“What is Learning Theory?”

In this episode, we break down Learning Theory, what it is, why it matters, and how it shows up every day in our interactions with horses (whether we realise it or not).

We explore the core principles behind how animals learn, including reinforcement, punishment, shaping behaviour, and emotional associations. Most importantly, we talk about how understanding these concepts can make us clearer, kinder, and more effective in our training.

If you’ve ever wondered why a behaviour happens, why something works (or doesn’t), or how to build training that truly supports your horse’s wellbeing, this episode is for you.

Voice note your questions on WhatsApp to +353 85 143 8688 to have your questions answered on the Podcast.

Meet Your Hosts

Barbara Hardman (Bright Horse Equiation)
www.brighthorse.ie

📧barbara.j.hardman@brighthorse.ie ☎️+353 85 143 8688

 Jen Nash (The Equine Method)
www.theequinemethod.co.uk

📧 Info@TheEquineMethod.co.uk ☎️+44 7902920923

Transcript

0:00

That we can only support learning when the horse is in, as a friend of mine says, a trainable state, which I love as a phrase. I say, if anybody's had to do any public speaking, that's a really stressful situation. That's not a good place. And we've talked about that for setting your horse up for success. It's not a good place to be able to learn in that situation. Standing in front of a crowd, you're not going to find learning in that situation. That's why we do rehearsal. We understand that for ourselves. We practice our speech, we do it all, we have all our notes, we we get it all right. Same a dressage test, we learn our dressage test because we know in the moment that's not the place to learn. Now it's time to perform. And it's it's the same as well for our horses. We have jumped around all over the place. This, I feel like this is such a big topic. We could do like several episodes just on it because I feel like we just barely scratched the surface, Jen. We have. So I think it's about time we covered what is learning theory and you know, how do we actually apply that to training horses? So, what's learning theory then? I'm gonna put you on the spot. There's no messing around with you today. So learning theory is basically that scientific concept that has been tried and tested over many, many years and applied to all mammalian species, to my knowledge, or at least it should be able to be applied to all mammalian species. I think I think I feel like I read this paper, or maybe it just came up in conversation one day, that you can potentially train plants as well, with negative reinforcement, for example, which sort of makes sense. Well, yeah, I suppose and the now we're straight down a rabbit hole before we've even before we've even answered the question. Yeah, because I'm like, well, if you if you applied pressure to the plant via like not providing it with, say, like water, put those environmental stresses on it, what's the plant going to do? They're going to look for other adaptive strategies, you know what I mean? Um, whether it's light or water, and if that pressure is put on them, but then you're kind of getting into Tim Bergen's four questions and functional behavior, and that's a whole different podcast. We'll we'll uh we'll sideline that. So getting back to it, learning theory. Learning theory is I'm sure people have hopefully people are getting familiar with that quadrant of learning theory, where you have four boxes in a bit of a rectangle or a square, and you'll see that there's a plus and a minus, and there'll be quadrants for positive and quadrants for negative, and within that we have positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, positive punishment, and negative punishment. And these all work together in pretty much every aspect of life, even if you don't know that they're happening. And it's called learning theory, even though these are reinforcements, because they fundamentally drive a lot of the behaviors that we all do and our horses do, and it leads, depending on the punishment or the reinforcer, it makes our behaviors either more likely to happen in the future or less likely to happen in the future. So reinforcers try to encourage behaviors from happening again, more likely. Punishment, so positive punishment, negative punishment, is trying to reduce the chances of that behavior again. You know, it's punishing, so don't do that, you know, lessening the chances. Yeah, so learning theory has it's sort of a field of psychology and behavior, and it's an education as well, like it's it's applicable to us and our own learning dynamics. It's been around for a very, very long time. So the very early 90s, there this is researchers were just fascinated by it. And before learning theory, and I'm sure everybody's familiar with Pavlov's dogs, there was instrumental conditioning, which sort of started this chain of events, and then it got fine-tuned, researched more, and you know, we've the better part of nearly not quite a hundred years, which is kind of scary when I say that, almost that amount of time developing that. So a lot of people can get hung up on the idea that going like, yeah, but it's just a theory. They jump onto that kind of well, it's learning theory, like the theory of evolution. And I just wanted to address that really quickly, um, just to explain the kind of the differences in biology compared to say like mathematics or physics, where we don't see in mathematics or physics, we don't see them use the word theory. And that's because biology works slightly differently. We can't quite unbake a cake in biology, so we can't sort of we can't unbake that cake. So, cake example, I've got my eggs, I've got my flour, and you know, I put it all together, I mix all up, and I put it in the oven and I have a cake. We cannot then deconstruct that cake to get back the egg. Okay. So technically, baking that cake is a theory. We still know we can bake the cake, right? We still know that they are the components that go into that cake. We still know it's egg, it's flour, it's milk, it's butter, it's water, it's oil, that's what goes into it. But we cannot go back and deconstruct it. So it's the theory of baking a cake. And the thing is with biology and life sciences is that there's a there's a messy nuance to it all. We still know that those are the ingredients to bake a cake. We know that that's how we make a cake. We know that it tastes nice, it's great, it's fabulous, there's our cake. However, if I make a cake and I am laissez-faire when it comes to cooking, whereas I have had Jen's banana muffins, they