Bonus Episode 3: Negative Punishment

 Here we explain Negative Punishment, removing something the horse wants to decrease a behaviour. We talk about time-outs, the role of clarity, and how to avoid frustration or confusion. A gentle, practical overview of a concept often misunderstood in training discussions. 

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

How did we start the other ones? We just went, okay, here we are, episode three of the bonuses. And so we have gone through positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement. So if we go back to our quadrant, that leaves us with two more boxes to tick, which are Barbara. Sorry, I was busy laughing, you know, at just the way you were like, and we've gone. You know, it was just like it was really jazzy, it was very jazzy. Um, but yes, we have negative punishment next. So just like we did with the reinforcement, I just want to focus on the punishment aspect. So we talked really heavily about reinforcing is making increasing the likelihood of a behavior being repeated. Okay, so all the reinforcement increasing the behavior. Punishment is decreasing the likelihood of a behavior. That's really, really important. Reinforcement increase, punishment, decrease the likelihood. So when we talk about punishment in these next two bonus episodes, we're talking about decreasing behavior and reducing the likelihood. So that leads us nicely into negative, and just like with the reinforcement, negative in this context is removing. So we remove something in order to decrease that behavior happening again. And already I feel like it's so convoluted because it is really hard to wrap your head around all these things because we have a lot of terminology. So hang just focus on what is uh what is a punishment, you know, and we think of different types of punishments. Let's go very much from a you know survival and an evolutionary and a wild animal perspective. Punishments are really important, right? Punishments are really, really, really important to make sure that we don't perform a behaviour in order to survive. Great. I mean that sounds exactly what we want. We want the horse to stop kicking the door, we want the horse to stop biting us, we want the horse to stop doing whatever it is they're doing that's annoying us, and on the face of it, that sounds great. But punishment techniques are far more convoluted and complicated than that, and there's also an issue there that isn't talked about enough. When you stop a behavior from occurring, think about think about it as like an empty void. Something is going to fill that void. If we don't fill the void, a new behavior will fill it. That doesn't mean it's going to be a good behavior, it might even be an even worse behaviour. So we're going to talk about the details of negative punishment and why it's so important to understand what it is, how it's in use, and how it's happening all around us. So when we're looking at a training perspective, before we dive into nuances, we don't want to just look at it from an immediate perspective and stopping that behavior right now, and the long-term potential of stopping that behaviour for the rest of their life or a session or wherever we want. So there are two different aspects because it may be the case that we just need an immediate stop of the behavior because it is a dangerous situation or it's an emergency situation, and that's a short-term gain. And this is where punishment may be more effective, and it may be the least adversive because it is an emergency situation, and we need a short-term stop of the behaviour, and then we stand back and we reassess and we go, okay, well, now I need the behavior to stop long term, so I need to employ a training strategy. So there's two different aspects of that, and I think that's really important to just focus on for a second. If I am in an emergency situation and I need to disrupt the behaviour that's happening, and I need to stop my horse from performing that behaviour, that's a short-term game, and it's very much a short-term game. So when we're looking at long-term games, we look at a different different sort of training, um, a different training regime. Yeah, so if we just give an example, think about you're leading your horse and there's an actual risk of them, they're about to bolt onto a road that has heavy traffic. In that moment, if you had to apply more pressure or techniques, or maybe you had a stick or something in your hand, if that is what it takes to keep you and that horse safe in that moment, is it technically punishment? Yes, it absolutely is. That is an emergency situation, not a training situation. And we would never advocate that situation, that environment, as somewhere you would train that is purely keeping you and your horse safe. So, just to recap, we have talked about in our other bonus episodes what is reinforcement, negative and positive. Obviously, we've dived into a little bit of what punishment is as a whole, but just to fine-tune us and funnel us down for this episode, we're going to talk about negative punishment. So, Jen, can you recap us? What is the negative part of negative punishment? Yeah, so in our previous episodes we had negative reinforcement. We removed the adversive to reinforce the behavior we did want. In this case, we're talking about negative punishment. So we're doing the opposite, we're removing something pleasurable. So we're removing something the animal wants or something that they were expecting. So that this is probably the most tricky to get everyone your head around. And I know the first time I came across learning theory and putting this into practice, this was a really hard concept to get your head around, especially because it's actually happening all the time around us and it's actually really hard to control. But don't worry, we're going to talk through quite a few different examples in different situations to see if we can make heads or tails of negative in punishment. So when we want behavior to stop happening, this is what punishment means. So, like we want this behavior to stop happening. So, let's talk about, for example, a horse that is mounting another horse. You know, they are performing a behavior that we want to stop. Now you could remove something, which is the other horse that they're mounting, put the barrier between them, and you're removing the additive and you're punishing them then