Chicken and egg, cause and effect or the other way round.
Give a dog all the privileges of a pack leader, an alfa dog, and it will assume it ís the top dog.
Arrange your home rules so the dog has none of the privileges of the top dog and it will be convinced it is not. The simplest way to nip dominancy conflicts in the bud.

Just try and aim truly aggressive body language and gestures at your partner during 10 minutes. Try to mean it. Please inform him/her beforehand.
Compare this to 10 minutes of being the sweetest lovely partner you can imagine. Although acted the effect on the level of stress and your partner’s wellbeing is surprisingly high. If possible, you can do this test with a heart rate meter the result will be clear.

What has all of this to do with horses?
The 'arched neck threat' and 'prancing' are both serious threats horses display just one step away from actually fighting. In dressage this type of body display is called 'curved neck' and 'passage'. You see the conflict with ‘being relaxed'?!

A horse is a social animal that uses body language as primary means of communication. This body language-speaker is asked to display its most aggressive postures and is put under stress by the painful bit that is pulled by tight reins. Aggressive body language, pain, closed doors; STRESS!
Let this settle in your mind and consider how much physical effort 10 minutes performing figures at a moderate pace on a perfect arena floor is for a well trained horse. It’s not worth mentioning, is it?! Then why look all these horses leaving the dressage ring as if they are melting?
If this still does not ring a bell: just use a heart rate meter.

Stress in horses is tricky; it is very close to fear and a part of the survival mode. A horse that is frightened is not frightened for the dentist but fears to be eaten, it fears for its survival.
A stressed horse reacts with primary responses to all stimuli.
A stressed horse thus is not an attentive pupil; it is not open to learning experiences. A mentally relaxed horse is. You can not expect a pressured horse to have an open mind; it needs to be mentally relaxed.

In my perception this model is not compatible with the interests of the horse, even in conflict with my ethical views on riding horseback.
Rewarding a horse is a lot more fun to do, a horse that enjoys working for these rewards a joy to ride and this is apart from the simple contra-productivity of trying to pressure and bully a horse, and of constantly fearing control problems.
It thus completely baffles me why the vast majority of riders seem to prefer to ride all tended up with blisters on their hands. Why would anyone want to do this to his horse and to himself?

The survival of the fittest does not apply to horse riding, because that would be the horse.
Rarey laid it down as one of his three principles; the horse should never realise how 'fit' it is relative to you.
It is thus logical not to base the learning process on the brutish use of force. You are far cleverer; use your brain, do not let it come down to a battle of physical power. You might very well loose that and teach the horse it can bully yoú whereas it can never win a battle of minds.
Think; plan before you start something and explore 'what if'. Naturally you will encounter unexpected situations, and you will need to improvise on the spot. A toolbox filled with basic techniques and general understanding is essential to be able to make instant alternative use of the tools.

How do horses learn?
Horses learn in the same way dogs do, or cats, or we do in several differing ways.
The most common are;
- classic conditioning (unconscious association)
- operand conditioning (trial and error)
- habituation (routine)
- complex learning (making connections)
- latent
- imprinting
- imitation

These all have in common that the result of an action determines what the horse learns.
The action, the behaviour, can be a success, thus be reinforced, rewarded, represented by the letter R.
The behaviour can also have a negative effect, be discouraged, punished, P.

The qualifications positive and negative are scientifically interpreted as adding and removing.
Positive rewarding, positive reinforcement, R+, is the adding of something pleasant as a result of the action. Giving the horse a treat for moving aside when asked is an example.
Negative rewarding, negative reinforcement, R-, is the removal of something unpleasant as a result of the behaviour. This is the 'moving from pressure'; the removal of pressure when moving aside.

Positive punishment, P+, is adding something unpleasant to discourage unwanted behaviour. An example is shooing your horse away when it enters your space.
Negative punishment, P-, is removing something pleasant to discourage: stopping with scratching your horse in the manes when it gets pushy.

The last learning experience is extinction; the not having any result.
You can try to discourage a horse that is attempting to draw attention by pawing but you can also ignore it. The horse may very well come to the conclusion it is of no use and stop it.