are fabulous. Jen is far more precise. We take the same ingredients, we take the same bake a cake theory, we go and we make that cake, they're gonna taste slightly differently. They're going to be cooked slightly differently. We might do the temperature, we might have the cookers slightly differently. It doesn't mean that's not how to bake a cake, but there's going to be variations within it. And this is where we can kind of get hung up a little bit because if I apply learning theory to my horse and Jen applies it to her horse, there's going to be variations within that animal. There's going to be variations on the day because they're all living, breathing creatures. It doesn't mean the theory doesn't work and it isn't correct. It just means that there's going to be variations in biology. Whereas with mathematics and physics, we can actually prove things. And it's the only science is mathematics where we can actually say it's proven or proof. Because if I go two plus two equals four, I can then go four divided by two is two. And you're back down. Yeah, I'm loving it. You can you can backwards compat it like so you can take it and you can reverse it, and you can do that with everything in maths. I'm sure mathematicians will jump on and go, actually, there's some really, really challenging theorems. I'm not a mathematician, it's just uh to demonstrate the biology. I've loved that. I've loved that analogy. I'm gonna I'm gonna steal that. That's why we say it's a proof, and it's proven in mathematics. Biology has nuances and and tiki bits. So that's why when we say the theory of evolution, the learning theory, when we say the word theory, it's because scientists are very pedantic, mathematicians like are the only ones who can really say proof and proven, and we have to acknowledge the variation within biology by saying the word theory. I love that. I've never I've never heard anyone I've never even heard you explain it like that before. So that was really nice. Everything was really I I constantly have to explain it like that to people, mainly because I think like because I studied zoology, it's very heavily based on evolution, you know, you know, and all of those genetics, evolutionary trees, and a lot of that concept, particularly when I studied, was still very controversial, and people really struggled with the idea of being like, oh, but like it's just a theory of evolution, and I had to defend it a few times. So yeah, it it's trying to like explain it that way, and I find it's a really accessible way to understand it as well, and also it applies to our horses and and understanding that there are nuances and that it's a bell curve, you know. You know, you you have a spectrum of animals, and a spectrum of people, and a spectrum of people, and they will respond differently. Um, and it doesn't it doesn't mean that learning theory won't work, it just means that some of some adaptive strategies are going to work better for others. If you have, I mean we talked about in the was it the first episode about sort of biting insects or rain being negative reinforcement. Oh yes. So if your horses are in the field and the insects are biting, that is either, you know, like a form of negative reinforcement because it's putting pressure on the horses to go and seek shelter, and they'll perform the behavior until the pressure is removed and the flies are removed, and they that that behavior will be reinforced. This is where I can seek shelter from the biting flies or the trench or rain. If you have a horse that is very upset, like the individual, right? So the individual itself will be like, I really hate flies, they really upset me. I'm really like thin-skinned, like it's and I don't mean that in a like in a in a thin-skinned kind of way. I mean, like, I react really badly to biting flies, so I lose I lose my mind, whereas David's okay with it. Um, so I'm gonna be more motivated by that negative reinforcement than maybe someone who's not as motivated. So that's the individual spectrum. And when we're studying animal behavior, we take a we try and take a normal population. So all this research takes, say, horses who are really frustrated by flies and horses that are not so bothered. Yeah. And when we do research, we try and take a spectrum and a normal distribution of data so we have that bell curve so that we can actually say conclusive things about how they learn. And that's really, really important. We don't just pick all the horses that hate flies and study them because that would skew our data. And that's really important to understand as well that these conclusions that we come to in learning theory, the science takes, you know, Jen perfectly baking the cake, me botching the cake, and and studies all of those together to be able to reach conclusions. Yeah, and I think I mean this is a slightly dangerous, tricky comment to make, but I think you know, we talk about research a lot, and like you say, it's taking a normal distribution of a population. So say that we can say that a certain technique works for a significant significant um increase in success rates for this particular technique, and say the number is 94%. There's still six percent of horses that are in. Those still those six horses still exist. Um and I do see this, like probably in a weekly occurrence where we've got a game plan, we've got the evidence, and go right, this this formulation, this uh this environmental setup, these cues, these predictors, these reinforcers, the majority of time this works, the science likes it, we're gonna go with it. And every now and again there will be a horse who just doesn't engage, and it's just like either finds it really worrying or doesn't find it motivating, and it's just like, oh, there you are. You're one of the outliers. Yeah, you're one of the six percent. Because we can't study all the factors, like when you're you know, I know we're kind of diving into the science and and the research, but I think it's important um when we're talking about this topic, when you're designing an experiment, you have to try and control a lot of those factors so that you can reach solid conclusions and that there's nothing in and there that's a confounding factor, which can a confounding factor is just something that could interfere with your main question. So if we want to ask the question, you know, horses learn best through punishment, positive punishment, and we want to ask that question, we want to make sure that there's no other confounding factors in there that would interfere with that question that we're asking and give us the wrong answer. So