Equine Behaviour and Learning Patterns

We can encourage the horse’s decision-making ability by employing the horse’s motivating factors as stimuli and noting his response. We can either encourage or discourage his response based on what we want him to learn.

As a prey animal, a horse is always aware of potential danger and, given a choice, will remove itself from a fearful situation. Many domestic horses do not have that choice as a viable option. If a horse has no way to deal with fear, he will learn less effectively because he is sincerely afraid, and no animal learns well under that kind of stress. Horses that form a fear-based learning pattern will be more reactive and often become over-achievers. They learn not because they feel good, but because they are afraid of what might happen to them if they do not perform. They are essentially working under duress.

A horse’s ability to make a decision is often overridden by his instinct to react first and think second. The more afraid a horse becomes, the less capable he is of making a decision about how best to deal with the situation he finds himself in. The decision-making process needs to be developed, because it is not a tool that horses rely upon to keep themselves alive. It is often a secondary response that if developed can bypass the horse’s survival instincts and allow him to process information presented to him. The horse can then decide to do what we ask, or he can decide not to. If the horse is consistently wrong, even though he is thinking about what we want, then we are not giving him enough information to come up with the right decision. Although horses do think and make decisions, they think linearly. Once your horse gets a thought in his head, you need to change the stimulus to get a different thought. A horse always thinks he is right. If he is incorrect based on what you want, then you asked him the wrong thing. Change your question and you might get the answer you want.

Understanding how horses behave, learn and think is essential to development of a training program that is tailor-made to the individual horse. Behaviour and training patterns are just general guidelines that should be followed, but not always relied upon. The individual nature of the horse’s personality, combined with his individual life experience, will often alter his behaviour and learning patterns.