Overcoming your Horses Fears with Desensitisation

Read Complimentary Blog: https://www.brighthound.ie/blog/overcomingfears/

 Horses are naturally wary creatures. As prey animals, their survival instincts are finely tuned to detect and react to potential threats. 

📧barbara.j.hardman@brighthorse.ie

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:17

Happy Monday, everyone. It might not be Monday when you're listening to this, but it is Monday today. And today I am going to well, first of all, I'm going to turn on this light because it's a bit dark in here, it makes fabulous fucking audio. Um, about overcoming fears with a process known as desensitization. Now, the reason I hesitated there was because you will have heard of it as desensitization. We use the word desensitization interchangeably with a number of different techniques that aren't always desensitization. Sometimes, and here's the word vomit, sometimes they are systematic desensitization, sometimes it's counter-conditioning, sometimes it's a form of habituation, uh, sometimes it's a form of classical conditioning, uh, sometimes it's a bit of operate conditioning and counterconditioning and systematic desensitization all thrown into the mix. Sometimes it's just out and out flooding, um, and sometimes the horse is just utterly trigger-stacked. So there's quite a lot in there, and understanding which one you're actually seeing and how to actually apply a correct method for the case and the horse that you have in front of you can be really, really tricky because number one, what we all universally understand about desensitization is we're usually using it to overcome fear or give our horse confidence to perform a behavior in a certain situation or be able to work with us while we do something. Um, and you know, you see this a lot on YouTube and Instagram with people doing videos where there's flappy flags. I have another blog on flags. Uh, I won't get into it here, but generally like bits of plastic that they tend to be scared of, bunting, various obstacles that are novel or new, walking over tarp, a lot of these things we use as desensitization. Now, whether we're actually using desensitization correctly, um, in that set if that's what it's called, but we tend to use it as an all-encompassing term just to explain that. So, for the sake of this podcast, I'm gonna keep it at desensitization just to help bridge the gap. And if there is any differences that I think are important to highlight, then I will. But ultimately, why do we want horses to overcome fears? Um, and it comes down to the fact that like ultimately a horse is a very naturally wary creature, and this ultimately comes from the fact that they're a prey animal. Simple as, they get eaten. Their survival instincts are super tuned to detect and instantly react to a potential threat. And frankly, they were a damn sight better at than us. Like, absolutely. They can hear better than us, they can see better than us, they can smell better than us, and they are hardwired to react to a potential threat. Now, buoy for us, that means that we can potentially get hit in the crossline if they decide to drop the shoulder and spin, like whether we're on the ground or in the saddle. And thanks to the way the horse's brain works, we suffer from things like one-trial learning, which we'll get into, and things can stick around for a very long time. Because we can get quite scared with these high levels of reactivity, like reactions and reactivities, we often kind of overlook what's actually happening for the horse when they do drop the shoulder and spin at what looks to just be a shadow. From our perspective, it feels dramatic and unnecessary. And we tend to sort of assign blame with phrases, and this is self-talk, and we say it out loud. I hear it all the time, I'm sure you do too, where we go, oh, that's just a person, you've seen them a million times, oh, it's just that corner, and that's self-talk, and we're saying it out loud because we can't we understand the processes that are happening, but not necessarily for the horse. For the horse, it's a response that is genuinely an honest reflection of their current emotional state, their current ethological state, and a reflection of their evolutionary wiring. It's super important to understand that it is an innate reaction, they can't really control it the same way, that we can be scared of something and get a start and rationalise it. They don't have that capacity the same way. It was crucial for their wild ancestors, and that translates into fear and avoidance of new objects and situations in the life that they live with us now. Um, in other words, I need to stay away from the scary thing because it might eat me. So in this blog, I want to explore some of the concepts of desensitization, and as I said before, we'll also talk about counterconditioning and systematic desensitization. I'm just going to use desensitization as a broad term. And ultimately, this technique builds on the principles of learning theory, which I covered in my previous blog and blogcast Understanding How Horses Learn. So if you want to go ahead and listen to that afterwards or before, it's absolutely fine. You should be able to cover, you should be able to get the whole idea. Um, and the blog covers a bit more as well for both of them. Ultimately, the payoff about understanding how to do this correctly isn't just fewer spooks, but it's a horse who can somewhat think about the situation. Um now I say that because they don't have the same treptibly treptibately, treptid, oh that's a word, um, because they can't think about things and reflect on them the same way that we do. However, we can create different emotional states and psychological understanding of a particular novel object or an unusual situation that will help the horse just take a beat and go, hmm, is this going to be as scary as I previously thought it was? And ultimately, this makes riding safer, handling safer, and more enjoyable. I don't know about you, but I don't want to be scared that my horse is just gonna go and drop the shoulder and be gone. Um, I want to have a rewarding relationship with them. So I just want to take a few minutes to talk about horses as a prey animal and how this instinct shapes behaviour. So we're