This is what I had intended to share regarding desensitization and intent. Leah asked me to write something about desensitization of horses. So here goes. When I was a kid most of the time when people talked about desensitizing a horse they were talking about sacking out. This involved constantly exposing a horse to something that scared him into an early grave until he got use to it. Often horses were tied up or hobbled to restrict their flight response and then flooded with whatever scared them. The flooding would only stop when the horse stopped trying to flee or avoid the stressor. All horses experience some form of desensitization at some point in their life. For example, saddling a horse for the first time involves tying down a hunk of leather onto his back, which stays there until he is calm enough for the trainer to be able to get it off again. This is a form of sacking out or desensitization. There are lots of other examples such as fitting a rug (blanket) for the first time or being locked into a racing barrier or being caught in a fence. I know a few people who tie horses to a tree for hours at a time and let them struggle until they give up. It’s sometimes called the “tree of knowledge”. For many trainers, desensitization or sacking out involves making a horse stand still while cracking a stock whip around them or throwing tarps over them or even lunging them with bags of plastic bottles tied to the saddle or surcingle. These are all flooding techniques designed to kill the flight response inside a horse. But I want to be clear that the flight response cannot be killed. It can be severely dampened, but because it is an integral part of a horse’s survival instinct it can never be eradicated. The flight response is probably the strongest instinct a horse has – possibly stronger than the need to herd or eat or reproduce. So any attempt to kill the flight response in a horse is futile because there will always be something that brings it to the surface. It’s not possible to expose a horse to everything that might evoke a flight response. It’s a life-long job to get a horse to not worry about everything. As trainers we have two choices about how we approach desensitizing horses. The first is to keep presenting scary things to them until they learn to ignore them. This is what the lady in the video below is trying to do. The second approach is to teach a horse NOT to ignore the object, but to learn that it is okay and won’t jeopardize his safety. On the surface they seem like almost the same objectives, but they are not. Teaching a horse to ignore something that worries him is fraught with trouble. It relies on the horse shutting down to some extent and tuning out the existence of the scary object. He doesn’t feel any better about it, it’s just that we have taught him that reacting to the object is futile and only means we will keep exposing him to it. So he learns to shut his feeling inside and try to pretend he could live through the experience if he doesn’t over react. If you watch the video clip below, this is exactly the method that is being used. There are plenty of signs that the horse feels badly, but he is getting ready to give up and become resigned to his lot in life. In my opinion, if we continue to expose a horse to something that he feels might get him killed we are basically telling him that we don’t care if he lives or dies. He is learning that his safety has no importance to use. That’s why helping him to feel better about the object rather just giving up the fight as futile is so important in our relationship with him. The alternative approach is to teach a horse that what scares him is not so scary afterall. This can only be done if we ensure he does not try to tune out the scary object. We require him to deal with it and explore it rather than pretend it does not exist. Let me give you an example from my own experience. I was sent a troubled horse that was over reactive about the rider’s legs touching her sides. She would shudder inside and scoot forward or jump whenever she felt my legs against her. After playing around on the ground for a while I rode her. I pretended I was the clumsiest rider ever and would swing my legs back and forth against her. At first I eased into it, but in time I became even clumsier and more careless with my legs. I looked like a kid kicking my legs on a swing. I rode her around the arena at a walk, trot, canter, back up, leg yield – while all the time I kept rubbing her sides with my legs. If she scooted or jumped I ignored it and asked her to keep going as I stroked her neck. If she got really panicked I eased off and as she got more confident I became even stupider. Anybody watching must have thought I was having a seizure. But while I was doing all that with my legs I was also using my seat and legs to influence her thought to go forward. If I applied my legs to her and she didn’t listen I firmed up until she got the idea that sometimes my legs mean she needs to think about going forward. I wasn’t just bumping her with my legs trying to get her to ignore me – she needed to always be aware of what my legs were doing. There were times when I bumped her with my legs and she needed to change to realize that my legs were not to be ignored. I was teaching her that sometimes my legs mean ‘go’ and sometimes I am just a clumsy rider and they mean nothing. But never was she to ignore my legs. Instead she just needed to learn to not be worried by them. Probably a more relevant example for some of you is desensitizing horses to a tarpaulin (or something similar). I know lots of people do this. When I am using a tarp around a horse I want him to deal with it and not tune it out. So during my tarp ‘sacking out’, I might flap the tarp in the air and lay if over my horse etc and help him to not feel the need to flee from it. But I will intersperse that with using the tarp to direct him forward or sideways or backing. Sometimes the tarp will have no meaning and other times it will be used to direct my horse. He will learn to feel my intent for when the tarp is talking to him and he needs to make a change; and when it is just flapping in the breeze and he can keep doing what he is doing. But on ALL occasions I need him focused enough to be aware of what my intent is with the tarp. If I sack him out to teach him to ignore the tarp he won’t know when I want him to response to it because his focus will be elsewhere. There is a big difference between training a horse not to react and training him to feel there is no need to be worried. I know a lot of trainers spend time using desensitizing techniques like the one shown in the video clip below, but it’s not for me. I hope when you watch that video you can see the problems that lady is causing with her sacking out method. I view methods like this counter productive and create problems that will later bite most riders in the bum at some point.
Posted on: Sun, 04 Aug 2013 18:47:29 +0000