“Does Dominance Theory Still Hold Up in Modern Horse Training?”

In this episode we dive into the controversial and widely debated topic of dominance theory. Is it still relevant, or has modern behavioural science moved on? We chat about what dominance theory actually is, how it came to influence horse training, and why it continues to spark disagreement today.

Join us as we explore what the latest research says, how dominance-based approaches compare with evidence-based, ethical training methods, and the real impact this has on horse welfare and human–horse relationships. As always, it’s an open conversation grounded in science, compassion and curiosity.

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

Hi everyone, and welcome to season two, episode three of our fabulous podcast. I'm Barbara, and with me as always is the animatic Jennifer Nash. Today we have an awesome topic lined up for you, which we've been wanting to do for ages, and that is debunking dominance. We're going to be diving into the history of dominance theory and how it's shaped our understanding of animal behaviour and all the good stuff. Hi everyone, we are so excited to be back for this episode. Dominance theory is something that has been around forever, but we're still talking about it as if it's new. So dominance theory was, you know, has been a cornerstone of behavioural psychology for nearly a century. And in this episode, we are going to be exploring its origins, how it manifests into different species, and the implications it has for our understandings of social structures in animals, and obviously, particularly our horses. On a slight admin note, um, it's a really, really warm day and we're recording. So if you do hear any fans in the background, I'm really sorry. The computers are struggling. Um, the joys of recording in the summer has finally arrived. 100%, Jen. And we'll also be discussing some practical aspects of dominance like territoriality and resource control or resource guarding and antagonistic behaviors, which often gets mistaked as dominance, but we know a lot more now. And we're going to understand how these behaviours play out within species and between species. So within is like horse on horse or horse on human. So within and between species, because those different behavioural patterns are really complex and they're really important to understand the nuances. We're also going to examine why dominance theory isn't the best approach for training our domestic animals. That also includes dogs and horses because it's very common among both species. We have a lot to cover in this episode. We're going to talk through some recent scientific studies that challenge traditional dominance-based training methods, and overall, our goal is to provide you, our wonderful listeners, with some comprehensive understanding of dominance theory, how it has evolved, how it can be applied, and you know how maybe it's going wrong in application in our animals. So, Barbara, it's probably that time that we get started. 100%. Let's dive into our first section, guys, where we're going to explore the history of dominance theory and how it became fundamental in our concept and understanding of behavioral psychology. So let's start with the basics. What is dominance theory and where did it originate from? So dominance has been quite a pervasive feature in animal societies, it impacts individual fitness through antagonistic interactions, so that's aggressive and submissive behaviors, and they create social hierarchies. Now, a social hierarchy emerges in different animal species by repeated social interactions. Okay, so it is a learned pattern of behavior, and the ranking kind of develops based on those interactions. So, for example, an antagonistic behavior, an interaction, could be, for example, two males fighting over a resource, which is the female during a mating interaction. So they would be aggressive and submissive, and we see them in all of the documentaries where they're fighting over a resource. Again, it's important that it is a learned pattern of behavior and it's seen across the animal species. Exactly, there is loads to dominance theory that has perhaps been forgotten about in the equine industry that is, you know, it's it's really well explained in these documentaries, and we see in other animals, but for some reason we seem to struggle putting it back into horses. But the concept of dominance theory can be traced all the way back to 1922, which I think is mad. And unfortunately, it was by a groundbreaking researcher with the most amazing surname that I'm going to do my best. He's Norwegian. That's why I'm laughing. She's laughing because before we started this podcast, I was like, I want to talk about this person, but oh my god, the name. So any Norwegians listening, I'm gonna do my best, okay? So the surname, I'm not even attempting the first name, is Shieldaroop Eb, no Ebba. I mean just I'll do that again. Hold on, it's a full name, it's double-barreled. Shieldaroop Ebba, I think is his name. We're going for it. And his research was groundbreaking. It was also done in domestic hens. And this is where we get the term pecking order from. Okay, so he observed a pecking order among the hens whereby some birds consistently pecked others into submission. And this hierarchy was the first documented case of dominance behaviour in animals all the way back in 1922, which I find awesome. Jen did a fantastic job pronouncing that name. No, it's how I'm not going to try. Um better at it. You're welcome. So, this is yeah, this is where the concept of pecking order came from, and of course, it was in chickens, which are domesticated species, um, and studied dominance hierarchies, and this really evolved to encompass a much broader understanding of social structures and power dynamics and various species and modern influences in ecology and evolutionary biology. So it started the conversation and it kind of fixed there a little bit in our own kind of narrative. We still refer to things like a pecking order, even though it was called a pecking order because it involved pecking, and yet we still refer to it when we talk about horses, and they don't have beaks. Um, I feel like I need to just say that in case there's confusion. I mean, we talk about it with humans as well. We don't have beaks either. We we we do, we do, and it's so fixed. Um, even though it's referred to a particular type of behavior that involves pecking, um, which I find really interesting. But since then, dominance theory has been applied across a variety of different species, from birds, mammals, fish, and even insects. These