10 reasons why you should never punish aggression
Punishment is ineffective and can even be counterproductive when dealing with aggressive behaviours
In the previous two articles we looked at the purposes and causes of aggression in horses. We learned that aggression is a natural and normal set of behaviours that horses use to communicate. Now it’s time to get practical. Aggressive behaviour in horses can be dangerous and we need to know how to deal with it safely and effectively. In this article I will explain the cardinal rule of dealing with aggression: don’t punish it!
What is punishment?
The advice to not punish unwanted behaviour may seem a bit counterintuitive at first, but before I dive into the explanation, let’s take some time to define punishment. In scientific terms, it simply means any consequence that makes a behaviour less likely to occur again. You touch a hot stove > you burn yourself > you will probably not touch a hot stove again.
There are two types of punishment. One type means that something unpleasant is added after the behaviour, like in the example with the stove where the burning sensation is enough to make you not touch it again. The other type means that something pleasant is taken away after the behaviour. An example of that would be a parent revoking internet privileges for their teenager after they missed curfew.
These same principles also apply to our horses. The most common type of punishment used in horse training is the first type: adding something unpleasant after an unwanted behaviour. These unpleasant things can range from raising our voice to yanking on the lead rope or hitting them with a whip.
This type of punishment is rarely called punishment. Instead, we tend to use euphemisms such as correct, reprimand, re-establish respect, show who’s boss, stand our ground, and so on. But if the purpose is to make an unwanted behaviour occur less frequently, it’s punishment.
Why is punishment ineffective?
It’s not.
Punishment is not a method invented by scientists – it is a natural process through which living things learn to adjust their behaviour. Think about it; people who miss their bus (unpleasant) will leave their house earlier the next time around, and dogs that get stung by a bee (unpleasant) will avoid that part of the garden in the future.
The problem with punishment is not that it’s ineffective in general. The problem is that it becomes ineffective – and sometimes outright counterproductive – when we use it to train animals.
Here’s why:
It is difficult to use punishment correctly. For a horse to associate an unpleasant experience with a specific behaviour, the unpleasant experience needs to follow immediately after the behaviour. We humans can often connect behaviours and consequences after a long time because we have more advanced cognitive abilities, but horses need the immediacy. As soon as the punishment is separated from the behaviour by even a few seconds, the horse may no longer make the connection and we risk inadvertently punishing a different behaviour than we intended to. As our ability to observe subtle behaviours is poor-to-awful (see no. 2 below) and our reaction time hopelessly slow, we are very bad at delivering punishment at the right moment for it to be effective. With aggressive behaviours, for example, we may inadvertently punish the moment the horse stops being aggressive and turns away from us instead.
It is hard to tell which behaviour we are punishing. Aggression is not one specific behaviour, it’s an umbrella term for many different behaviours, displayed in a complex chain with often very subtle expressions. Because of our poor observation and reaction skills, we humans struggle to separate the specific behaviours from each other. This means that we never know which behaviour we are punishing. Take biting for example: are we punishing turning the head away, wrinkling the nostrils, putting the ears back, extending the neck towards us, opening the mouth to bite, closing the mouth around our arm, or letting go and withdrawing from us?
Punishing horses for showing warning signals will make them stop warning us. Horses never attack out of nowhere. A bite or kick is preceded by warning signals of increasing intensity that we have either overlooked or chosen to ignore. If we look at the Equine Ladder of Aggression, most of the aggressive behaviours we punish through raised voices, jerking on the lead rope, or smacking are in the middle of the scale: aggressive facial expressions and bite or kick threats. If we succeed in punishing these warning signals, horses will display them less, which means we will take away an important line of communication between them and us and risk having horses that go straight to full-out attacks instead.
Punishing aggressive behaviour will not change the underlying emotion. Horses don’t choose to behave aggressively; they are driven to behave aggressively by their emotions (the same is true for us). Research indicates that the neural pathways that mediate anger in animals are old structures in the brain, very similar to ours. Even if we try to suppress the behaviour through punishment, the emotion will remain and find other ways of manifesting. The aggression will be directed at another person, at another horse, or become generalised and directed at everyone in the vicinity.
Punishment can make aggression worse. Punishment doesn’t just fail to address the underlying emotion – it can make it worse. Two main causes of aggression in horses are pain and fear. By design, punishment will lead to both, for example when we give horses a smack with our hand or a whip, giving the horse even more cause to behave aggressively towards us. In addition, punishment can lead to hyper-reactivity which can manifest as generalised aggression (see reason no. 10).
Aggressive behaviour is often our own fault. A lot of the aggression we see in domestic horses is caused by the way we keep and handle them, for example social isolation, social instability, hunger, and limited resources. Additionally, two important causes of aggression are pain and fear. Punishing horses for being in pain or afraid, or for behaviours that we have created in the first place, is highly unethical.
Punishment damages our relationship. Because the way we apply punishment is imprecise (see no. 1 and 2), horses often learn to associate the unpleasant experience with us rather than with their own behaviour. By using punishment repeatedly, we risk teaching our horses that humans are unpredictable and unpleasant, and they will start to fear us.
Punishment is inherently abusive. For punishment to be effective in suppressing a specific behaviour, it needs to be strong enough to override the motivation to perform the behaviour and be applied every time the behaviour is displayed. These conditions also make it inherently abusive. Because aggression is about survival, horses are normally very motivated to display aggressive behaviours when they have cause for it. This means that the punishment needs to be very unpleasant to override this motivation. And because we keep horses in suboptimal environments that give them many reasons to behave aggressively, punishment will need to be frequent. As horses habituate to punishment with time, it will need to increase in intensity as well, which can eventually lead to learned helplessness (see reason no. 10).
Punishment has a negative impact on horses’ ability to learn. Punishment may stop horses from doing certain things, but it gives them no information about what they should do instead. Any new behaviours we get when using punishment are simply avoidance or flight responses when the horse tries to escape from us or the situation. In a worst-case scenario we can even trigger a fear reaction to a place, a piece of equipment, or even ourselves that is strong enough to become permanent. Because punishment triggers fear, it can interfere with subsequent training because fear inhibits horses’ ability to respond to training. In addition, horses that are frequently punished will stop trying new behaviours because they will be afraid of being punished for them, which will also make them less responsive to training.
Punishment can lead to life-long fear, neurosis, and learned helplessness. Because of the strong emotional component, punishment can have long-term emotional and behavioural fallout that is very difficult to rehabilitate. When exposed to frequent or unpredictable punishment horses will become either hyper-reactive, for example overly fearful or aggressive, or stop responding altogether and descend into a depression-like, shut down state, often referred to as learned helplessness.
In this post I have focused specifically on aggression, but these reasons apply to other behaviours as well. Bottom line is this: punishment is an ineffective and unethical training method with severe welfare implications, and we should strive to avoid it in favour of other, more ethical and effective management and training approaches.
But what should we do instead if our horse becomes aggressive? That will be the topic of the next post, so stay tuned!
I believe most humans use punishment with horses because of their own fear and/or anger in a given situation. Any training technique based in our own negative emotions like fear and anger can lead to very negative consequences.