Horse Information - Aussie Horsemen

This is the first of a short series of articles exploring natural horsemanship training from a scientific perspective.

In the past thirty years horse training methods which claim to be ‘natural’ have beenwidely popularised and adopted by horse owners across the world. A quick internetsearch will throw up thousands of sites devoted to these ‘natural’ techniques, withmany of the same sites suggesting that you need to part with hundreds of dollars tolearn the secrets. Many natural horse trainers achieve amazing things with theirhorses and more importantly, help ordinary owners achieve training goals beyond theirwildest dreams.

But how natural are they really and can science explain how and why they work? Wewill not be attempting to debunk or specifically criticise any one method or trainer,but rather apply what is now known about horse behaviour, learning, cognition andsocial organisation to the ins and outs of natural (and non natural) horse trainingmethods.

Topics that we will explore are:
1. An introduction to natural horse training and the scientific study horse trainingand behaviour.
2. The human as herd leader- who leads the wild horse herd?
3. Join-up- what’s really going on in the roundyard.
4. Speaking horse- do horses understand our accent?
5. Leadership and respect- are horses smart enough to respect us as their leader?
6. Un-natural horse training- what science can tell us about how to effectively trainyour horse?

The ‘natural’ horse (wo)man- a brief introduction

Unless you are completely new to horses, you will have likely come across the work ofhorse trainers who describe their training methods as ‘natural’. In short they statethat their methods of training horses rely on the natural attributes of horses andthat as humans, we can successfully mimic many of those attributes such that horsesrespond naturally and without fear to the training. In the process, the horses staycalm, accepting and relaxed and the end result is that the human trainer can form astrong positive bond, relationship, indeed a partnership with their horse. And giventhat so many of us struggle in our interactions with our horses, that’s a goal worthaiming for.

American trainer Pat Parelli trademarked the term “Natural Horse. Man. Ship (NHS) inthe mid nineties and the term has come to denominate trainers who claim to use‘natural’ methods. For the rest of these articles we will use the abbreviation NHS torefer to such trainers, including those who don’t use Parelli techniques. There aremany NHS trainers, including the aforementioned Pat Parelli, Monty Roberts, JohnLyons (to an extent), and Mark Rashid, Clinton Anderson, Buck Branaman, Tom Dorranceand many others. Almost without exception (eg Australian Clinton Anderson) theyoriginate from America and in particular, come out of the ranching/cowboy/rodeosubcultures of the mid West (hence the ubiquitous cowboy hats).

While their individual techniques vary, they all make similarclaims about their methods. In summary they are:
1. Natural- that is based on how horses relate to other horses
2. Use ideas about the social structure of wild, feral or free ranging horse herds toexplain the relationship dynamic between horse and handler
3. Place a premium on concepts of leadership and respect- that is the human takingthe role of the herd leader or alpha mare and the horse taking the role of therespectful follower.
4. Believe that all horses need and seek a leader and the human can fulfil thisrole
5. Emphasise communication via body language and posture rather than relying on‘force’ or gadgets (though most market and sell a range of equipment)
6. Place a premium on groundwork as the basis for establishing both the correctleader/follower dynamic and as a means for developing the horse-human partnershipbased on respect and submission.
7. Claim that once the appropriate relationship of respect and leadership has beendeveloped, that the horse will comply with the human’s requests of it, even when thehuman is on its back or asking it to do things which normally it would avoid becauseit respects the leadership of its human.
8. Lastly, because apparently avoiding fear and coercion and relying on the horse’snatural behaviours, the horse will willingly comply with its human’s requests becauseit wants to please the human, its herd leader.

While each trainer has developed varying techniques, each system is underpinned bythese set of beliefs. While it is undoubted that the horse man (and women) who havedeveloped these systems are superb and gifted trainers and riders and who achieveawe-inspiring things with their horses, is there any evidence to support many of theassumptions underlying their systems. That is, just because a trainer such as PatParelli says that horses are “into pressure animals” (Parelli, 2003) is this actuallyso and can science shed any light on these issues? In order to assess these beliefsthere are some questions we need to answer:

Questions which arise from the analyses of horse behaviour endorsed by NHS trainersinclude:
1. How do horses communicate with each other in the wild and how are their herdsstructured? We need to know this in order to compare how wild or feral horses relateto each other and compare it to what NHS trainers say and do when interacting withtheir horses.

