So what does elephant training have to do with horses or science for that matter, and howcould “feel” ever be cold or hard?

I was fortunate to attend the RPSCA’s annual scientific seminar recently and the topic ofthis year’s meeting was “All work and no play; Modifying the behaviour of animals”. Avariety of speakers presented the results of their research into the training of animals.The talks covered dogs, horses, elephants, sheep, cattle, Tasmanian devils and exoticanimals like giant pandas, rhinos and chimpanzees. The speakers worked at universities,commercial settings, wildlife parks, zoos or as private consultants and all held masters orPhD level qualifications. As well as conducting original research all were accomplishedanimal trainers in their own right- no ivory towers here; bruises aplenty and manure on theboots!

In spite of the range of species trained by the speakers, they spoke unanimously on thequalities that make a good animal trainer and these are, timing and consistency. “Feel”wasn’t really mentioned, though there was a fair bit of discussion of anthropomorphism(attributing human characteristics to non human things) and the dangers it poses to goodtraining outcomes and ultimately animal welfare. Associate Professor Paul McGreevy ofSydney University noted in his opening address that just because you love your horse (oryour elephant) doesn’t guarantee that you will safeguard its welfare and that many of thingswe do to horses in the name of ‘love’ can actually cause harm.

The other key point of agreement was that in “training” an animal, what we are really doingis putting an aspect of their innate behaviour (sitting, jumping, rolling over, canteringetc) under our control so that they perform it each time they are cued by us and even whenthey would rather be doing something else (like loafing under a tree instead of going roundin a 20m circle.) We don’t teach a horse how to perform a flying change, it already knowshow to do that, what we teach it is to perform a flying change when we ask it to.

Elephant Training
The keynote address was given by Dr Andrew McLean on his work with elephant trainers inNepal and India. Dr McLean is an internationally respected trainer of horses and has anenviable record of success in retraining problem horses world wide. He has been awardedAustralia’s first PhD in equine cognition, so is very well placed to put theory intopractice.

Applying learning theory principles, and in partnership with an experienced elephant trainerfrom Australia Zoo, Laurie Pond and other trainers from the WWF, Dr McLean developed areliable and humane system for training young Nepalese elephants to be ridden, despitehaving no prior experience with training elephants.

Working with the Nepalese mahouts and elephant trainers, over four days, previously unriddenand largely unhandled elephants were able to be mounted and controlled with light signalsdelivered by the bare toes of the mahouts. This training was completed without theelephants being restrained or tied up and even though they would regularly take themselvesoff for a break from the training, they always returned of their own volitation andrecommenced the training when they were ready.

So what’s this got to do with horses? We’re getting there ...

Like the horse world, elephant training has a long tradition of several thousand years ofaccumulated knowledge. And just like we do with our horses, mahouts have strong opinionsabout the character and motivations of their charges based on anthropomorphic notions ofrespect, arrogance, submission. Like many horse owners, they believe that as a result ofbeing trained, the animals know what is the right thing to do, and when they don’t respondas required that they are being deliberately disrespectful. And just like with horses, thekey to being able to ride and handle an elephant is to have its innate behaviours(locomotion) under the control of the rider.

The traditional method of elephant breaking is just that- breaking the animal until itsubmits and the methods used to achieve this vary from country to country, but all involverendering the elephant immobile, weakening it by deprivation of food and subjecting it tovarious painful and aversive stimuli until it stops reacting. Dr McLean showed some footageof some of these methods and they were very difficult to watch, though not dissimilar intechnique, if not level of force, to those used on horses today (hobbles, sacking out,dropping to the ground, tying up for hours and hours, tying heads to tails etc). The resultof this treatment is that the elephant learns that no response it can make stops thediscomfort so its stops trying. It develops what is called learned helplessness, where itbecome dull and unresponsive. It is no longer trying to make the pain go away, but it isstill feeling the full effect of it.

At this point, the elephant is deemed to be suitably “respectful” of its human handler andis mounted and taught via aversive stimuli, the commands for go, stop, back turn etc. Theproblem with this training method, aside from its obviously deleterious effects on theelephant is that the safety of the mahouts is seriously compromised. Many of the elephantswill go on to display what is called latent hyper aggression, which is an expression ofaggressive behaviour later on and out of context. Something happens that triggersaggression in the elephant and it will then turn on the mahout or other people in itsvicinity. It is actually reliving the pain and fear it experienced when being “broken in”and being free of the restraints this time, can express that fear and aggression, often withtragic results for the mahout and the elephant. In India 8% of all mahouts are killed bytheir elephants each year and no doubt you will have seen footage on the news or youtube ofdomestic elephants running amok.

