STM 1.4 undesired behaviour

This blog post is all about undesired behaviour. In the STM course there is a nice long PDF about it, but I am going to do my best to keep this as a very short summary.


Causes

• pain - obvious, if it hurts the horse will avoid it
• disempowering state - handler being too extreme on the interaction quadrant
• relationship - human needs and emotional state of the handler is impacting on the horse
• fear - if a horse is scared it well either fight, flight or freeze
• aggression - I'm going to summarise in more detail in a bit
• misunderstanding - if the horse does not understand because we are not being
• lack of motivation - if there is nothing in it of the horse they stop trying
• repitions - accidental reinforcing of behaviour via letting it happen more than 3 times

Solutions


There is a big long section on solutions for undesired behaviour so this is a very short summary.


If your horse is afraid of its new surroundings, the whip, or a spooky corner, be the leader and show the horse it is alright (eg put yourself between the horse and the scary thing), use positive reinforcement and operant conditioning to make the feared source change to a nice source (eg feed treats and relax in the spooky corner,) and use habituation to desensitise the horse (reward the horse for not reacting to the whip).


If your horse appears to be bored or lazy take a look at your actions. Are you really interested in the exercises, do you know why you are doing them? Have you lost motivation? and if they are lazy have you caused them to loose motivation via there being nothing in it for the horse eg too long, unexpected, or too much pressure without reward.


Aggression


I'm making the effort to pick up on aggression as I see if from both my horses. Sofie pushes and rears, Tonto pushes, threatens and kicks.

The main causes of aggression and offensive behaviour are:

• disempowering state of the trainer
• too much pressure
• too long pressure
• unexpected pressure
• steedy pressure

With Tonto, I think our issues are more with his reaction to any form of pressure, he is very sensitive about it. His ingrained fear and sensitivity, in addition to his troubled background and learned behaviours has resulted in him quickly escalating aggressive behaviour. If a stranger approaches to pat Tonto he can quickly turn, flatten his ears, snap his teeth and lunge at them if he does not feel comfortable. Thankfully he is rarely aggressive with me as he feels very comfortable with me. Occasionally he head tosses, and can pull faces when he gets over excited about treats but this is the most I normally get from him in terms of aggression. I have not done enough to stamp out the treat faces, something that I will work on I think.

I think with Sofie the issues are actually far more to do with a disempowered me. Sofie is dominant and pushy by nature. In fact this is how she came to me for free. But her pushiness is worse if her handler is not 100% confident. In its mild form she pushes and invades space, but in the extreme she rears. Her rearing behaviour started around the time I lost my sharer and was worried about finances and her lamness issues. Looking back at the blog post you can see it comes in immediately after the entry about pony woes. I could not work out why she stared rearing, I thought it was a trick she just remembered, but I realise now it must have been triggered by my stress levels. I have noticed that the rearing starts back up again when I am stressed. Prior to the rearing Sofie gets mouthy and nickers. It is the strangest thing but I am getting more and more confident this is her way of reacting to my internal emotions.

So in order to stop Sofie from rearing I need to first - let go of my emotional baggage - this is very hard, especially whilst trying to deal with Tonto's failing health. This must be very hard on poor Sofie. Secondly I need to make sure I am always acting as the confident leader, walk with perpouse and dismiss those gremlins. Thirdly I need to notice what happens before the rear - the nicker - and nip it in the bud (with steps 1 and 2 and a firm NO to let her know that rearing is not OK). Forthly I need to re-direct the behaviour - 'I understand Sofie but lets not go there' and do something different - I am not sure what this is yet. 

And on the pushy front, I think defending my space and back up is the key tools in my tool box. I have been using these during the ST exercises we have done. It also comes back to the ground work stuff I did back in November.

Perhaps Sofie and I could do with a bit of therapy. At the risk of sounding like a purple rider I am contemplating some Reki. Its not that I actually believe that Reki can heal through touch - but I do think that it does have the ability to unlock pent up emotions. I figure the gift Reki healers really have is being very attuned to horse/peoples emotions and allowing them to release them. I know I am a ball of anxiety and sadness with Tonto's failing health (I have been struggling with bouts of depressing and find it incredibly difficult atm) and it must impact on my horses. Perhaps some Reki could help us.