there's always going to be an element of again, we call it noise that that six percent as Den talks about, like in the data, that we have to try and and work with. And that's why science is always changing and developing. So we might we might do one research paper um and a couple of years later we we repeat a similar amount of similar research and we find that it changes a little bit, and then we do it again and we develop and we tweak it so the more data we have, we can make more solid conclusions. Um, because you know, science, science doesn't stop with one answer, because if it you know, to quote Darr O'Brien, if uh you know, if science had all the answers, it would just it would just stop. It doesn't, it's a it's always a constant polishing. Um there was something you said there when you're talking about say like obviously us working with clients and supporting their horses based on the research and the science. This is where we have sort of we have learning theory and animal behavior and what applies to the the population, and then a separate science and a nuance, and this is where not I want to say like the kind of the art comes in, if that makes sense, and then you have applied animal behaviour. Yeah, I think I think this is where they just the experience and the skill of being what was it you said to me the other being agile, being adaptive, and being agile in itself is a skill, like you're you're not going against the research, you're not going against the science, but you are taking the most applicable bits for that horse, so it's knowing that that reinforcer, okay, that works for that 94%. This is not working for this horse. So instead of like throwing everything out the window and just going rah at the horse, you can go, okay, I also know these are options, or these are options. Let me re-evaluate what is the behaviour, what's the function, what's maintaining the behaviour, are we coming at it at the wrong angle? So you're still coming to you're still coming to your final conclusion based on evidence, based on learning theory, based on what we know, yeah, but it's having that skill and knowledge to be adaptive and go, okay, the direct route wasn't the one for this horse. We actually need to take the the side route and we need to go over the bridge, through the tunnel, round the mountain. Yeah, and and this is it, and like there's there's so there's so many nuances in it because I think a lot of a lot of people go, I'm just I'm just doing positive reinforcement. And so positive reinforcement is an additive. We I think we talked about previous episodes as part of learning theory. Well, I was just about to say, should we should we just quickly define, you know, talked about the quadrant and we've we've chatted on. Yeah. Should we should we go through it? So people for just for the benefit of anyone listening. So you crack on, you um you had positive reinforcement. Yeah, so positive reinforcement being an additive, so uh a horse performs a behavior that we want, and we provide an additive. So additives can be anything from we're very familiar with food rewards, um, so anything that is uh polar mint, a treat, carrot, hay, grass, all that sort of stuff, an additive. So food rewards are very commonly used. Uh they can also be scratches and something enjoyable for the horse. So scratches are Jen always says a superpower, and I think I used that word several times yesterday. I agree. Scratches are definitely a superpower when it comes to our horses, and we do the same with our dogs as well, and we give them a cuddle. And social contact. Social contact being a social species is also an additive. Um, being around other horses can be can also be positive reinforcement and reinforce behavior. So then negative reinforcement is removal of a pressure or an adversive. I think it's really important to understand as well. Like, again, scientists are very pedantic, so we refer to it as an aversive, and that is the terminology that's used in the the science. But negative reinforcement, technically speaking, for example, and I use this example a lot. If you really need to go to the bathroom, your body is putting pressure on you. It doesn't feel very good. If anybody's done a long car journey, I think we all have, it does not feel good to want to go to the bathroom and can't pull in. That is technically an adversive, right? And and you will perform the behavior and it feels good to go to the bathroom because it's a relief, yeah, but it will reinforce the behavior, you know, um, and we'll find those service stations and all the rest of it. And that's something that we actually use when it comes to like say dog training, when we want to get them to go to the bathroom, you know, what's reinforced would be repeated, they need to go to the bathroom, we go outside, and the and the relief is is rewarding. So when we say adversive, it's really important that that's not that we we're not demonizing anybody for using negative reinforcement, that's just the science that requires that we like we call it an adversive, and hopefully that example explains that. We just for the benefit of anyone listening, very much support the use of correct negative reinforcement. I use it every day with my horse. We use it of each other as humans, the environment, it happens all the time. Like you say, the word aversive, the word negative, they do have those less desirable connotations, but that's just language. It is, and it's actually it's Andrew McLean, is it McLean? McLean, I can pronounce it, who has said it beautifully in one of his presentations at the ISIS conference, and I really enjoyed the way he said it. Is that this is the beauty about learning theory, it they don't work in isolation and they all kind of they all kind of blend together because technically speaking, if you're hungry, that's negative reinforcement, and if you're provided with uh like an additive and given an apple or given something, then that's both positive reinforcement but also negative reinforcement because it relieves the pressure of food. They do not necessarily work in isolation, and when animals are trialing and learning different behaviors, and we've seen this in the research, like people think we're just using one on its own, and it doesn't quite work that way. So, like negative punishment, for example, if an animal performs a behavior that we don't want and the and something is removed, so they're they're punished for it. And this happens when animals are say trialing, you know, trialing different things, they're trying to sort of like say animals in the wild, like from