Socialising your horse

Positive reinforcement, repetitive conditioning and operant conditioning are a few of the highly successful angles to good end results.

Clicker training is of practical help in horses, especially in teaching complicated tasks and sequences of movement. The trainer, handler or owner must know how to use a clicker to obtain the desired results – it is all about concentration, empathy and timing.

The clicker allows the trainer to work without food treats or stroking the animal. The way in which this is done is to make the clicker click every time the horse is fed or offered a treat.

In this case, the food is the primary positive reinforcer and the click is the positive secondary reinforcer. After a while the horse realises there are enormous benefits and expectations when a clicker is clicked.

FILE PICTURE: Horse.
Picture: Image supplied

This helps further to induce a searching behaviour, which is a great sensation in the horse, so instead of it obtaining a food reward each time it exhibits a certain acceptable positive behaviour, the animal gets to anticipate the reward without receiving it, which has its benefits.

The success of the clicker then allows the primary reinforcer, the food reward, to fall away and its place is taken over by the gizmo.

Horses are more difficult to rid of fears due to their inherent high-fear character. Rearing and striking in an Arab horse is a habit which may be incurable, whereas being uncooperative with a farrier is usually reparable.

Rage can occur with frustrated horses in tedious situations such as circling in a round pen for hours on end, confinement to a box stall, insufficient exercise, being housed alone, etc.

Horses have powerful social requirements and companionship is high on the agenda. They instinctively need to interact with other horses especially for grooming purposes – this interequine natural activity helps reduce stress by dropping their blood pressure and increases their bond.

Picture: Michel Bega

Horses raised and accommodated in social groups are much easier to train and much more reliable to ride. Expert horse trainers understand the horses’ emotions, instinctive natural behaviour patterns and the principles of behaviour training.

Horse riding is a hazardous sport with a high percentage of injuries in all types of events and a bad-temperament animal is not readily adopted as a pet because it is expensive to maintain, cannot be ridden and may be too fearful for any owner to obtain any pleasure.

The tragedy of owning any animal with an unacceptable temperament is that the longevity of the horse is going to be drastically curtailed and about 70% of such animals do not live longer than two to seven years.

For any person to understand their horse and obtain the optimum potential they, themselves, must have suitable sensory perceptions of body language, attitude, voice, touch, smell and so on.

A horse owner has to have a feel for their particular horse by understanding and predicting its emotions within seconds of reading certain signals, which genuine horsemen regard as true unity.

If everyone could socialise, train and handle horses with a “gift”, a lot fewer horses would be euthanised. One cannot teach the human-horse bond – it has to be in your character to even learn the basics.

It is even more difficult in this modern age where people have mostly lost contact with reality and far fewer people live with animals on smallholdings or on farms.