How Do Horses Learn?

This article is from the February 2024 Horse Deals magazine.

With Dr Kate Fenner - B. Equine Science (Hons). PhD Horse Behaviour and Training

Books like Black Beauty and The Silver Brumby, as charming as they are, have tended to lead us down the wrong track regarding how horses think. In those books, the horses think like humans; they plan and predict, just as we do, and they reason. The human brain is able to think in the past, present and future, but because the horse lacks a prefrontal cortex in the brain, its brain does not have an executive function; it cannot conceive or have goals, and they either comply or not when requested to do something. The horse lives in the moment; it doesn’t judge, criticise or manipulate, but it is a very capable learner and does have a very good memory.

Horse Deals asked Dr Fenner to explain how a horse thinks and learns.

“Horses are designed to have instinctive responses that keep them alive, and the main one is flight,” begins Dr Fenner. “In the wild, a horse needs to get up and go from a very young age to survive. Over 56 million years of evolution, the equine brain has evolved to survive in an environment that is full of potential predators. A horse that stops to consider the meaning of a movement in the grass is a horse that becomes a predator’s dinner. The horse needs an instantaneous response to a threat, and this is a response that, when the horse is domesticated, is not always useful and can be quite dangerous.

“Horses don’t consider or ponder the consequences of their action because they don’t have a prefrontal cortex to enable them to do so. This is why punishment doesn’t work very well with horses; because, unless your timing is perfect, it is hard for the horse to know what it is being punished for. For example, a horse that paws. We take that horse away from its mates in the stable and tie it up somewhere where it will now paw or where pawing doesn’t annoy us. That is negative punishment because we are taking away access to its mates. We could explain that action to a child. You were talking in class, so you were sent to the naughty corner for 20 minutes. The child can reason that if it does not want to be sent to the naughty chair, it will not talk in class. The horse can’t reason that it has been taken away from its mates because it was pawing. We have no guarantee that the horse is associating any of the behaviours with the punishment. Positive punishment, where we add an unwanted stimulus, might be easier for the horse to make the association, but again, only if your timing is perfect. For example, a horse stops at a jump, and you time the use of a whip perfectly so that the horse relates the stop with the application of the whip. But of course, we are heading into dangerous territory, and the use of punishment should always be avoided. Over the years, I have been training horses; it is the use of punishment as a training tool I’ve found to be one of the major causes of horses becoming dangerous to work with. An example is a horse that bites or nips. The horse bites, and instantly, the handler slaps it on the nose. What are we teaching the horse? Are we teaching it not to bite or to raise its head? The first thing a horse will do when you hit it in the face is raise its head. If you are holding on to the horse and facing it, it will also step back because it thinks it might get hit again, and if it continues to feel under threat, it will rear up simply because it has nowhere else to go. You might stop it from biting, but you are, in effect, teaching it to rear. Horses are very good pattern learners, so pretty soon, they will skip the biting phase and go from ‘thinking about biting’ straight to rearing, and we’ll be left thinking the horse is ‘unpredictable’ or dangerous for no reason at all. As always, the moral of the story is to be careful what you teach. I have encountered a number of people whose horses come back from the trainer/breaker with a rearing issue. ‘Did he bite or nip before he went?’ Yes! The horse no longer bites, but it ‘thinks’ bite and rears up. If your horse bites, try to drive it forward in response and then engage it with a lesson that requires it to find the correct response to your signals. I find a simple lesson such as giving to the bit or shoulder control very useful here because the horse is walking forward, and I can use that energy to teach something I want the horse to learn. This keeps me proactive rather than slipping down that reactive/punishment route.

“By domesticating horses we have removed them from very instinctive, responsive behaviours to actually engaging their brains with training. We want them to stop being just responsive to their environment, but rather be interactive with their environment. It is about engaging their brain; we want the horse to think because a horse that is thinking and engaging is not reactive and scared. A scared horse is reactive, and a reactive horse is dangerous. For instance, a shying horse is not engaged with us. We need to give it something to do other than shy in response to changes in the environment and get it to think about what we are asking it to do.
“On the whole, although this is changing, I think we start riding horses when they are too young. However, the younger we can start some groundwork with them, the better off we are, and if we can leave the riding part until later, the better off we are. When they are older, they are much more sensible, and if they have had that groundwork, the follow-on to riding them flows much more easily. But what we do generally is take a horse out of the paddock that has done virtually nothing as a two or three-year-old and send it to someone for six or eight weeks! It is like putting a child through kindergarten and university in the same year. The horse cannot learn everything it needs to know in that time and they cannot build the muscles required to carry a rider in that time either. That’s why I think it is so important that we start the groundwork early, teaching horses forward, back, right, left, faster, slower, and to lead correctly, etc, before we consider getting on the horse. This is something a novice horse owner can do; you don’t have to be a horse master, but you do need to learn from someone who specialises in this area. For example, in my Kandoo Equine course, we teach everything on the ground before we do it under saddle.