....


but I fear we are going off the ST track here so back to summarising the rest of module 1.4. A good way of keeping on track and keeping your horse motivated is to play the hot cold game. So when the horse is onto something good you encourage them with your voice (+R) and release (-P) so that they know they are behaving as expected, and when the horse goes off track we let them know they are getting cold with a withdrawal of praise (-R) and a correction either with the voice or by applying some pressure (+P). Normally horses loose motivation because the riders get the timing wrong. This is something I really need to think about as I think I am a bit slow atm.

STM - 1.4 the 5 R's

I had originally put a bit about reward in the previous blog post, but then realised that the 5 Rs should really stay together. The 5 R's are

1. reward
2. release
3. redirect
4. relax
5. repeat

Reward
Reward is a form of positive reinforcement, and can either be vocal, a pat or a treat and a combination of both is recommended. Reward is a tricky one for me. I am fairly comfortable with using my voice and pats, though when I came across voice rewards in earlier modules I realised I have only ever used one voice reward and never thought to change this for each horse. I have now also been trying to use treats but tonto just gets way to excited, and is rarely in a calm mental state to reward.



Basic rules of rewarding:

• Treat only offered for desired behaviour
• Treat only offered when horse is in a positive mindset (no ears back)
• Treat must be seen as a gift, and grabbing then take treat away
• Do not over reward, should not be obsessive. 

Treats just might not work with t, but might be a useful tool for sof providing she doesn't get too pushy.


Release
Release is a form of negative reinforcement. The idea is to remove pressure as soon as the horse moves in a direction you want. So opening the hand when the horse lowers the head in forward down for example. The logic is very natural to me, it is how I have always been told to train horses, however I lack finesse and am often to slow to release, resulting in nagging from me and a confused horse. I need to initially expect less and release faster.


Redirect
Redirect is to move away from undesired behaviour. Here I am a bit confused how this is done in practice. My only experience is with child-minding, where the child is upset that it hasn't got the toy it wanted, instead of giving the child the toy (because it was its siblings) or shouting at the child because it is too young to really understand you distract it by finding another toy and making it interesting. This avoids reinforcing the bad behaviour and prevents things from escalating. I totally get it with kids... but I get a bit more confused with horses. If the horse is not doing the thing you are trying it to do should I try something else? Would this not just confuse the horse? Is this not a form of release? I think I need to see this done in practice before I really get it.


Relax
Horses do not learn from doing the exercise, they learn from reflecting upon it, therefore you need to give them time to stop, think and learn. Plenty of breaks is advised. This is something I am very guilty of not doing, I have a tendency to rush from one thing to the next, and if it is going well I always have the temptation to push through for more. I really need to force myself to stop on the high and just let the ponies chill. The good thing about training two simultaneously is that I can give them breaks by swapping between horses. The signs that a horse is learning include:

• Lowering the head

• Blinking the eyes

• Shaking the head

• Yawning

• Licking

• Chewing

Sofie is a big yawner and blinker, Tonto is more of a lick and chew horse. I need to watch for this signals and only start the next exercise when the horse is ready and starts looking to me.


Repeat
Apparently it takes doing something 3 times for the horse to learn a habit. Therefore to really master something you need to keep repeating it, and you need to make sure you don't repeat bad behaviour - hence where the redirection comes in handy.




Today I did a bit of forward down with T and Sof to try and put some of this into action. At first both were begging for treats but they eventually gave up when they realised they didn't get the reward for begging. For the first time I managed to get Tonto to lower his head in a relaxed way! admittedly it was not on the floor but this was real progress. I have to stay very quiet with Tonto as he is too excitable. I could then very quietly give him a treat. He hates pressure so tiny vibrations and very fast releasing is necessary - in fact he rather I guide him with my voice than use any pressure. He might me more of a liberty kind of guy.


