How horses learn: natural behaviours by Sarah Lewis

As humans we put a lot of effort into teaching and training our horses so that they are suitable for our purposes. And since it has been established that we would have lost the last of the wild horses about 6,000 years ago if humans hadn't realised how useful they could be to us, it's just as well that they are very trainable animals.

However, the fact that they learn to do so many things to suit us can cause us to forget how alien our taught ways can be to their natural behaviours, and to be unappreciative of the degree of adaptation they show just to live with us. Over this series of six articles we are going to consider how horses learn and how we can use that knowledge to help our horses and ourselves. First of all though, we are going to consider how much we train horses before we even get to sit on them, and how much of that training is counter-instinctual to the horse.

A few interesting facts; it would seem that the natural behaviour of horses includes grazing/foraging for 16-18 hours a day at a slow but steady rate of movement and sleeping up to 30  minutes (in snatches) ever 24 hours. They range over 30 miles on average in 24 hours and they live in herds of stable membership. They have an established social order and so do not need to keep re-asserting themselves. They live in family groups and they form pair bonds that, under optimal conditions, last a life-time. They do not appear to function as fully mature until about 12 years old. They act like prey animals, fleeing from the first sign of danger and only fighting in extremis. They play both with each other and with objects a lot, and they reproduce.

No doubt you have read many of these facts before, but have you really considered what they mean in terms of how we keep our horses. We keep them in fields (they can't range). We stable them (they are on their own, they can't move and forage and they aren't sleeping!). We break up pair bonds (reducing their sense of safety). We deny them the opportunity to run away (increasing their sense of anxiety). We rarely keep them in family groups or small stable herds (reducing their sense of security and increasing their need to re-assert themselves).  This is only the beginning of the list of requirements we have that ask of our horses that they modify their natural behaviour to suit us.

When we think of our horse keeping routines like this, we can see that there is an awful lot of compromise on the part of the horse. It is unsurprising that sometimes they find the accommodation required to live with us difficult. An obvious example of this of course is loading and travelling. For a horse to be reluctant to go, on his own, into a small, dark space with no escape makes absolute sense; to do so is a behaviour that goes against every instinct of self preservation and survival. We need to appreciate that it is a miracle that any horse ever agrees to load, not a particular aberration of the part of any individual horse that he doesn't!

It is my hope that as we become more able to appreciate how much we ask the horse to accommodate to our needs, to the extent of (as he experiences it) putting his life at risk, we might be able to become more generous in our attributions of intent: that is, a little slower to say ' He's being disobedient', 'He's taking the mickey', ' He's getting the upper hand', ' He's getting away with it' etc. and so respond with authority and impatience, and a little more inclined to say or think 'He's scared', 'He's anxious about this', 'He's not sure it's a good idea to do this', or, 'He doesn't understand what's required' and so to respond with patience, encouragement and generosity.

Over the next few editions we will be exploring what we understand about how horses learn and considering how to use this knowledge to help our horses to live with us, training them with understanding, patience, encouragement and generosity.

Sarah Lewis is a British Psychological Society qualified organisational psychologist who is currently training with Heather Simpson of the Natural Animal Centre to become a qualified equine behaviour therapist.

From The Editor:-

Thank you Sarah for this very informative and interesting article.  We look forward to reading more articles from you.  If any members would like to write in and tell us about their training triumphs or experiences we will be happy to print them.