It is common sense that the mountains are high because the valleys are deep and vice versa. If you raise one bucket and lower the other the water will flow faster from higher into the lower than when you just raise the one or lower the other; it is the difference that counts.
The same thing goes for pleasant and unpleasant experiences.
Also every next reward has a diminishing value.
I love lasagne. Also two following days, but after a week even a nice lasagne becomes a discouragement.
The receiver determines; my taste determines lasagne is a treat and Brussels sprouts are not.
How much I enjoy eating the lasagne is influenced by how long I have not eaten it, by how much I had to do to earn it and even by if I ate Brussels sprouts the day before.

Thus all the learning experiences are determined by the receiver, the pupil, the horse. A food reward can be something to really get excited about by the one horse and can leave the next horse indifferent.
It gets more complicated if your horse experiences cuddling as an unwanted intimacy than stopping that is not P- but R-, not the removal of something pleasant but the removal of something unpleasant. You might be encouraging the wrong behaviour without realising it.
Make sure you know your horse in order to be able to encourage or discourage it.

Positive discouragement, positive punishment, discouragement by adding something unpleasant, P+, has several drawbacks.
First of all it is not ethically acceptable.
However there are practical reasons too.
- By punishing for the unwanted behaviour the pupil does not automatically understand what is wanted
Punishing unwanted behaviour does not produce the wanted behaviour.
- Anticipating a punishment or worse; fearing pain, does not encourage a horse. It does not lead to motivation to do display the wanted behaviour. It also dulls the senses, makes less perceptive, less responsive.
- Especially in the horse anticipating something unpleasant leads to stress, this triggers the survival mode and blocks the learning process.
A horse frightened by the pain induced by the bit resulting from pulled reins by the fright response of the rider and spurred forwards by the squeezing legs will most definitely go into survival mode. All it needs for a flat out flight is a frightened scream by the rider....

Rewarding
Learning a young puppy to sit is simple: you offer a tasty titbit so the pup approaches you. When you move the treat slightly upwards and to its tail end it will tend to follow it with his eyes and head without moving backwards. Done carefully, the pup will haunch down to raise its head. Now you say 'sit' and give the treat.
You repeat this and the clever pup will sit down on the cue 'sit' in just a few minutes.
Stop when you are ahead; don’t be tempted to repeat the success too often. The value of the treat diminishes and the pupil will get bored. You will end up teaching the pupil to ignore you.
If you would attempt to teach the pup by punishing it for not sitting down it will not understand what you mean and will learn that 'sit' is bad news.

You get what you reward. What a reward is, is determined by the receiver.
The reward is worth more if it is something special and when the horse understands it has to be earned.
The removal from sight of food when the horse intrudes your space, P-, automatically increases the value of receiving a titbit, R+, for the correct position.

Although positive reinforcement is the most fun to use, negative reinforcement has its functions too. The aids are almost exclusively based on 'moving from pressure'. A horse needs to learn this as the natural reflex of almost any creature is to lean into pressure even if only to restore its balance.
Moving away from pressure is R-; the horse is rewarded by the removal of the pressure by moving away in the same direction as the pressure: the basic principle for the aids.
By enlarging the pressure in phases you can make the horse move. These are the four phases of Parelli: touch the hair, touch the skin, touch the muscle, touch the bone and this works.
It is quite simple to combine this essential moving from pressure with positive reinforcement. Set it up and wait. The horse will sooner or later seek relief from even the lightest pressure and the moment it gives, you reward it with something it likes.
Both R- and R+ are based on; as light as possible, as heavy as needed, but using R+ reinforces the giving way and reduces the pressure needed in record time.

Operand conditioning is learning by trying. It is so effective because the horse actually seeks to encounter a solution and will thus remember the discovered, learn rapidly.
The well-known and popular clicker method is a form of operand conditioning using a bridge.
Working with horses I prefer my voice to a clicker. The voice can be used for variation and differentiation of the bridge, therefore the reward.
The excellent book of Inge Teblick 'Grondwerk met Paarden' covers this subject exhaustingly.

'Clickering' with the voice is an effective way of positive reinforcement. It is fun for both the horse and the rider, stimulates the rider to work with the horse, and stimulates the horse to work; to like learning: you get what you reward.

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