The horse-human bond: why training methods matter

A growing body of scientific evidence suggests that the training methods we choose affect our relationship with our horses.

The horse-human relationship is the stuff of myth and legend. From Alexander the Great and Bucephalus to Alec Ramsey and the Black Stallion, the indefinable bond between horse and rider has been at the core of our storytelling.

But storytelling can only give us the human experience. For it to be a relationship, we need to take the horse’s perspective into account as well. What do horses think of us?

How horses feel about people seems to be influenced by the training method they’re exposed to. Photo by Jeromey Balderrama.

We can’t ask horses how they feel about us, we can only observe and interpret their behaviour. One basic way of differentiating between positive and negative emotions is to see whether an individual will approach or retreat from another individual. This works for both humans and animals. Think about it: a person walks into the room. If you like them, you’ll go to them, but if you dislike them, you’ll try to avoid them.

The same principle can be generalized to a whole species, too. Say you’re a dog person but not a cat person. If you enter a room with a dog, you’ll approach it and try to interact with it. But if you enter a room with a cat, you’ll ignore it.

There are a few different ways of testing this approach/avoidance response in horses. One of those is called the motionless human test, where a horse is left alone in an enclosed space with an unfamiliar person, who stands completely still and doesn’t interact with the horse. Whether the horse chooses to approach that person or not is an indication of how it feels about people in general.

What are some factors that affect how horses perceive us? Training method is high on the list. After all, most of the interactions we have with our horses are within the context of us actively training them, whether that’s in-hand or under saddle. It therefore makes sense that the way we train them will have an impact on our relationship.

Horse training can crudely be divided into two main categories:

• negative reinforcement, such as traditional dressage or natural horsemanship, which utilizes something unpleasant like physical pressure to make the horse work to avoid it

• positive reinforcement, such as clicker training, which uses something pleasant like food to make the horse work to achieve it

While most traditional horse training uses negative reinforcement (think pressure-release), positive reinforcement is becoming increasingly more popular in the horse world. So far, there is limited research into the long-term effects of the different methods and there’s currently a lot of debate whether it’s OK to combine positive and negative reinforcement in horse training or not.

For my Master’s degree research, I wanted to see whether adding regular positive reinforcement training to the daily interactions between horses and owners would improve their relationship. The study, “Regular positive reinforcement training increases contact-seeking behaviour in horses” (Larssen & Roth, 2022), was recently published in Applied Animal Behaviour Science. It’s open access, so it’s available for everyone to read.

For the study we recruited 40 privately owned horses that had not been trained with food rewards before. Half of them were asked to just keep doing their normal negative reinforcement-based training, regardless of discipline or ambition. The other half were also asked to keep doing their normal negative reinforcement-based training, but in addition do at least 20 minutes of positive reinforcement training a week, for eight to nine weeks.

I had all horses do the motionless human test, with me as the unfamiliar person, once before the start of the study to get a baseline level and then once after to compare the results. Just as expected, the horses that did regular positive reinforcement training increased the time they spent having physical contact with me (nuzzling, sniffing, scratching etc.), indicating that their attitude towards people in general had improved!

In science, it’s important to be careful when drawing conclusions from a single study as there are many limiting factors that can influence the results. However, these results are supported by previous studies that have found the same thing: horses trained with positive reinforcement seem to want to be closer to people.

It makes sense. When using positive reinforcement, we create positive associations between ourselves and the food or scratches or other rewards we offer. Being close to us means an opportunity for our horses to gain something they want. In contrast, when using negative reinforcement, we teach our horses to move away from us and avoid us, because being around us is associated with the unpleasant sensations of aversive pressure.

So, is the closeness a sign of positive emotions or simply of the horses’ looking for treats? Both and neither. It’s a false dichotomy. Positive emotions are triggered by pleasant experiences. These don’t necessarily have to involve food, but food is essential to our survival and a great way of providing our horses with pleasant experiences.

We all love hearing our horses munch away at their hay in the evenings or taking them out to graze by the road. We put an apple in their crib to give them a nice surprise or offer a sugar cube at the end of a great lesson. Giving our horses food as a way of showing appreciation and love is the most natural thing ever, because that’s how we interact with each other, too.

Intimate family dinners, going out for coffee and gossip, a business lunch. There’s no significant human event that isn’t accompanied by food, whether that’s a wedding, a wake, a first date, or a business meeting. Food is how we build relationships with each other.

I think it makes perfect sense to utilize the bonding power of food in the horse-human relationship too. It makes sense for us, because it’s part of our cultural heritage, and it makes sense for the horses, because we become providers of positive experiences.

There are many other benefits of leading a reward-centred life with your horse, but they are beyond the scope of this post. We’ll get to them some other day! For now, the key takeaway is that you don’t have to change your entire training philosophy to improve your relationship with your horse. By incorporating rewards – whether they be food, scratches, or other things your horse likes – into your training you can build more positive experiences, and these will in turn pay off as a stronger bond.