Sofie is a bit ahead of the game as I have worked with her before on this. She did a bit of blocking but vibrating the reign seemed to work alongside a quick release. Vocal feedback seems to really help her. She was doing so well that we tried a bit of LFS on a circle. It looked good to me, but I am still not very confident I am doing it right. I'm off to a clinic tomorrow so that should help :)

STM 1.4 training horses - leadership and motivation

Module 1.4 is a big gun.  Lots of stuff to get through. At first I found this a bit overwhelming, but was then reassured that lots were things that had come up before in the home study course and the previous modules.

Educational program was covered in the home study module 1.212-straightness-training blog post

The interactive quadrant was on the Mini mastery program and on the stm module 1.2 stm interactive quadrant post

Training styles (teaching, coaching and handover) and the motivation quaderant I have come across before in stm module 1.3 13-understanding-horses-part-one blog

However this module goes into more depth in some of these areas so I thought I would reflect on leadership styles and reward.

Leadership styles is an interesting one. M talks about the role of the dominant mare and the stallion. In a herd environment both mine prefer to be henchmen to the lead, but will step up to lead in the absence of a strong leader. Sof has lots of lead mare characteristics, she commands respect in the herd, bosses around others and can be seen as a calming influence in stressful situations where so knows it is safe. In the current herd she is boss by default. Tonto is an aspiring stallion, in his younger days he was rather good at it, but now he is older and less secure he is a bit ott on herding his ladies and defending their hounor,  to the point that he looses sof's respect. He does like following and herding us about though, and if another horse or person threatens us he imediatly positions himself in their path and chases them off.

The question of who is the leader between me and so is debatable. It seems to depend on situation. Often I am leader, but occasionally, like when I am on the ground in the school, or sometimes on the way to the feild sof tries to be leader. I think it might be when she perceives threat. Perhaps she does not think I am equipped to keep us safe.

Which was another little revelation from m - how to deal with spooking, something I have always struggled with. When a horse sees a threat we must take the leadership role. Which means staying calm, positioning yourself in between the threat and the horse, looking at the threat not the horse and relaxing. The horse then knows you do not see it as a threat. I have actually started doing this with sof when leading... at first because I didn't want to get flattened but then I realised it helped. When ridden sof still takes the lead - stopping and only going forward once she is happy it is no threat, but the other day whilst riding and leading I got her to go past by calmly saying everything is fine.

Getting back on the horse

So yesterday I was quite deflated. I haven't been able to keep up with M''s email schedule and realistically I can't catch up. I have been trying to race through mod 1.4 but in my hurry I am not really taking it in. Problem better to stop rushing, I can make the best progress I can.

In an attempt to re-ignight my interest I tried out some horse training stuff with soft today. I was mainly focusing on paying attention to her signals and rewarding the slightest try and asking quietly and releasing/praising as soon as she delivered. I also wanted to investigate asympathy.  I have found this difficult to figure out without moving her about. For example since doing the forward down I have discovered that my first report is wrong. She is a left bent horse.

Anyway, I take her up, but could tell she was uncomfortably windy from the new grass so vowed to just stick to walk. When I lead her to the mounting block in the school I sensed her get agitated. She parked, nunged with her nose and started a whiney.  Warning signs for rearing. If I asked again she was going to rear. So I stopped, let her calm down, asked her what was wrong, then moved the mounting block to her and she was fine.

So progress in that I saw her early signals so she didn't need to "shout" by rearing... but I am stistill not sure what triggers her to get like that.

So once on board I let her amble round the ring. I did a lap seeing how subtley I could ask her to turn. We were able to weave the cones on the buckle with reign yield which was nice to find out.

I then took up contact as lightly as possible and found sof was very soft and responsive in return. Cool. We then did some walk manuovers, and so was being super responsive to my subtle aids. She was really trying and responds well to asking just once quietly. Super cool.

In the past sof has gotten stress about reign back, she doesn't go backwards evenly and gets upset when I continue to ask and starts to pour the ground. Today I asked very very quietly. Almost just thinking it, and she did a step back and I instantly released.  We managed several steps back this way without sof bring upset. Breakthrough, I need to be quite!

We also tried turn on the forhand as I wanted to assess which of softies back legs she favours. She did not want to turn to the left (left leg on did nothing) she was happy to turn to the right. So I think she has a problem stepping under with her left hind, but probably need to do more investigation to be sure. I suspect she has an arthritic hock.