a zoological context, you know, if we have a lion or a tiger, you know, and they perform a wrong jump to get their prey, they miss the prey, and the prey is removed, and that's a negative punishment, and that still happens in a learning cycle. And then in the same moment, they might go, okay, well, if if I jump this way, then maybe I'll get the antelope. And then they performed another behavior and it's positive reinforcement because they've gotten the antelope. And that all happens in that learning quadrant as well. So it's it's it's important to understand that learning doesn't appear in isolation, that we're very fluid animals, all uh all mammals are very are very fluid, very clever, adapted for their environment, and all of those quadrants together, and using that same example with the the lion as well, say they did that jump and they got gored in the side by the antelope with the horns, that's positive punishment because they performed that behavior to jump and they got, you know, it's like, oh well, I'll be careful then next time. There are important survival mechanisms that are in place to help the animal learn because if I get gored by an antelope, I could get an injury, could get sepsis, and then I won't I won't survive. So they and again, this is all the kind of the theory side of it, um, they don't they don't live in isolation and it they all sort of wiggle together. That's the scientific term. If I can take your lion antelope example and flip it into a horse one, I want you people to imagine that they've got their horse and there's an they're trying to teach you with positive reinforcement to you know stand still or whatever, and then you're gonna put the food into the bucket. So if the horse performs the correct behaviour, you throw the food into the bucket and the horse gets the food. Positive reinforcement. Now, what happens if the horse trials a whole bunch of behaviors, puts his head in the bucket, and there's no food, expecting there to be food. You've now removed in the equation for the horse, there's no food. So then the horse might begin to think, well, buckets don't give me food. I was expecting there to be food in that bucket, food. Don't give me buckets. Foods don't give me buckets. Buckets don't give me food. So the chances are that behaviour will now be reduced. It is negative punishment, not the best way that we want to train. On another day, your horse is trialling the behavior of getting food out of the bucket, but as he does that, he somehow manages to whack his head off the side of the stable door and experiences pain. Now he's just experienced positive punishment from the environment for trialing a behavior, putting his head in the bucket. So now there's a chance, because remember, punishments uh have the aim of reducing a behaviour, he's less likely to try that behaviour in the future. Because, and there's also a chance he then connects buckets with pain. And now potentially you have a horse who's worried about buckets. So, as I say, even without having humans involved to apply positive punishment or anything like that, it can happen on its own. Absolutely. And like you say, and this is where if we get if we if we start trickling into where do people go wrong with learning theory, is because it's happening all the time. Like you say, they're blended into one another. And if we take that last example with the horse hitting its head, you might also have been there trying to train something. For example, let's pretend we're training head collaring or something, and the horse is head shy, and as you're you're doing really well, and the tractor backfires outside, and the horse spooks and hits its head, they've now experienced positive punishment while engaging in the training with you, and there is a chance the horse connects the two. It wasn't what you wanted, yeah, but it's all it's happened. So your horse has experienced positive punishment, nobody's to blame, you don't have to feel like you're the worst person in the world. No, but potentially we now need to do a little bit more work to help the horse realize that that wasn't what we'd hoped for, what wasn't what we were aiming for, you know? And it it's funny, um I've worked recently or of this over the summer with um trailer loading with the client, and you know, obviously there's only so much I can I can speak about, and but we were struggling with the behavioural modification, and we realized that something like that had inadvertently happened to the horse. Okay, you know, and that's that was one of our roadblocks exactly like that. You know, they had inadvertently without us around, had created a positive punishment experience when it came to trailer loading, and we see that can happen, and I know you've probably seen it the same as well, when they've hit their hip or they've knocked their hip on a trailer. Oh my god, the hip is the worst, it's so hard. It happens all the time. Oh my god, it happens so much, or you know, they they bang their head or something, and not only does you know trailer loading become even harder because the trailer itself is then associated with the positive punishment, yeah, and again, for a prey animal, horses want to avoid, like the plague, anything that creates a positive punishment experience. And they and they do because they need to be able to survive and they can't afford to get an injury as a prey animal because speed and and being agile and running away from predators, they're far removed from those ancestors, but those traits still exist in our domestic horse, and it's really important to understand, and it's very hard to then untrain that. And and we we figured it out because we had broken everything down into these tiny little steps because we were trying to problem solve where we could support this horse, and it was during that time we just happened to put something just to the side or above his head, and he went, Oh, I don't like that. And then we went, Whoo, that's interesting. And then we could see that was where the problem was that he'd inadvertently like hit his head at one point, so that gives us information to be able to support the horse and and work backwards from there. No, I think I think it's a nice, a nice uh topic to discuss and leads a nice thing to what I was gonna say next, which is you know, so we can know the third, we can know the theory, we can feel confident, you can you can get to the point where you can go, right? I understand what positive is, I understand what negative is, I understand what reinforcement and punishment is. I understand them and I understand ways in which