So what’s this got to do with horses? A bit more about the elephants, because this next bitis key! Dr McLean applied the scientifically validated principles of learning theory totrain the elephants, demonstrating that when applied correctly, the outcomes of the trainingare predicably reliable and can be applied to any species of animal that can be trained. Nowhispering, respect or leadership required.

The point about learning theory is it’s not a system or method, but a set of principleswhich describe how animals learn new behaviours or responses to cues, what will motivatethem to change their behaviour or response and also explains what has gone wrong whenoutcomes don’t match expectations. Learning theory can be applied to any animal, anytraining system or method.

To get the elephants’ behaviour under the control of the mahouts, Dr McLean used acombination of positive reinforcement (food rewards), negative reinforcement (pressuresignals and their removal) and classical conditioning (making an association between twoevents because one event predicts that the other event will occur- eg verbal commandpredicts food reward, animal responds to verbal command to get food reward).

After four days of applying these principles and carefully shaping the elephants’ responsesfrom a small try to whole movements (eg, standing still, to being mounted, to moving at theright speed and direction) the elephants were calmly and obediently under the control oftheir riders and the cues the mahouts were using were very light (toe pressure from barefeet). Now these are not small animals and they aren’t ridden with any kind of bridle,saddle or restraint. The results from the first visit have now been replicated at severalother training centres, the Nepalese government has mandated its use for all elephanttraining and it is now being adopted in India.

So what’s this go to do with horses? We’ve finally arrived! We use exactly the sameprinciples when we train our horses whether or not we realise, and when we use themcorrectly, we can get the same kind of results.

Horse Training
Is this really so? When riding and handling horses we primarily use negative reinforcement,which isn’t bad, it’s simply a maths term, which means that something is removed orsubtracted to reward or reinforce (make more likely) a behaviour.

Let’s take using your legs to signal to the horse to go- you apply a pressure on theirsides, the horse doesn’t like the pressure on its side and wants it to stop, it movesforward and you stop pressing. The removal of the pressure is the reward, next time youapply the pressure the horse is likely to move forward because that’s the behaviour thatmade the pressure go away last time:

Pressure of legs on horse’s side= cue
Horse walks forward=response
Pressure removed =reinforcement (reward)

So long as that pressure does go away, the horse’s world is predictable and you have his goforward behaviour under your control. The pressure motivates the horse to respond, therelease tells it what it needs to do to make the pressure go away. You haven’t taught thehorse to walk or gained its respect, what you have taught the horse to do is to startwalking when you signal it to. Its walking is now under your control. Whether it’swalking forward from leg cues, performing passage, cutting out a beast, clearing a fence, orleading onto a float the horse is responding to pressure cues by doing something in order tomake that pressure go away.

It really is that simple and whether it’s your seat, your reins, the leadrope, the bosal,the whip or carrot stick, it’s all the same principle at work.

Positive reinforcement involves adding something, usually food, to reinforce or encourage abehaviour. It works in exactly the same way as negative reinforcement except that somethingis added instead of being subtracted.

Hand signal=cue
Horse nods its head= response
Piece of carrot= reinforcement (reward)

The head nodding in response to the cue has been reinforced by the addition of the carrot.Next time the horse sees that cue, it is likely to nod its head again, because that’s whatmade the carrot appear last time. Because food is a highly motivating reinforcer- eg theylove it(!), horses (and elephants) trained with positive reinforcement will usually pick upnew responses or behaviours very quickly because they really want that food!

Both of these methods of conditioning (training) actually put the animal in control of itsresponses- it learns what it needs to do to get the outcome it wants (either food or relieffrom a pressure). When we get it wrong and don’t reward it for the correct response it getsconfused and tries new ways of getting its reward and often those new behaviours are ones wedon’t appreciate so we call them problem behaviours and blame the horse for getting it wrongor believe that the horse is being disrespectful of our leadership.

Classical conditioning involves the animal making an association between two cues in whichthe first cue predicts the second one. We use it in combination with either positive ornegative reinforcement.