So all in all feeling happier and more motivated today

Deflated

Feeling a little dejected today. Went to see t and sof after a week of missing them. Tonto was happy to see me, whinning and coming straight over when he saw me, but when I took his rug off I was alarmed to see how much weight he had lost. Sof has ditched her fly mask and now has balled patches from sweetitch. And the perfect field I thought I had secured for them this summer has been nabbed.

In the end I just cuddled the horses. I was too worried about t to really enjoy riding or do anything constructive with st. He also had a nose bleed on Sunday whilst I was away. Poor boy isn't well.

And I had to shell out another 700 to cover vet fees. Insurance has only paid for 300, not sure why. I am not sure if I should call out the vet again. Just don't know what to do to help him.

On top of this I am behind on straightness training, and fed up of endless theory. Feeling it hard to stay motivated with that.

At least it was nice to see sof excited by her new - not quite as good as the one I had in mind field.  She prance about introducing herself to all the new neighbours. She can do a wounderful elevated trot when she puts her mind to it. The trauma of separating her from Charlie was clearly short lived (Charlie couldn't join them as the fencing is not good enough for the little escape artist)

STM 1.3 Understanding horses

Sorry for the break, I've been away rock climbing in cornwall. Now back smelly and sunburnt and ready for more straightness training.

Just a very quick post to say I have completed the understanding horses module and am pleased to say that I already understood horses... so I don't have much to reflect on for this module.

I guess I can thank 18 years with t for this. I had to get very good and very fast at reading his body language in order to avoid being flattened in the early years.

I guess the one learning point was that as both my horses have a tendency to dominance so I am going to have to monitor them closely when doing groundwork exercises that invite them into my space. Other than that, this particular module was just dementia what I already knew.

Looking forward to seeing them tomorrow. Missed skinny and fatty.

First proper hack

So its all been about ST recently, but I wanted to share how thrilled we were to go on our first proper hack since diagnosis!

We have been doing walk hacks with Tonto, and have got these up to an hour now, but we really can't stride out because of poor T's legs, and I am constantly trying to get T to walk alongside so I don't really get to enjoy Sofie. Ride and lead is a bit of a stress sometimes. We have also popped into the school once or twice and Sofie has been amazing, super responsive and feels pretty sound. She was hopping into trot the other day - but I think it was more with enthusiasm then to do with lameness as she then felt very even. We had a little canter the other day - she just felt so forward I thought why not (besides I saw her fly bucking and galloping about the other day so figured a little controlled canter surely can't be worse than that).

Today the sun was shining and the leaves are budding on the trees. Sandy suggested going up to Farley heath, and I desperately wanted to join her on Sofie. We popped Tonto back in his field with Charlie and then went to he heath. I was very worried about leaving Tonto, and I could hear him screaming all the way out the yard (which broke my heart) but he wasn't galloping about and Sofie didn't seem too worried. Apparently he shouted for a long time, but eventually settled to grazing and wasn't sweaty when we came back.

Anyway, as soon as she realised she was off somewhere new Sofie really perked up. She powered down the drive with her ears pricked. It is a long old walk down the road to the heath, but we got to enjoy a nice view and admire some spectacular houses on our way. Sofie was excellent with traffic and all the scary new sights and sounds. She also seemed to cope really well on the road barefoot, she didn't try to hug the curb at all. Once we hit the soft sand of the golden mile sofie got really excited, shaking her feet and having a little dance in anticipation. Sandy was in front and asked Jess to do a little trot and canter. Jess gave up after a few strides, but Sofie was so desperate for a run I asked to go in front to let her run. I loosened my reigns and let her go, she was so delighted to just be running again. She made it a good way up the track before I felt her tire and asked her to slow down for her own good. She has also left Jess for dust. The rest of the hack we pretty much walked, a few little trots here and there but I kept them controlled and short so not to tire sof (not that she was having any of this, super bouncy pony). She did start to call for Tonto on the way back into the yard, but still waited patiently for me to untack her and through a fly rug on before heading back to the field.

Such a super little horse. I think she missed our hacks as much as I have. Big smiles all around.