gonna talk about the horse's ancestor because it is their ancestor. The modern horse was domesticated by us, but their ancestors lived in open grasslands, they their survival depended on the ability to detect and escape predators quickly. Yes, we domesticated these ancestors and we selectively bred them into the horses we see today, but even with the selective breeding that may have changed the size and appearance of certain horses, you know, heavy horses, warm bloods, you know, it's in athletic breeds, you know, we have lots of different shapes and sizes and colours, the evolutionary roots of their ancestors is still a preanimal. And we've actually kind of done ourselves dirty in many ways because for some horses we have bred them to be faster and faster and faster and have a better athletic capability. Now, what's important to understand is this comes down to genetics and alleles and the actual genetic components of it. The behavior of spookiness and reactivity shares an allele with running fast. So if you breed a horse to run fast, the chances are they're going to be on higher alert because they share that allele. It has other consequences across the board, and we see that throughout genes. So if we have a horse that we have trained to have a better athletic capability, and it's it's a mistake to think, oh, she's talking about thoroughbreds. I'm not, I'm talking about all of them, because all of them have been trained to have a better athletic capability. It doesn't matter if it's a cold blood, warm blood, or hot blood, you know, because a carriage-driving horse or a horse that was designed to pull, they have a greater athletic capability than their ancestors in that they have better strength training and to pull. So why would you need to have that growth? Like, what allele do you think would share with great greater strength? Like, so there's a huge genetic component, and the way we have selectively bred them, we cannot escape the fact that they are prey animal and all of their biology has been shaped into noticing changes to their environment and react instantly. Because if they didn't react instantly, even if it seems like just spooking out a shadow, that might be it. That might be you're eaten and you're gone, and that and your genetics aren't going to get passed on. So it is really hardwired. We know that horses will particularly shy at new and unfamiliar objects, which can trigger a flight response, um, because ultimately they're going, is it gonna eat me? And if they can't run away or create an avoidance behaviour, then it's then it's the fight or flight, uh fight, flight or fight, because it they have to protect themselves as as much as possible. Our role as train trainers, caregivers, and anyone who has a role in supporting horses, whether that's vets or behaviourists across the board, is to guide them to through those fears and help them see that not everything is a threat, because that is the best way to keep us safe. So I know I talked a little bit about alleles and genes and all that sort of stuff. These are kind of the three big heavy hitters, really, from an evolutionary history that influences their behaviour and learning today. This is really all we we kind of need to take home when it comes to horses. You don't have to go and look up alleles, I promise. So they're highly reactive to threats. Understandable. Horses are hardwired to flee from danger. The flight response can be triggered by a new or sudden stimulus, which makes training a delicate balance of managing that fear, but also fostering trust by exposing to them things and training in it in a safe manner. Because ultimately, we can't just not have them, we can't wrap them in bullet wrap. We need to be able to expose them to a low level of stressors in order to teach them to be able to cope with those stressors, but we need to do it in a compassionate and ethical way, and I say that because also exposing them in a flooding way is also unethical for the people involved in the handling, and that's something we don't discuss. They are prone to one trial learning, buoy for us. Um, I actually don't know what buoy for us means. I've just been saying it like recently, so who knows? I feel like it's an American word. Oh, message me, tell me. Um, so one trial learning means that a single negative experience can condition a horse to fear that stimulus sometimes permanently. Okay, this is where they don't have the ability to reflect the same way as us. So if a horse sticks their head in a bucket and then lifts up their head and hits their head on something, they may create an instant fearful reaction to that bucket that can stick around for their whole lives. Because it's really important that that fearful or that response sticks about because it could be something dangerous. It's rapidly learnt, and although it helps them in the wild, it creates training issues for us, as you can imagine. Even if we do counterconditioning or systematic desensitization to try and extinguish these fears, it can take a very long time, it can stick around for a very long time, and we may not fully eliminate it. It may be a case that we have to accept some of those fears with our horse and use tools to manage it safely. You know, it doesn't necessarily mean we can rewrite it. They are super aware of their environment, as I said earlier, they have better sight, smell, and hearing than we do. So not only does it seem like they're more aware of everything, it's because the the sound is the sound, the sight, the smell is turned up to a thousand in comparison to what we hear. They will scan the environment for potential threats because, again, that's important. Horses on their own, you know, are more likely to be hyper-vigilant, horses in a more stressful situation, they are herd animal, they need certain objects. Visual horizons mean they can have to scan a little bit more, so big open fields. You know, we go, oh, the blood is up because we're in a big open field, because they have to scan that environment a lot more. There's way more they have to look for, and this hyper-vigilance and this heightened sort of you know, constantly scanning can make it really difficult to concentrate on a training task if we're setting the environment up in a way that is not conducive