I can use them. And then inevitably you'll get to a point where you'll go, why isn't this working? And now we have to do a little bit more learning, which is about species-specific motivators, yeah, and individual variation. If we look back way to the start of this, which is we need to know what motivates a horse. It's very different to what motivates us as a human, a dog, a dolphin, an elephant. There's differences there, but also the individual variation of what motivates I for example, between my two, my two boys, Dougall and Ruben, both are motivated by food, both are motivated by scratches, but to different degrees. So Dougle is very food motivated and also very motivated by scratches. Ruben is motivated by food, but if he gets worried enough, he's not motivated by food as much because his motivation is then more on keeping himself safe than ingesting. Whereas with Dougle, um he's not he's Dougle hasn't experienced as many, maybe as negative life experiences as Ruben has. So even when he gets really worried, this is going back to this data point that we talked about in a previous episode, that Douglas' life experiences tell him that really, nine out of ten times people are nice, people are good, and even when I'm worried the majority of time, people have my best interests. Ruben, unfortunately, has been through more homes before me, and he's been through quite a few different veterin interventions and surgery and injuries and all sorts, and even my best attempts, his life to date has been more stressful than Douglas. And Ruben may only have maybe 60-70% that people are good. So it's like solid 40, 30, 40%. He's still he's still like, no, I need to look after myself here. So I have to be very careful about what works for one horse might not work for another, and I and knowing what motivates each one and where their thresholds are, which is another part of the conversation. And it's funny, it goes back. I know at the very start, this you spoke about plants, and I was like, oh, that kind of dips into Tim Bergen's four questions, and I actually think this is a really nice place to put it. So, part of ethology and the field of ethology, which just means the study of behavior and study of animal behavior, there is this principle of Tim Bergen's four questions, and one of them is development, which is what you're talking about there with Rubin. So this explores how a behavior changes within an individual's lifetime, you know. Uh, some of it's about you know, genetics, how they developed in early life, those influences, and how the behavior changed as the animal matures. Now, some of this can be related to like a foal, and and a foal's behavior is going to be very different from a fully grown horse, and how they, you know, they they are going to, you know, they are going to suck, which is the correct word, from their mother, who is suckling, just to be difficult. Um, and they're not going to continue to perform that behavior as an adult. That's something that fades out. So there's going to be certain behaviors that an animal will have as a as a youngster compared to as an adult, and it's it's worth looking at that. So the time frame of where an animal is at is going to change their behavior, and then the experiences that they have during their lifetime is going to change how their behavior, you know, what motivates them and those learned experiences. And then if we look at the other uh questions for Tim Bergen, we have the causation. So, what is causing the behavior to happen, you know, in that moment? And this it kind of bleeds from what's causing the behavior. I said we talk about the physiological changes, you know, if you're hungry and you're motivated by food, or a learned experience, as you say, with Ruben, who's had more homes, had more learned experiences, and those memories and those learned those learned experiences are going to change how he responds to those normal physiological changes. And then the functional adaptation as well, like what that species is, and you touched on it there, like that species-specific behavior. And it's really important that you know a social species compared to you know a quite precocious species, like a cat who is very independent and from a young age, is going to be very different, and their functional adaptation. A prey animal is going to be different from a predator, and how they are motivated and what they need is going to be very different. And so understanding a species-specific behavior is really important, and then obviously, like the evolutionary adaptation. So here we're talking very much about domestic animals, but they have still evolved from a free-living wild animal, and we've bred certain traits. So understanding how they've evolved over time is really important. So those kind of four questions govern it. So when we look at a behavior, um, I'm trying to think if we can look at something that is a nice example. Well, I've got an example because it's literally just happening uh last night with a client, and um so if we look at species-specific behaviours, horses, a very normal behavior for horses, is standing alert and surveying what's around them, they're keeping themselves safe. Um, so if we can just visualize there's a horse who finds being brought in a little bit worrying, especially in windy weather. And the way the field is designed is you've got the yard at one end, it's the very last field, and after the last fence line, it's just open countryside, and it's we're on the top of a hill, and it's a great big vista. So that horse has to walk with all of that behind it all the way in a straight line right back down to the yard, and it's just understanding that this is more than just getting the horse good at walking in hand and listening to stop start. There's a whole emotional element to this that the horse is potentially not feeling safe because it spends a lot of its time grazing in one direction because it's constantly keeping an eye. Am I safe? Am I safe? Am I safe? And uh, when we're working with the horse and asking it to stand still, it very often will not stand still side on to that end of the field, it wants to turn and look because it's keeping it there. This is where understanding the species-specific behaviours is really important because punishing this horse for that behavior would just serve to increase the tension levels and the anxiety in that environment. The horse doesn't necessarily actually know what it's being punished for if the behaviour it's displaying is purely for survival. Yeah, and that's the that's the evolutionary context. So, like, you