Behavior Modification Techniques
By
Dr. Jim and Lynda McCall
Copyright
© 2003
Lesson Nine
ELIMINATING
UNDESIRABLE BEHAVIOR
Horses are not born bad. They are made bad. It may seem adorable to have a foal nip at
you but it is never fun when that horse grows up biting. Encouraging foals to
rear up and playfully paw and strike at you is not our idea of an enjoyable diversion.
It is only a matter of time until someone is going to knock the dickens out of
them for that kind of behavior.
This is what happened to Fourble Joe. He was a incredible
beautiful young horse and folks came from all over
Now the battle was engaged. The
more he bit, the more whip was used.
Angry, the yearling, struck out and bit the chest of the handler. This behavior was immediately rewarded as the
handler fell to the ground. Too smart for his own good, Joe learned to fight
against the ignorance of humans. It cost
him dearly.
A much better approach is for foals to learn how to related
to people in a respectable way. The
behavior patterns built during the first few years last a lifetime. Way to often, early
training contributes to producing undesirable behaviors. Horses are driven,
pushed, coerced or abused into undesirable behaviors by trainers who lack
feeling about a horse's individuality.
Whatever the cause,
once the unacceptable behavior appears it must be dealt with.
There are three fundamental approaches to curing dangerous behavior:
1. Ignore the behavior
2. Train an incompatible behavior
3.
Administer punishment
Each method has advantages and disadvantages. Each one will not work
equally well under the same circumstance. In fact, when we were younger, we weren't
even sure that ignoring the behavior was a viable alternative. We figured that
if an animal did something bad, we needed to deliver a good whack to tell him
not to behave that way again or else. (Age is a wonderful thing)
The first time it become apparent that
"ignoring the behavior" might even be a possible solution
occurred one afternoon as Jim was helping an Indian move some Angus heifers
down a lane on foot. He tells this story:
We started to crowd the heifers as
they gained momentum going towards the chute.
Pow!
One heifer had taken dead aim and
kicked the Indian in the shinbone. The hit sounded like a small bore rifle
shot. I turned to look, expecting to see him grimacing in pain and cussing that
cow. I was astonished to see that his facial expression had not changed. Nor
was there any hitch in his stride. I thought to myself that Indian must have a
wooden leg and he just never told anyone about it.
In a few minutes we closed the pen
gate. Not wanting to pry into matters which didn't concern me, I casually
asked, "Didn't that cow kick you pretty hard back there?"
"Yep," he says without
divulging any more information.
"Didn't it hurt?" I gave up
on trying to seem only mildly interested.
"Yep, it hurt," came the reply, but still no further explanation.
"How come, then, you didn't do
or say something," I asked, figuring that maybe I would find out about the
wooden leg.
He answered, "If I had, then the
cow would have known she hurt me." I was confused, but not wanting to
appear ignorant, I dropped the subject.
Several times over the next few years
I thought about this incidence and what the implications might be. It finally
dawned on me that this incident was an example of eliminating an undesirable
behavior by not rewarding it. The cow kicked the human because he was doing
something she didn't like. If the Indian had reacted in the expected manner,
the heifer would have known the kick did what she intended. She then would have
been more likely to try it again the next time a human invoked her displeasure.
Since the kick solicited no response, the cow was probably as confused as I
was. If her kicking behavior was repeated a few more times without creating a
response, it is likely the heifer would feel she was wasting her energy and
give up the practice.
__________________________
It
finally dawned on me that this incident was an example of eliminating an
undesirable behavior by not rewarding it.
Since most folks are not as stoic as this
particular Indian, the key to using this training technique is to decide which
behaviors can be extinguished by lack of human response. One such behavior
might be the pawing and stomping of an impatient horse. If a behavior gets no
response it will usually go away.
Several years ago Jim got the opportunity to try out this technique when
he went into a stall to catch a rather roguish Thoroughbred stallion.
I wasn’t in the stall door more than a step or two when the stallion
wheeled and grabbed my arm with his teeth. I was caught. As the stallion
clinched his teeth on my forearm, I had a flashback to the kicking cow
incident. I decided to pretend that I
didn't feel a thing.
For a moment, the stallion seemed surprised. As the initial confusion
passed, the horse seemed to get madder. I guess he decided he wasn't biting
hard enough because he began to really lock down on my arm and shake his head.
Unable to stand it any longer, I stuck the thumb of my free arm in his eye.
Thank you, Lord! He turned me loose! The stud ran to the back of the
stall, cowered in the corner and looked at me like he was eyeing a ghost. As I
walked up to him he was quivering. I snapped the lead shank into his halter and
lead him out of the stall. He side passed down the hall with his eyes bugged
out as if he was watching the Great Spirit who had temporarily taken on a human
form.
As you can see, rogues or confirmed bad actors do not always respond to
this passive method of eliminating bad behaviors. But, it did surprise the stallion long enough
to give Jim an edge.
Beware of using this approach on demented horses like the arm-biting
thoroughbred. This horse would bang his head against the wall till it
bled. After he bit someone, he would run
to the back of the stall and shake as if possessed by Demons which made him do
it.
The behavior of these kinds of horses makes little sense to
themselves. And no
sense to a sane person.
Therefore, it is difficult to manipulate their behavior during the
standard techniques of operant conditioning.
We recommend that you leave the crazy ones to those who are crazy enough
to fool with them.
Rearing is a more common undesirable behavior when performed by a riding
horse. Since not too many riders choose
to ignore rearing, the standard response is to try to eliminate the problem by
using some form of punishment.