for training, you know. So if we take those three things, you know, how we can set ourselves up for success when we're doing something new with our horses is highly reactive to new threats. So something that's really novel, okay? Say we want to introduce our horse to something completely new for the first time. Well, we want to do it slowly and carefully and ensure that we don't create a one-trial negative experience because that'll stick around for a long time. And we also want to do an environment that they're comfortable with. Now, this is where I talk about person task environment. Um, so the person that's working with that horse, you want them to be familiar, to have positive associations with them and is clear and consistent. The environment, you want to be in an environment that they are calm and collected and are comfortable in, and then you can introduce a novel task because you've got the bedrock of the person and the environment to help learning take place. If instead you change all three of those things, it is going to be damn hard for you to predict how the horse is going to react in that situation and potentially could cause more issues because we're setting them up for failure. We want as close as possible for our horses to have errorless learning. And this basically means that they will are guaranteed to get the right answer, particularly the very first time, you know, and that's sort of setting them up for success. Like in dog training, we call it errorless learning, but ultimately it's a way of going like they will pick the right answer straight from the get-go, because then it takes out the guesswork, reduces the stress and frustration, and then you can always make it more complicated as you go along. But that is just it's just so important. And I, you know, I do often see this like people go, Oh, god, I really want to, you know, change the experience for them. So um, you know, I want to go and do these new jumps, and I'm also gonna go away from the farm, I'm gonna go to you know a different yard, and uh there's gonna be different people and sights and sounds everywhere, and we're just completely overloading the horse. And if we accidentally create a negative experience, it's gonna be so much harder to undo that. So, what is desensitization and counterconditioning and all that good stuff? Before you start, I think it's really important that there are differences between the different types: desensitization, counterconditioning, and systematic desensitization. And there are strengths and weaknesses in using one or the other in a particular case, and it's important to use the correct one depending on the horse that you're working with or the situation. But ultimately, in a nutshell, desensitization involves systematically exposing a horse to a potentially frightening stimulus in a small manageable increment. Now, in order for desensitization to work correctly, we want to make sure that the horse has no reaction. Now that is nearly impossible because we don't know what we don't know, and horses are really good at hiding emotional responses. They're very subtle, and we could accidentally not be using desensitization, and we they could actually be having a small reaction, and then we trip into trigger stacking. Um and there's a graph below about trigger stacking in the blog. I say in the below, like you're listening to this, but it's in the blog and it just explains what that is. So we can accidentally trip into that. So what is nearly better is is if we're using systematic desensitization or counterconditioning, and basically what that does is it exposes them in a small way, but then it also takes the pressure off them and then replaces it with a positive emotional state. So that way we we are less likely to run the risk of accidentally trigger stacking our horse. It can still happen, but what we want to do is try and find that sweet spot, that perfect balance where your horse is slightly going, oh, what's that, without being too overwhelmed. And again, have a look at trigger stacking there and the difference between flooding um on the blog. There's there's a couple of infographs there. We don't want to push them to when they panic or have a reaction. If they've had a reaction, we've gone wrong somewhere, and we need to like analyse that, have a look at it, and take a smaller step. Just remember what we're trying to do is give them small, confident steps towards overcoming their fear. So if we end up creating a reaction, we've gone too far, and that one trial learner, they may learn that that's the best way to escape. And what we want to do is not let that happen because that can stick around for a very long time. So we use this a lot with helping horses with fear of clippers or tarps or just helping build resilience so they can cope better about surprises in general, and this is called generalization. When we maybe desensitise and do systematic desensitization on one thing, it can help create tools to support in other areas, but it also helps them kind of pause, as I say, they can't reflect, but they might pause before something scary happens, and you can insert a tool to be able to get them back. And I think this is really really critical. So I'm gonna give you a little example of a sort of a step-by-step process of what systematic desensitization might look like. Um, so we've got a scary object that we know our horse is probably not gonna be too keen about, and what we want to do is calmly walk towards the object. What we want to do is pay close attention to the horse's body language. As soon as we see that kind of hesitance or resistance, so they may be sort of sticky, like Alex got sticky on lead rope, or we get a higher head carriage, we've got a little bit more hyper-vigilance, that is our stopping point, okay? And what we want to do is we want to make a good decision for them there in that moment in time, and the good decision for them is to move away, okay? And I know this seems counterintuitive, but trust me, it'll make a massive difference because you asking them to take a step forward in that moment in time, they're sticky. You're gonna have to apply a lot more negative reinforcement, so a lot more force on the lead rope to get them to step forward. You risk putting them over threshold, and