In positive reinforcement we pair a primary reinforcer (food) with a secondary reinforcer (asound) so that the sound predicts the food. The benefit of this is that we can use thesound to tell the horse that it got the response right and that the food is coming. So ifthe horse is performing at liberty or we are riding it, we can very precisely “reward” thecorrect response without having to give the food reward straight away.

Here’s how we do it. We positively reinforce the clicker as a predictor of food by givingthe horse some food after making the click. Very, very quickly (normally about two goes!)the horse starts to expect the food each time it hears the click. Now when we want to letthe horse know that a behaviour it has offered in response to a cue (such as a hand signalor voice command) is the right one, we can use the clicker(secondary reinforcer) to let itknow that it got it right and the food (primary reinforcer) is coming.

Hand signal=cue
Horse nods its head= response
Click= food is coming you made the right response (secondary) reinforcer
Food= (primary) reinforcer

This association the horse has now made between the cue, its response, the click and thenthe food is a very powerfully motivating training tool to get the horses’ behavioursresponding to our cues and thus the horse under our control.

We can use the same predictive association with negative reinforcement by pairing a lowvolume version of a stimulus- eg a light squeeze with our calves, with a high volume one.

Light squeeze with calves= soft cue
Horse doesn’t respond
Stronger squeeze with calves= stronger cue
Horse walks forward =response
Pressure removed = reinforcement

After a couple of repetitions

Light squeeze with calves= soft cue that now predicts that the strong cue is coming
Horse moves forward=response
Pressure removed= reinforcement
Horse has avoided the strong cue by responding to the light cue.

This pairing of the light cue to a stronger one allows us to train the horse to respond tolight signals and thus we can largely avoid having to use strong cues at all. Horses whichare soft to ride or respond to subtle seat cues demonstrate classical conditioning inaction.

So back to the elephants, by combining these principles, Dr McLean and his team ended upbeing to control their elephants. Of course they applied signals that had relevance toelephants (toe pressures behind their ears for example) but applied learning theory gave themahouts the means to switch from tried and tested traditional methods and instead usehumane, gentle but consistent signals that were more effective that what they were usingpreviously. And what they found is that they could achieve in four days what previouslytook four to six months. The ultimate result has been calmer elephants, calmer trainers anda much safer working environment for mahouts and elephants.

Well, an aggressive elephant is obviously very dangerous, so it makes sense to train them inways that don’t make them angry, but what has this got to do with horses, they don’t usuallyturn on their riders right?

True, but horses are well known for expressing their fear responses, known as hyperactiveconflict behaviour, and just like elephants, they are often expressed when we least expectthem. When that fear is expressed as a shy, a buck, a rear, spinning, baulking or boltingthe outcome for the human can be a loss of confidence at best or at worst, death or seriousinjury. For the horse, the outcome can be disastrous, with thousands ending up in thekiller yards at knackers because they are deemed too dangerous to ride.

As Associate Professor McGreevy noted, horses kill and injure more people in Australia thanany other animal (except snakes and most people who are killed by snakes are tying to killthe snake at the time). At the very least, from a safety perspective we owe it to ourselvesto train our horses in ways that produce calm relaxed and obedient mounts, who don’t trialrandom hyperactivity or random aggression and who are not confused and in conflict becausethey are being subjected to pressures they can’t escape from (strong rein contact, usinglegs and rein aids simultaneously, strong punishments, harsh gadgets and bits, tightnosebands). If a little learning theory can get control of an elephant without fear, forceor intimidation, imagine what it can do for you and your horse.

Learning theory is not a method, though there are training systems which are specificallybased on its principles. Any horse training method that works will conform to those sameprinciples. So learning about learning theory won’t mean you have to change your trainer orapproach. What it will give you is the tools to understand why training works and what’sgone wrong when it doesn’t.

There is a wealth of information about applying the very simple techniques of learningtheory to horse training, a great place to start is AEBC, the website of theAustralian Equine Behaviour Centre which is run by Dr Andrew McLean. A good book to startwith is Equitation Science is comprehensive introduction to applying learning theory tohorse training, written by Associate Professor McGreevy and Dr Mclean.

Whether it’s an elephant or a horse, learning theory gives us the tools to humanely gaincontrol over our mounts so we stay safe and they stay relaxed. Warm hearted science inaction.

Footage of Dr McLean working with elephants in Nepal can be found at Catalyst.

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