know, the horse is a prey animal, you know, that's how we've domesticated. So it's a natural normal response for that vigilance. Yeah. Yeah. And if we ask what was the causal, what what's the cause? What's the mechanism? You said they're about like those high visual horizons, that we know that that can increase stress enhanced in horses because they have more area that they need, you know, they need to be able to survey. Yeah, you know, they need to take an eye. That's a lot, and especially when it's one horse in a field, there's other horses around, but yeah, they don't have another horse literally right there beside them to share the mold. They're not in a herd where others can survey while I graze. When you've got one horse on your own in that layout, and uh it all falls on them. Exactly. It's a lot on their shoulders. So then if we come in and we're like, whoa, don't do that, a bit of banging on the head, positive punishment, rash outing, whatever, actually just making the horse's hard a lot harder. And I say, and and in no, I was gonna say, like, then you how I say like the the development and individual you know aspects of that horse throughout their life. If you take that sort of example, if you have a horse that was maybe from a very young age was trained to you know stop, start, move away from the herd in you know, with positive reinforcement, was you know supported through kind of visual horizons, was trained in those aspects, they're going to cope much better later in life with those learned experiences from a horse that maybe didn't have those learned experiences, too. So you have all those factors in there as well that are going to change how a horse responds to different trainings. So if you have a horse who has a really well-developed learning history with visual horizons and moving away from other horses, which is a challenging behavior, but they're really well developed, you may be able to use negative reinforcement with very lightly with great effect to go, can we move forward? Can we stop? And the horse is like, Yeah, I've got this. Yeah, you know, that's no problem. But if you have a horse who's finding it very, very challenging to move away from another horse, we need to layer in positive reinforcement to support that. And as we said, that can be scratches, food, or social contact. So maybe we can help support that horse by bringing another horse with them. Maybe we can support that horse by adding in positive reinforcement. We can do it slower, we maybe only take two steps away from the field and we go, well done, that was amazing. You know, it's a small, it's a small effort, but it's actually a big effort for them, and we can support that learning. So understanding the the history of that individual horse as well really supports how we, you know, really determines how we can support that horse. And like you say, and so it's taking that combined uh approach. So it's not just about the training, and for me, learning theory is more than just being successful in the task, it really is what is the horse learning. So you we we know through enough research that horses can be compliant and not be willing. And what I mean by that is there's been enough research to show that oh, just because a horse is compliant doesn't mean that they're calm. We've done this with extent, um to a great extent, looking at heart rate variability, cortisol levels in blood in saliva, behavioural indicators, that we can force horses to do things that they don't want to do. We'll just get that out there. And so for me, it's looking at having that understanding of body language and awareness that okay, they're doing what we've asked, but are we getting to that deeper level that we're actually learning differently and they're learning that oh this is okay and that's good. For me, that that's success, not just the completion of the task. Yeah, and I think that's it's really important to think about the function of the behavior actually from a physiological perspective, yeah, because they are biological creatures. Um, and you know, we don't have to we we can empathize really quickly with that because think of a time when you know you were quite scared, you know, um, say in the house on your own, and you hear a bang upstairs and you're like and your heart goes. Yeah, there's a physiological response in that from a very uh hormonal and a biochemical perspective that that's that's triggering it, and that will drive your behavior and it will drive how you feel. Um and they're you know, and if you're feeling good or you're happy, you're going to have different hormones. And and horses are mammals, like with all other mammalian species, just like us, they have the same hormonal cocktail inside them, and and and it works very similar, like it really, really does. And I don't think there's any getting away from that because by the very fact that they can run and have athletic performance, they they're they're gonna have hormones and physiological drivers that support all of that. So it's having empathy in that understanding. If a horse is highly vigilant, they are going to have all of those, you know, hormones coursing through them. There's gonna be a physiological response because they're going, maybe I need to run really fast right now. So if you have all of that coursing through your horse, it's going to not support learning the way we want it to, because they're just going to be focused on that. Do I need to go right now? Yeah. Like, do I need to go right now? And as I say, we've all had that shot of adrenaline. It's it's a similar kind of feeling. Absolutely. And yeah, so that functional aspect of behaviour as well. So if a horse is, and this happens when we go back to kind of learning theory, we talk about people going, like, oh, it didn't really work for me. Like, and and we've both seen that where we want to introduce positive reinforcement into a situation to support behavioral modification. And you know, the owner's like, Oh, well, I tried giving them food and they just wouldn't take it, or this wouldn't happen. And it's because of that functional side of the behavior where they're just there up there. So you you have to be able to understand all those other pathways that are there that we can only support learning when the horse is in, as a friend of mine says, a trainable state, which I love as a phrase, you know. So we we can't we can't expect, you know, I'd say if anybody's had to do any public speaking, that's a really stressful situation. That's not a good place, and we've talked about that for setting your horse up for success. It's