2. When horses in herds interact with each other in ways that NHS trainers say arethe same as when they interact with their human do they signal and communicate in thesame way? In particular, during dominance tests between horses in wild herds do theyadopt the same or similar behaviours or postures that a horse in a round yard or whois “testing the boundaries” with a human does?

3. What are the characteristics of the ‘herd leader’ in wild horse herds- do they infact behave in the ways that NHS trainers characterise? Is the most dominant horsewithin a wild herd also the herd leader?

4. What role if any, do aggressive behaviours play in determining who is the dominantand who is the submissive horse in wild horse herds- the answer to this question issurprising. Wild horse research has found that dominance between horses can bedetermined, not by aggression, but by appeasement and avoidance- so where does thatleave NHS explanations of horse behaviour as being the horse asserting its dominanceover humans- a lot more on this issue later.

5. Whether horses have the neural capacity or brain structure to possess thereasoning and assessment skills necessary to display the insight, reasoning anddeductive skills required to perceive, interact and relate to a human on the basis ofan assessment of the human’s leadership capacities. This one is crucial, because whenanalysed, many of the claims made by NHS trainers of the mental abilities of horsesrequire high level reasoning skills and insight, which extensive testing of equinelearning and cognitive skills have repeatedly failed to demonstrate are possessed byhorses.

6. Lastly, are there other explanations for how/why NHS methods work which canaccount for the observed results without relying on explanations of horse behaviour?

Science?
At roughly the same times as NHS methods became widely known, the scientificexploration of equine behaviour and cognition increased rapidly, with hundreds ofquality peer reviewed studies published in the past thirsty years, although theearliest studies of equine learning took place in the 1920.

So how does science work and how does it go about things? Good science is based onevidence- that is, a scientist poses a hypothesis, or an idea about something andthen finds out if there is any evidence to support the hypothesis. Good science usesa range of validated methods to find the evidence to back up or disprove theoriesabout why things happen. Good science will deliver results which are repeatable, notconfounded by other variables (not caused by factors other than the treatment appliedin the experiment) and can be verified by other researchers in other experiments.Good science uses accepted rules of evidence, a sufficient number of subjects so thatthe statistical analyses are reliable and results, which when published have beensigned off by other well qualified scientists as being a fair and rigorousexplanation of the results of the experiment.

Not all science is good science, not all conclusions that are drawn about experimentresults prove to be accurate and just like in other areas of life, scientists makeerrors, or make assumptions based on incomplete knowledge and when new discoveriesare made, they find that their original conclusions are incorrect. However, sciencehas and continues to contribute amazing things to society. As horse owners, wherewould be without the veterinary treatments which keep our horses healthier and activefor longer, the amazing synthetic materials we use in rugs, halters, boots and othertack, the formulated and precise diets we can now feed our horses and the knowledgeabout the best way to get a horse fit and keep it injury free.

Along with these areas, science can also allow us to be better horse trainers andriders because of the research into horse psychology, cognition and learningabilities conducted over the past 60 years. Science can now conclusively provideevidence to explain what and why our horses behave as they do and more is learnedevery year. It is this science that we will now apply to NHS training.

There are two areas of research into horses that are of relevance to this topic-ethology and equine cognition/psychology.

Ethology (defined in full in the glossary, link below) is thestudy of how animals interact with other members of their species, usually in wild orfree ranging settings. Ethnologists can give us insights into things such as howhorse herds are organised, dominance hierarchies, breeding success, feedingstrategies and so on. Applied ethology is the study of how animals interact withhumans. The work of these scientists can give us insights into the work of NHStrainers who claim that their methods are based on how horses interact with eachother.

The other area of scientific inquiry of relevance to NHS training is work inequine cognition and psychology - that is how horses learn and the processesby which they do so. These studies can tell us how “smart” horses are, what they canand can’t learn, what things they learn easily and what takes them a lot of time tolearn, how to optimise their learning, how many repetitions they need to learnthings, how quickly they can unlearn things and so on. As horse owners, knowing howour horses learn and the methods make it easy for them to learn can make a hugedifference to our interactions with our horses. What has been learned from thesestudies can be applied to any training method, including NHS.

If you’d like more information on the various terms we will be using, we haveprovided a glossary with detailed definitions below.

Our next article will be on the question of herd leadership-who leads the wild horseherd? What do scientific studies of wild, feral and domestic horse herds tell usabout the social dynamics of horses and can humans successfully mimic these dynamicsin horse training?

See Equine Psychology AndLearning Terms Glossary

Comment on this article using the Comment Function below. Discuss this article withother users on the Horse Forums.