the LRS was from Ken Ramirez, Susan Friedman and Steve Martin at Live From The Ranch. The LRS discussion starts at 20 minutes and resumes at 1 hour and 16 minutes, or like me, I found the whole thing fascinating and listened to it all!!
You can hear that here:-
https://theranch.clickertraining.com/live-episode-38/
Finally, I’ll show you a video where an LRS would be a good option to use, to give you a good visual. It’s not essential to use an LRS, but it can be a helpful tool. Being generous, understanding how to raise your RoR and lower your criteria when you don’t get the behaviour you expected, are important to remember as well. Knowing your learner is really important too. In this video, I have a very good idea why Seymour didn’t lift his back hooves, it had to do with what we had just been doing prior and then I unexpectedly tried to film voluntary hoof lifts after I’d just been teaching him to keep eating while I did something with his legs and hooves. But it’s a good example where I could have used an LRS to return to the voluntary hoof lifting behaviour easier and smoother and made it clearer for Seymour.
You can watch that here:-
https://youtu.be/tLkdfscZimo
