Prince, is immediately released when he is returned to his paddock. His halter stays on, because it is quicker to unclip the leadrope than undo his halter and his owner steps back quickly to avoid any flying feet as he charges back to his companions. Red's dinner is placed in his stall prior to his arrival. No one may enter his stall while he is eating and even being in the vicinity may cause him to angrily lash out at the walls or stall door. Jack cannot be left in a paddock on his own. Convoluted movements of horses are performed to ensure that this never happens despite the inconvenience and disruption to all the other horses and owners.
These are not unusual stories. Every day there are people who are managing problem behaviours rather than resolving them and often expending a great deal of effort in doing so. Initially, an animal may have a minor quirk or 'vice' that the owner or rider is too busy, too indulgent or too naive to address. More often than not the behaviours become more entrenched and more extreme, the more they are managed. Why? Because they are being reinforced. Managing behaviours, usually means reinforcing them. Reinforcers create stronger behaviours. This creates a bigger problem, the owner now has a pretty valid reason for avoiding dealing with it - its getting harder and harder to extinguish with every day that goes by.
But hang on, what stupid owner would reward behaviours that are annoying you might say? Food rewards and praise are not the only reinforcers. Anything that causes behaviour to increase over time is a reinforcer. Put it another way, if a behaviour is being maintained, or increased in intensity or duration over time - it is being reinforced by something. No ifs, buts or maybes. Something or someone is causing the behaviour to remain or increase by rewarding it.
So let's look again at one of our examples. Perhaps Red was excited and aggressive when he received his dinner. This may have frightened the person in charge of feeding him or maybe they just didn't have time to deal with it and thought ignoring the issue would make it go away. This led to them deciding to put in his dinner bowl first and then quickly send in the horse and leave the area. The horse's reinforcer - he wanted to have his food bowl all to himself and he got it. The more he acted fierce, the more territory he got. The people thought that by leaving him to it they were avoiding a confrontation and letting him 'calm down', in reality they were reinforcing his anti-social behaviour, teaching him to be more aggressive.
It's always important to remember that
anything that the horse wants at any particular moment in time is a reinforcer. Being with friends, running around, being scratched, having a roll, being left alone, anything that your horse may want can be a reinforcer. So it is important to be aware of the potential to reinforce behaviours that you may or
may not want
every time you interact with your horse.
Here's another example. You are leading a horse back to a paddock. The horse that has been left in that paddock has been walking the fence line since this his friends left. By bringing the horse back while he is still walking the fence line, you have just reinforced the behaviour of the horse in the paddock. In the horse's mind 'If I keep doing this behaviour my friends will return', and we make it true each time.
These are all perfect examples of how positive reinforcement can build very strong behaviours indeed. We do it without thinking, or worse, thinking that we are doing the opposite. In the fence walking example it is perhaps easy to think that bringing the horse back to the fence walker is a way of ending the behaviour but instead we are strengthening it. If you are prepared to never allow this horse to be on his own again then you would not see the behaviour but it would still be there, waiting until needed (by the horse) again, the horse would not forget this lesson or grow out of it.
In any and every interaction between animal and human, one is the trainer and one is being trained. If you aren't doing the training, then you are being trained. So, who's training who at your place?