not a good place to be able to learn in that situation. Standing in front of a crowd of you know, 100, 200 people, even just 10 people on the stage, you know, you're not going to find learning in that situation. That's why we do rehearsal. We understand that for ourselves. We practice our speech, we do it all, we have all our notes, we we get it all right. Same with dressage tests, we learn a dressage test because we know in the moment that's not the place to learn. Now it's time to perform, and it's it's the same as well for our horses. We have jumped around all over the place. This I feel like this is such a big topic that we could do like several episodes just on it because I feel like we just barely scratched the surface, Jenny. We have um I'm just looking through some of the questions we've had through, and what we're talking about kind of links to one of the questions we've had. So I'm gonna jump now to that, which is we've had a question through of why should we avoid punishment? Like, why is punishment-based training really why why should we avoid it? What's the issue with it? They've said why is it so dangerous? But what are the risks associated with using punishment-based methods? So we just recap our learning theory. Punishment can be either positive punishment, so that's us applying a punishment, a hit, smack, it can be pain, it can come from the environment, but we're adding something. So when the horse has done the behavior, so say your horse has stepped forwards when you didn't want them, the positive punishment might be a slap on the chest, banging on the head collar, whip on its chest, its legs, its face, whatever. I've seen a lot of different things. That's your positive punishment. Your negative punishment, uh, an example of that was when I was talking about the bucket, and previously the horse had expected there to be food in the bucket for performing the behaviour, and now it's not there anymore. So those are two different types of punishments, and I think for me, one of the most obvious drawbacks is it can put the horse in well, first off, negative punishment can be quite hard to avoid sometimes, like it interlinks with other things, but particularly positive punishment, we're not addressing how the horse is feeling in that moment, and we can potentially make the horse feel quite insecure and unsafe. And as soon as we make the horse feel insecure or unsafe, well, they're prey animals, fight or flight. Um, we know there are links between punishment, positive punishment, and trialling to develop successful aggressive behaviours. For me, that's one of the most obvious ones. There's more to it, but that's where I would start off the conversation with is you're risking your horse developing behaviors that you didn't want to defend themselves because they feel unsafe in that moment. Yeah, we we talked about that in our first episode. I think a good bit was, you know, those kind of calming signals and things like that as well. And you know, as a learning theory works in both directions. So when your horse is giving you like a calming signal of like, you know, please step back, ears back, you know, as a tension in the muzzle, they're trying to communicate because you're the pressure, you're the adversive, and they're trying to ask you to step away and stuff. So, like when we ignore that, it becomes positive punishment. So that's a really subtle form. That's true. Yeah, it's a really, really subtle form, and you know, very complex aggressive case for behavioral modification will use a combination of what we call subtle negative reinforcement, which is listening to that horse communicate, and then positive reinforcement to help shape a different behavior. Because a lot of the time when we have like um I say a lot of the time, in some cases where an aggressive behavior has performed, has has emerged, the horse is trying to communicate that they're not okay, and we haven't listened to those signals, and then they have to get a bit louder, and then our response happens to be that we get louder and then we use positive punishment. So everybody's getting louder and louder and louder, and it becomes more dangerous and more problematic. And I would say, like, think about it like if you've ever been in a heated argument with family members or colleagues or something happens and everybody starts getting louder and louder and louder. We know intellectually that well, actually, this isn't the best way to get things done. We want to bring this all down. You know, we we don't want to keep going up, we want to bring it down, we want to bring the energy levels down, we want to start listening to the person in front of us and going, okay, how can we how can we de-escalate this situation? Yeah. So positive punishment can sensitize a horse. And usually when we bring it into a training situation, the horse is already sensitized. They're already very sensitive, sensitized, being that they're already sensitive to something that's going on. As Jen said, like they're prey animals with that functional behavior, they're already feeling like, whoa, something else is going on. I'm not too happy about this. And by adding positive punishment, we can end up sensitizing the situation even more, which is again us getting louder, and we want to bring it down rather than bring it up. Yeah, yeah. Because as we know, as soon as you're in that fight-flight mode, this is the same for humans as well. So if you're working with your horse and you feel really worried, we know that that the connections in the brain, for lacking a better description, don't work as effectively for learning. So if you're in that fight or flight position, you're genuinely worried about your safety, your ability to learn and take in new information is just not there. I mean, you might take in a little bit, but it's there's still risk of learning the wrong thing. So, like you say, if your horse comes in, sensitized, we use positive punishment, sensitise even more. As that's going up, the ability to learn is going down. The efficiency of your session is going down, the likelihood of you achieving your goals is going down. And the risk of flooding and learned helplessness is also increasing. Yeah, and injury to everyone. And and injury, yeah, safety for a horse and human, and we want to be as safe as possible. Absolutely. And what's reinforced should be repeated. So when your horse, if your horse does then perform a bigger reaction and they manage to get away from you, that's the perceived adversive, then they will learn that that behavior helped. Yeah. And you know, that