for that behavior. So they can't do that anymore, and you're separating them out. Because remember, we talked about positive reinforcement is something pleasurable, it's a reward. So mounting another horse in reproduction is an additive that's part of positive reinforcement, and you can't have positive reinforcement without negative punishment. Because once you remove that, it's then technically negative punishment. Horse mounts another horse, we don't want them to mount, we separate them into two different fields, we put a barrier in place, we've removed that, and we've punished the horse for mounting by removing something that they wanted. Perfect. And if we think about other species as well, there is an example that Barbara's just been sharing some online books that I found fascinating and definitely going to be geeking out on those later. And one of them had a fantastic example of negative punishment when working with dogs, and I'd never come across it before, and it's a really interesting idea. Um, so I'm going to share it with you now. So the example is that if you have a dog who is chasing and running off, and my own dog does this with squirrels, she's got fantastic recall, but when a squirrel is involved, Belle is, you know, if you catch her quick enough and you you've she's off a lead, if you can call her back and you can treat her, you're good, but we're not all perfect, and sometimes she chases that squirrel. She finds that very, very positively reinforcing. She loves the chase. So in this um, this literature that Barbara shared to me, it talks about then by putting the dog on the lead, we're actually removing the dog's freedom, we're removing the ability to chase, and that's actually negative punishment because we've removed the pleasurable thing, which is the chase. And it's such a great example how you can end up punishing a behavior without realizing it. It doesn't mean that's the worst thing in the world, it might mean that you're actually creating an extinction situation, and we're going to talk about extinction in another episode, so that's fine. But as Barbara just alluded to, there it's pretty much impossible to have negative punishment. It's nearly impossible to have positive reinforcement without negative punishment. They go hand in hand whether we like it or not, and unfortunately, that can make things tricky because if we allow for too much negative punishment, we can then instill and create frustration behaviours that can lead to behaviours we don't want to see in our horse in our horses. So, like from a human example, like you think about it like a shared a shared office space. And I'm sure we've all been there on a Friday where we're all having the chats and we're chatting away, we're all enjoying being in the office and talking, and we start getting very loud. We've all been there, especially if you're in Ireland, where we like to talk and we we have no indoor voice. We're all talking, and someone else in the office is trying to concentrate, they may reprimand us in the sense of, guys, be quiet, please. I'm trying to walk, like I'm trying to work. Please stop talking. You're then you want to have a chat. You want we talked about it at length that humans are really social creatures, and that having those conversations are really, really important for us as social creatures. That person is now maybe I say they're in a leadership role, maybe they're a manager, and they've gone, stop talking. So they have removed that. You're being punished for having that conversation, something that you want, and that's being removed to pro like to reduce talking, and it's all happened, happens to us in school, it's all happened it's happened to us in a work environment. You are you are then reprimanded, you cannot talk and communicate anymore. The thing that you want to do has been removed because you were talking too loud. So maybe you start to talk again and you talk a little bit quieter and you start to whisper, or you go on DMs because you're gonna still want to perform that behavior, or something else is gonna fill that void. So you're still gonna want to do it because it's really motivating, but you may change the way you do it, so you don't talk as loud, but you fill the gap by going, maybe I'll start writing notes, maybe I'm on Teams and DMing people, maybe I'm just gonna whisper instead. That is why we try and support animals to give them the behavior that we do want them to perform rather than using negative or positive positive punishment, because it doesn't give them a direction of the things that they can do, and that means that we are leaving them with no direction whatsoever, and they've got to figure it out for themselves, which makes our life harder. So, for the for the sake of the listener, if you have sat there and gone, is that not positive punishment? You're not wrong. It is both because we've added a reprimand to that situation. Gold star, let's focus on the fact that in that situation the ability to communicate verbally has been removed from those people. And what I love about this example is it's a perfect example of that void being filled. So when there's a motivation to perform a behavior, we'll find a way to perform that behavior one way or another, if that is the most motivating thing. You sending that note to the boy you fancy because you want to see them after school is so much more motivating than listening to your French teacher who's like, no, stop talking and listen to me. You will find a way to pass on that message. The teachers take the phones off the classroom, off the students in the class. I did that when I was a teacher. Did it stop any communications? Nope. It created a lot of frustration, and they all found different ways of communicating in the classroom behind my back. Now it's a highly motivated behavior, you know. So when we look at something that an animal is doing, I know I spoke about mounting because we know that reproduction is a highly motivated behavior. So, what's maintaining that behavior? You know, is negative punishment going to help actually reduce that behavior? So I know we've kind of got into the weeds here a little bit, but when it comes to it simply, it's stopping a behavior from happening. If you take something away, will that punishment stop a behavior from happening? I think maybe one of the easiest examples for negative punishment is when we think about it in the