One crude response is to bash the rearing horse with a stick between the
ears. In spite of the popularity of
this response, it doesn't always work.
Some horses have a difficult time associating the lick on the head to
the rearing. After all
the horse didn't use his head to rear up. He used his legs and his back. Unless the horse makes the
association, the punishment meaningless.
Even if the horse does make the connection between the hit and the
rearing his response may be to go higher to avoid the punishment. In fact, the
horse may learn that if he flips over completely, the rider will not have time
to deliver the blow.
At best, hitting a horse over the head will lead to head shyness. Every
time the horse catches a glimpse of movement from above he will dodge to escape
the hits he expects to receive.
We believe rearing is best eliminated by training an incompatible
behavior. Although rearing can develop into a life threatening dilemma, it
begins in stages.
Many times it begins like this. A
naive trainer/rider cannot get the horse to perform a specific movement so they
applied more pressure. Since the horse
didn't understand what was being asked in the first place, he feels like he is
being ridden into a vice. He can't go
forward without more pressure being applied to his head and mouth. He can not
go backward or sideways without being driven by the heels of the rider. The
horse becomes frustrated and begins to look for a way to escape. The only
choices the horse perceives he has left are to either rear up or lay down.
It is easy to defuse this situation.
Relax the horse, remove the pressure and, then, take time to analyze the
problem and come up with a new solution.
Most the times, this doesn't happen but this does: The horse chooses to
try and escape by rearing.
The first time a horse rears with a rider on its back it does not rear
and paw his front feet into the air. On
the first attempt, the horse lifts just a couple of inches off the ground. The rider, taken by surprise, releases the
pressure. Too late! Even though the rider quickly regained control, rearing was
rewarded.
Regrouping the rider reapplies the pressure but now ready for the horse
to try and rear. The horse, like any
well-conditioned animal tries again to escape from the pressure by lifting its
front feet a few inches of ground.
This time the rider continues the pressure. So the horse goes a little higher ...and
higher ...and higher - always looking for the height that will be rewarded.
Here is an excellent example of a horse being rewarded by the release of
pressure through which it is learning to rear higher and higher using
successive approximations.
Unfortunately, the behavior being shaped is not acceptable.
Once a horse learns that rearing intimidates riders, it can be a
difficult behavior to eliminate.
However, somewhere between the first low rear and the higher dangerous
rear, an incompatible behavior can easily be taught.
When a horse rises up, he is very susceptible to be pulled off balance.
Snatching him to the side before he has totally committed to the rear will
force him to either fall sideways or return to the ground. Pulling the reins to
the side instead of holding him back will also prevent him from charging
forward. We do not want to teach him to
substitute charging forward for rearing.
Once on the ground, the trainer should continue to circle the horse
until the horse calms down. In no time,
the rear can be changed into a spin - a much safer move to ride. We have now
traded a dangerous and intimidating behavior that cannot be tolerated (rearing
or flipping) for one that the trainer can control (spinning).
Punishment causes refractory behavior towards learning.
Therefore, we believe using punishment as a teaching tool should be the last
choice.
Training an incompatible behavior presents the opportunity to turn a bad
situation into a positive learning experience without the negative side effects
associated with punishment. Punishment causes a horse to be nervous and
refractory towards learning. Therefore, we believe using punishment as a
teaching tool should be the last choice.
Many years ago, a young calf-roper from
To speed the training process along the young horseman had developed a
rather crude but effective technique to get the horse to stop and work the
rope. He had a large spring-loaded rat trap, the kind which releases a loop of
wire around the rat's neck when the cheese is lifted. He had modified the trap
by sawing off the half of the board where the wire loop was designed to hit.
The remaining half was then tied into the brow band of the horse's bridle. If
the trigger was sprung, the wire loop would smack the horse on the forehead.
The trigger was redesigned by running a string from the cheese holder to
a weight. When the weight was placed in the stirrup the trap was set.
When the young rider roped a calf, he would holler "Whoa" as
he jumped down to tie the calf. As his boot left the stirrup, it would cause
the weight to drop, setting off the trap. The wire loop would plant right
between the horse's eyes, reminding him to stop and back up.
The first time this machinery was applied to this high-headed,
high-spirited animal, it did the job. The horse backed up real fast. Since it
worked so well, the young roper decided to use it every time. It only took a
few times for the horse to learn that no matter how hard he stopped and ran
back, he still got whacked in the head.
(And, they say, horses are dummies.)
Soon he refused to go into the roping box. The horse had learned that
chasing calves was a painful thing to do and he was going to try his best NOT
to do it. The only way to get him in the box was to have one person lead him
while another whipped him from behind.
Forced to participate, he knew he could not escape the pain if he
stopped. As soon as the rope fell around the calf's neck the horse ran wild,
refusing to stop no matter how hard his rider pulled on the reins. He wasn't
about to let this guy get off.
This created double trouble for the calf tied hard and fast to a runaway
horse. As the horse ran past the calf, the whiplash was strong enough to throw
the horse off stride. The horse slipped down, throwing his rider to the ground
and releasing the rat trap. When the trap popped, the horse got up and ran
backwards over top of the roper.
The calf, still tied to the horn, began to run in circles, wrapping the
roper and his horse into a well-tied bundle. Now, no one likes being wound up
in a rope, but it's particularly uncomfortable when you're wound up with a
1,200-pound half-crazed horse and a terrified 300-pound calf. What a wreck!
All punishment training does not end in quite as dramatic a scene as
this example, but the point remains the same. There are serious side effects
from using punishment as the primary training tool. It should be avoided
whenever possible.