behavior helped get rid of the adversive, and then that learning takes place. And that's the last thing we want to happen. Yeah, so reinforcement working against you. Yeah, yeah. So again, like as we said, it happened, it's it's it's it all goes together, guys. It like it really does. It's it's fluid, and they don't work kind of in isolation. There's another question here, and I think we kind of answered it, but I don't know if you want to, you know, just it it's um does negative reinforcement always mean harsh methods? And I think we we talked about it being an adversive, and I just wanted to talk really quickly about subtle negative reinforcement, which is something that we don't kind of talk about very often, um, and it happens all the time. And when we talk about, like, say, calming signals or maybe cooperative care, um, that's actually a form of negative reinforcement. So yeah, so there's a there's an example that you can see um, you know the the YouTube series is it don't hurt your vet or don't break your vet? Is it Gemma Pearson's stuff? Yeah, Gemma Pearson's yeah, she's done a lot of work on it. Yeah, I think it's don't break your vet. Um she's done a video on um training for needlework, and it's a nice it's a nice visual if you want to go on YouTube and watch it. So um you'll see in the video she makes contact with the horse's neck, and she's just making contact, there's no needle or anything, it's a training situation, and the horse is shaking its neck and head neck, which is a really normal thing that a horse would do for a fly bite or something. They're trying to get rid of the sensation that they're feeling, and the chances are the horse has experienced needles before and it's preempting the needle later. So she puts her hand on the neck, the horse shakes, she retains the contact when the horse goes still, takes the contact off. So that doesn't have to be forceful, it's literally a hand, it's just skin-to-skin contact. That that can be enough for some horses. Take that way back. I did it with um mules and donkeys back at the sanctuary, and I couldn't even get that close. It was a case of um, and particularly with one mule, I had to do a lot of protective contact with her. I got to the point that she would stand near me with a f a fence or a wall between us, and it'd be a case of just lifting my hand towards her. Yeah. And we can stand still, great. I would lower my hand, and in this case, I would use a combination approach. So I'd lower my hand, click, and give the food. So I'm using negative reinforcement, and it's important to have your protocols in place and being really strict of yourself. So it was a case of hand up, she might shake her head or whatever, she's standing still, she goes still, great. Lower my hand, click, food, and we repeat and we shape that closer and closer and closer. But for that, for that animal, that mule, um, probably what's that? A foot? A foot away from her neck, that was enough. That that was what all she could cope with. You know, if I then actually put my hand straight on her, that would have been flooding because she was not ready for that. So can negative reinforcement be gentle? Absolutely, but you absolutely you have to be. I think for good negative reinforcement, you have to be really aware of where the horse is at. Yeah. And and as I say, there's there's other forms of kind of subtle negative reinforcement. For example, something that you know I've done years and years ago with one of my my older horses, where she was so scared of going anywhere near the arena, like completely terrified of going anywhere near the arena. So the arena was the pressure, was the adversive, right? So that that's what she wants to get away from it. So at the time I was using a combination of positive reinforcement, but also subtle negative reinforcement. So what we would do is I had this big arcing circle, 20-meter circle, and she was okay to a point where she gets sticky and then goes, No, I can see that. And if she took one step, I go, fantastic, and we turn away. Yeah, and that's subtle negative reinforcement. I'm removing the pressure of the urina. Yes, we can step away from it, you know, and I was rewarding moving forward. So step forward, fantastic. Now we can leave. So there's a combination approach. And could you could you argue that that like is a very harsh method? I would think that that's quite a non-adversive method of using negative reinforcement. Um, an adversive way of using negative reinforcement, which would trip into positive punishment, would be to force her into the arena, yeah, and that would be flooding, as you said with the S of the Mule. Whereas we can use it in a very subtle way, and when we understand what's actually happening and what the adversive is. An arena doesn't seem adversive to us, you know, when we think of that word, but in that behavioral loop for this particular horse, she was like, strange danger, I don't know what's in there. Yeah, I don't know what what's happening in there. Yeah, and and we just did this over two or three weeks until she was really calm and fact, and then we'd go in and we'd hand walk around the arena, lots of treats, and she's like, Oh, this isn't so bad. And that's part of the kind of the behavioral modification, and then it no longer becomes an adversive. Yeah, absolutely. And we were changing those behavior, so behavioral modification being like modifying previous behaviours and and and how the horse is feeling. Absolutely. Well, it answers that question. I feel like we've done. I mean, to be honest, we've done, I think, a good effort of summarizing learning theory. You know, we went everywhere. We went everywhere. We cherry-picked, we meandered, we dotted, we darted. There is just so much more that we can go into, but I think it's gonna have to be another another episode, a follow-up, part two on learning theory. I mean, we've we haven't talked about dominance, we haven't talked about operant conditioning, classical conditioning, we haven't talked about any of that, but to do it justice and to save the ears of our listeners, I think I think we've done a good job there, and we'll revisit this topic. Yeah, I'm sure there's gonna be lots of lots of questions, but uh, but yeah, no, that was really fun. I really enjoyed that, but we could talk about this for hours. I think we already have. We have, we have, yeah. We we're definitely behaviour nerds. Um so hope hopefully you've enjoyed it, guys, and uh yeah, and we will try and do a part two, I think, because there is so much in here. Fabulous. Cheers, Barbara. All the best. Bye guys.