context of working with food. So if you've been working the food of your horse and we've all done this, you're on a great run, and you're clicking and rewarding, clicking and rewarding, marking and rewarding. It's all going really well, and you get distracted, and maybe your timing goes off a little bit, or you just stop training. Your horse doesn't necessarily know that you've stopped training in that moment, and they might continue to perform the behavior and they're going, Oh, I'm doing this thing, there's no click. Where's my food? Where's my food? Where's my food? Where's my food? You know, and they're trying, and then the horse is left with this empty void of I'm getting really worried now. I'm not getting the positive thing that I was supposed to be getting. I wasn't getting the food, I wasn't getting my affirmation. I also don't know what to do here, so I'm going to revert to normal equine behaviors. So they might barge into their human, they might rub their head on their human, they might nip or bite or do something instead of this pretend they were touching a target with their nose. They're going to do something because they don't know what else to do. And if that happens too many times, that in itself becomes a learned behaviour. But we can actually help to avoid this because we can train the horses to have off time. And if we we can train a queue to say, right, we're taking a break, and that might be head down, have some grass, or here's your haynet, or you can just be a responsible trainer, to be honest, and go, oh, I'm gonna have this conversation, down tools, put your horse away, walk around the corner, have your conversation, separate yourself from the environment because whether we like it or not, whether or not you mean to, negative punishment just happens. And one of the things that we're gonna cover in our other bonus episodes on extinction is where negative punishment happens quite a lot. So during an extinction phase, and I say we'll dive into that in detail, the horse is trialing different behaviours that we want the horse to no longer do that may have been reinforced before, and now we're effectively punishing that behaviour by not providing that reinforcement in order for that behavior to disappear. So while we talked a lot about our desire to not necessarily use punishment where we can, like when we can, there are certain behavioural modification techniques, such as extinction work, that actually leverage off a certain type of negative punishment, and that is an important part of behavioural modification, but it also comes with providing the horse or the dog or the human uh hello husbands, with what or partners, sorry, very well, with what we actually want them to do. So I want to just touch on the back of that on where negative punishment is actually okay. Because so far we've talked about how it's you know can lead to frustration and all these things, and it is something we have to be really aware of when we're working with horses. And by the way, this does actually happen with negative reinforcement as well. This is not only linked to positive reinforcement. You've got to remember negative punishment is the removal of something nice or what they're expecting something nice to happen. But in a low level, it can help build some resilience and resilience in learning. For example, if you've ever been on a team building exercise with in school or with colleagues at work, there will often be puzzles, um, maybe come some kind of murder mystery thing, and you're trying to work out whether it's a physical puzzle, think crystal maze, if you're that era. Um, you're physically. I know. Love crystal maze, but there's a certain amount of negative punishment when you're trying to sort something out to get the reward, to get to the finish line, and sometimes it doesn't always work. Think about the the rats and mazes in lab testing, you've hit a dead end, you've hit dead end, you haven't got the cheese, you haven't got what you wanted. It's not always the worst thing in the world, as long as that frustration level is low enough, it can actually build up a level of resilience that learning is hard, learning's tricky, it's okay to feel like this, we'll get there in the end. So, although it's a part of life and we want to manage it, because it's a part of life, it's also something we shouldn't fear too much as long as we're aware of it. A lot of why we want to provide these bonus episodes is to help educate with what actually the terms mean because we believe that knowledge is power and understanding why certain training happens, why behaviour is happening, and what we're actually defining it as gives us the tools to be able to support our horses in our training by understanding what we're actually doing will help lead us to more success. Um okay, so just to recap, guys, and to sort of summarize everything, negative is the removal, and punishment is trying to stop a behavior from happening, discouraging a behavior. So we remove something in order to discourage a behavior, and just like with the other reinforcements, timing and consistency are really important. Proper application is so critical in order to ensure that we are maintaining the best welfare for our animals. And if you enjoyed this episode, please do share with other people that you think might enjoy it, find it interesting. If you have any questions, because I'm sure there will, this is a really difficult one in the quadrants. Please do send us an email, message, and we'll hope to address those as best we can. Absolutely, and we encourage questions specifically on this topic because it is the hardest to get your head around because it's full of nuances and it's not always the most clear-cut. So for me, the take-home is negative punishment is happening all the time. Don't worry about it too much, don't be fearful of it. The most beneficial thing we can do in our training is be aware of it. If we think that the horse is becoming particularly frustrated and things are going wrong, just take a moment. Am I actually inadvertently causing too much negative punishment? Thank you so much, guys. This has been a tricky one, as we say, tricky conversations. It's dangerous at both ends, tricky in the middle. We're trying to have these conversations, and we look forward to seeing you next session for positive punishment. Thanks for joining, guys. We'll see you next week. Cheers guys, bye.