“We tend to make assumptions about a new horse. ‘It is a grand prix showjumper, so it knows more about jumping than I do. It will teach me.’ However, one of the things we must consider, regardless of age or experience, when we get a new horse is we need to create communication between us and the horse; you can’t buy that with the horse. Whatever the horse knew before, it doesn’t really know with you because your cues will be slightly different from its previous owner. You need to teach it those things; even simple things like the way you lead the horse is different. It might only take ten minutes, but the horse will stop responding in the same way if you are not asking in the same way. For example, you buy a dressage horse from a rider with long legs, and yours are short. The horse has learned to respond to leg aids that are going to be different from yours. You need to teach the horse your way of doing things, and when we start to think about it, it focuses our attention on what the horse is doing. The idea that the ‘horse will teach me’ is really incorrect, as the horse only knows as much as you know. You may not be able to get the grand prix showjumper over a small jump because you are not riding it in the way it is used to. We learn from every horse we train, and every horse we train learns from us. Even an Olympic dressage rider cannot get every horse they ride to do a flying change the minute they get on, despite the fact that it has just been doing them with its usual rider. The rider is good, and the horse is good; they are just speaking slightly different dialects. When we get a new horse, we need to treat it as a blank canvas so the horse starts to understand the way we do things.
“How intelligent a horse seems or how much it understands depends on its environment. We know the horse can’t conceptualise. As a result, it might be fine with a hose lying on the ground, but it is a totally different thing when it is coiled neatly. When the horse shies at the coil, we are inclined to think, what’s wrong? It’s just the hose. So, can we measure horse’s intelligence? In 2016, I did a study on a group of horses and assessed how quickly they learned a lesson. The lesson was backing up off one rein through a corridor using only the negative reinforcement (pressure-release) of rein tension. I found that the horses that were a little emotional, as assessed by heart rate and heart rate variability, learned faster, and I think that goes back to the horses that are more engaged. A confident horse is likely to be curious, mostly because it’s not scared and, therefore, not in a hurry to leave the situation. Good trainers create confident horses because they give the horse a safe place to be by engaging it and lifting its emotional level just a small amount by making things interesting and being confident themselves. That creates a horse that is willing to trial answers.

“A horse’s mental development depends on its environment and how we relate to and train it. Do we want to be trainers that reward the good or punish/correct the bad? By focusing our training on reinforcement, we can remain proactive and avoid the very reactive punishment-based methods.

Remember, positive reinforcement is not only the use of food; it can be the addition of anything the horse wants, such as company, a scratch on the wither or a rub behind the ear. Also, we really never just use negative reinforcement (pressure release) on its own. We almost always use a combination of positive and negative reinforcement together, known as combined reinforcement. Imagine the situation where you signal the horse to go from walk to trot when riding. You might have a verbal signal or put your leg on the horse (pressure) and then release the leg or stop the verbal signal when the horse trots (release). Then you might scratch the horse on the wither (reward/positive reinforcement). The sequence becomes pressure-release-reward, also known as combined reinforcement.

“How much can a horse learn? A Grand Prix dressage horse seems to know a lot, but really, it is a matter of building up its musculature in layers along with movements. Building strength and information is a layering process. Horses can look very clever, like Clever Hans in Germany at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. But they are responding to signals, in Hans’ case, very slight signals, and to do that, they have to be confident in their trainer and environment.

“When we look at how horses have been portrayed in films, such as Black Beauty, we can see they have been given human emotions and motivations. However, this type of anthropomorphism is dangerous because it leads us to make assumptions about what the horse is thinking. We might think the horse is in a bad mood because it does not want to go to the show or doesn’t like the farrier. However, these are negative emotions, and what happens if we start putting thoughts into the horse’s head? If we do that, we usually react to those thoughts. We need to be careful about making assumptions about what the horse thinks because it is likely to make us very reactive. Imagine how differently you might react to a horse that will not load onto the float if you felt that a) it was being difficult because it didn’t want to go to the show, or b) it was frightened because the last time it was on the float, it was injured. In the second scenario, we would take the time to reassure the horse and break the lesson down to allow the horse to load with confidence. In the first scenario, we might get upset with the horse and try to bully it onto the float.

“Horses live in the moment, and they do not judge, criticise or manipulate; we should be grateful for that. Temperament affects trainability, and both are an indicator of how well they have been taught.”

Article: Anna Sharpley.

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