they're gonna have a diminished capacity to learn. So, what you want to do instead, so when you get that sticky point, you ask for a step backwards. You ask for a gentle cue on the rainback, step backwards. The minute they're able to take a step backwards, it releases the pressure from the scary object, so they're further away from it, which is what they wanted. They were able to listen to you asking them to do it, which means they go, Okay, my human made a good choice for me because I wanted to move away. And then you very clearly go, Yes, good boy, you give them a big scratch or you give them a food reward. This is a combinate like a combined approach. You've got the pressure of the object, pressure to step away, removal of the pressure from stepping away, and reinforcing the behavior of moving away. So they get to say no, and you're giving them a treat for saying no or scratch. And by doing so, you're also solidifying the learning and creating a positive experience with the scary thing. There's a combination of different things happening, but ultimately what we're doing is moving towards and away, and we repeat it three times, stopping at that sticky point, asking to step back, and just try and get your timing right where you're releasing any pressure from the reins. As soon as the horse responds, we're saying, Yes, wonderful, you're amazing, give that marker, give a reward. You can then extend it past the sticky point, build in duration, build in distance, the three D. So distance, duration, and distraction. We only want to build one thing at a time so that we're slowly building up over time. The reason it's important as well to do this approach is you think about it, you're gonna fight a losing battle if you just keep asking for forward. And the horse, all the horse has to do is turn, spin, and get away. And they did that by failing to listen to your ask. You asked them to step forward, they didn't respond to that, they turned and they left the scary object, which means on their terms, they escape from it. This totally knocks trust because it's basically, well, I'm not gonna listen to my my owner. Why would I listen to them? You know, because they asked me to go towards it and it was too scary. I got away from it by not listening to them, and then that sticks about a long time. Now I'm kind of half anthemorphosizing here. Some of these terms I don't particularly like, but you know, to use in that context, but I just find it's a little bit easier to understand. Whereas it we want to be a reliable leader for them, see that they're a little bit scared and go, okay, chicken, I see it, you know, totally 100%. Can you take a step backwards and move away from them? And they go, Oh yes, that's what I'd really like to do. Yeah, absolutely. You know, and then they were able to listen to the ask that we gave them, we're able to reward it, and then they're going, Oh, you know, I can listen to my human, I can listen to my owner because they make good decisions for me and create positive associations, not only with you asking them to do something, but also with the scary object. Before you obviously try this at home, legal caveat, please don't do this without you know experienced behaviors, trainer, so on so forth, you know, to ensure that everybody is safe and that is the right protocol for your horse. I gave it as an example. It is not a training plan without it being assessed. Safety, 100 so important, always prioritize safety. You need to start with a low intensity version of the stimulus, whatever it looks like, whatever the scary object is or sound, super low. So your clippers, if it was clippers, you would start by creating as much distance away from the horse as possible and turning them on for a short period of time, so distance duration, okay, and then turning them off again, and then returning to your horse to reward them, and you will reduce that over time. And you would not be on top of the horse turning on the clippers, sticking it by their ear, okay? That is don't do that. You know, so we need to be able to create distance to keep everybody safe and be prepared to stop what you're doing if the horse shows signs of stress. Be consistent, so we need to be consistent in everything and the cues that we give our horses so that they understand this is what's expected of me, this is what my human wants, and these are my expectations when I do the Correct behavior. For desensitization, it cannot just be that the pressure goes away because we're not replacing it with anything else. The emotional fallout of that scary stimulus is still the same thing. And that can be a massive problem. We need to replace it. Just doing desensitization on its own without pairing it with something positive, you're going to get there a lot slower, and the chances are it won't be as effective in learning. It's really important that every horse to understand every horse is an individual. They all have unique sensitivities, they all have different learning speeds, and you want a tailored approach to your horse. So, you know, look it there isn't, although it's a simple formula that I've kind of described in this blogcast, it is important to understand that we go at the speed that the animal dictates to us, not our own time schedules. And by understanding that, applying the principles of learning theory, it gives us the abilities as owners and trainers to transform their fear into confidence and give us tools to be able to support them in different situations. And if you go on to my blog, the link is in the description, there's a list of a couple of behaviors to look out for when you're doing this, so you can learn to have a look for them, as well as some descriptions on the difference between flooding, desensitization, trigger stacking, and so on and so forth to help set you up for success. I'm a big believer in using systematic desensitization to support our horses and also build resilience and also to help create you as the reliable leader for your horse, that you become a trusted source. So when they face new challenges in their life, they can look for you and feel confident that you will make the right decision. And long term, this will set you and your horse up for better successes. Thanks so much for listening and happy Monday.