[...] more fundamentally if it comes down to me giving Tilly a serious smack with a whip or we get run over by a bus - then funnily enough I'm quite happy with the idea of giving her a serious hit. Trimmer's view is that with correct schooling you would never need to do this. In the 3 years since she's come back off loan I have hit her (with serious intent) twice - first time we were out on a hack and she'd had a spook into the middle of the road where she froze as she stared at the offending object. Unfortunately this was on a blind bend and I could hear a car coming, when she didn't respond to a squeeze, a series of kissing & clicking noises and a pony club boot - I had little choice (I felt) other than to give her a proper smack. Which had the desired effect of snapping her out of the freeze and getting us out of the way of the upcoming vehicle. I'm not sure there was really any other option (am happy to hear it if people have ideas!) - but from the outside I'm sure it looked like someone who was beating her horse for spooking....
I use my (usually for ear-scratching/fly-swatting/gate-pushing) whip occasionally for this purpose too. Arguable whether in these circumstances it's +P or -R though perhaps (are we punishing the standing still/napping, or putting pressure on them to move
). Either way, if it gets them to shift their ass out of the traffic then it is good. And I always find something to ask Chocky to do to then praise him for asap afterwards
. Yes in an ideal world schooling would never make this necessary. But in mine it is, occasionally.....
Other point I wanted to make is that positive punishment is lots more than just hitting though - ANYTHING unpleasant you add in to stop a behaviour is a positive punishment, so the sharp "ah ah" or shake of the lead rein are just as much a positive punishment as hitting a horse is. It's all a matter of degree and the individual horse/handler combination. There are horses out there for whom a sharp "Ah AH" is as severe a degree of punishment as a slap with a hand is to another horse. I think we owe it to the horses we work with to find out the absolute minimum thing we can do/use if we are going to go down the route of using positive punishments on occasion. And even if we have had to up the ante on one occasion not to assume that's what we have to do every time (so sometimes Tilly needs a rope over her nose to lead her - but we don't put it on EVERY time 'just in case' - we just have it as an option when needed).
Same with levels of pressure (i.e. -R) too, what is needed for one horse might be very different from what another needs. I once lunged 3 horses within an hour. One was a nervy soul who needed "whisper" level body language; one was a very well balanced individual who responded well to "talking" level body language; and one definitely needed more of a "shout" to get his attention and focus
Some people go in "shouting" every time. And of course then there's the people who don't realise they are giving off "whisper" (or even bigger) body language and then punish the horse for responding to that body language, so horse learns to ignore the whisper and only respond to the shout
.
And lastly (hurrah I hear you cry!) - I just wanted to mention extinction behaviours (as someone who is currently helping her new rescue dog understand that barking doesn't achieve much they are very much on my mind (and eardrums!)). If you look at the door kicking scenario that Lyndsey described. If you've always previously walked up to the horse and gone "Grrrr don't do that" - but you now about turn and walk out of the barn, chances are your horse is going to kick the living daylights out of the door in an attempt to get the response he wants (you coming up to him). After all it worked really well the last few times - so now it's not, he's going to try it bigger, more and louder to see if that helps. I think a lot of people fall down at that hurdle ("ooh the behaviour is getting worse, this isn't working - I'll go back to what I did before"). Learning about extinction behaviour was one of the most useful things I learnt about training animals I think.
I see this so much with horse and dog owners (and parents
) I know/see around. I had a tough extinction burst with Daisy Dog on her first night with us, but I knew that if I went in to see her after 1 hour of howling (
) I'd only have taught her to try it for more than 1 hour the next time
Luckily she's a quick learner and did stop, and has never done it since that first night
And this is the piece that's important because we mustn't make assumptions about what our horses find rewarding and punishing but we need to look at the behaviour. Is the behaviour increasing or decreasing.
You see this with biting - does someone hitting the horse actually make him bite them less, or does it make him more inclined to bite quickly then duck away before he gets "bit" by the human? i.e. does he actually understand that he is being punished for biting? Perhaps (because of the ethical consequences of getting it wrong) even moreso than with +R, timing is all important for +P as if the animal (or indeed human) doesn't realise that the punishment is linked with its previous action, then no learning/conditioning will occur. So I guess I agree with your statement Lyndsey (just because we think something we do is a punishment or indeed reward, doesn't mean the horse does), but I'd just add the proviso that even if the behaviour is not decreasing, doesn't mean that your action is not punishing to the horse; rather it might be that the horse just experiences it as a random horrible thing happening to him, not related to his previous actions (like shouting at the dog when you get home to find he's chewed/messed etc).
Sometimes I think people don't even consider whether the undesired behaviour is reducing/decreasing when they administer punishment - administering the punishment is actually more for the punisher than the punished i.e. to make them feel better/in control/proactive/not a victim