interactions have helped us understand how within group competition uh structures animal society. Now, within is really important, so I just wanted to define that really quickly. So you have within a species, so say horse on horse, or between a species, which is horse on, say human, um, but we're really focused on the within, because that's really what we can speak to, just for I say the history side of things. So dominance relationships are kind of where one individual say yields to another and forms a predictive passion in the group. So again, it's a significant learned component within all of that. Yeah, and what I find really interesting, especially about these earlier papers, is correct me if I'm wrong, Barbara, but I don't feel like violence or aggression was really a focus point in any of this. You know, it was very much like who yields to who, and that pecking might be more severe or it could be quite subtle, but it was consistent, and there's a learned pattern to build that predictability. Yeah, and I think what's really important in telling is this paper was 1922, right? So, you know, for those who don't know, this was before we really had kind of instrumental and operate conditioning developed, and it's about maybe 30 years before we had a real understanding of positive and negative reinforcement, and it's probably about you know the better part of 60 years before we understood um how animals communicate with submissive and stereotypical behaviour, as you say, calming signals as they're often referred to, but also their distance increasing behaviours and distance reducing behaviours. So a behavior that an animal would perform to reduce a distance between that and another animal is a behavior they'll perform, so they want to get close to you. Uh so if everybody is familiar with cats, they will usually put their tail up and rub themselves against your leg and approach you with a tail up. That's a distance reducing behavior because they want to get close to you. Um, so we didn't understand all of that. So the only thing that we could see really that we understood clearly when we were studying this is anything that overtly looked like a distance increasing behavior, so more antagonistic, looked like it was more kind of aggressive. So it got termed as dominance in this sort of aggressive context. Um, but it's so much more subtle and nuanced than that. Have I gone down a rabbit hole? I think I have. So I think with that in mind, I think it's really interesting that as that research progressed and scientists started to develop various methods of ranking individuals within these hierarchies, this was all done before we had an actual understanding of learning and reinforcement. So all they could look at was who was winning or inverted commas losing in these interactions, and that was the data they had to use to infer, you know, each individual's position within the hierarchy, which was a baseline information, but it didn't give us the whole picture because, like I say, we didn't and we didn't have an understanding back then in the 1920s-30s on the learning side of things and how habits and behavioural bonds through learning can happen. But these rankings can now be correlated with various factors, such as you know, the behavior species, physiology, gene expression, reproduction, even longevities for how long the animal lives. So, a lot of what we're going to be talking about, as you know, we're going through the history and we're going to link this into how this has progressed to where we are now. It was good with what we we we knew what we knew back then, but we are talking about a hundred years ago, and research has changed and developed over a hundred years. But our the things that we've taken away, like Barbara's just pulling up a paper now for us to talk about um that was done on wolves, and that is still referenced today in hierarchy. And we're going on a hundred years since that research was done. We've we've come so far, but we're still we still hang on to the original insights. Um, I think because a lot it's almost like the uh what do you call it, the Hollywood effect. Because we've had we've had a lot of this put into films and movies and like the alpha male and the all you know, all this on oh, and you need to like I want to get that wild stallion, the fixation on like getting the wild Mustang stalli stallion to submit. Even though they just do what they're told, yeah, even though they're just from a from a from a hierarchy perspective as well, like it's often a matriarchal society similar to kind of elephants too, you know. Yeah, we I really want to talk about elephants later, actually. That's reminded me. Okay, right. Alright, guys, we get back on track. Sorry, this is us being excited about talking about something that we want to right now that we kind of talked about that. So, right, so when you said a hundred years, right, suddenly I'm like, holy shit, it has been a hundred years since that first pecking order that referred to a very specific type of behavior, and not all animals have beaks. I think I you know I've said that. So when we look at like the idea of dominance, then like where did it go to kind of next? Like it was studied in, as I say, like fish and insects and mammals, and it was studied a lot in birds because birds have lots of really complex hierarchies, and they're quite an evolved species, like they've been around a long time. We know they've been around since like the dinosaur, so they've evolved lots of different ones. We have lecking, which is a type of interaction, like you see, like the birds of paradise. If if anybody's watched those kind of documentaries, you have all these different hierarchies, and they're really complex, and we we studied them because we were fascinated, and also it was really easy to take birds and put them in a domestic and a laboratory setting and then study them because they're small and they you know breed quite quickly and they reproduce fast. So these are very much in a lab setting. So the next kind of migration from that was on wolf populations to try and understand the domestic dog based on wolves because scientists at that point kind of recognized well, hold on a second, okay? These are domesticated birds that we've bred, put them in a lab setting. So, really, what we need to do is be looking at a wild population and start to understand what's happening there if we really want to understand that. So, the concept of dominance in both packs has been the subject of extensive research, and I'm sure it's ringing a few bells for people as well. What's really important is that we this idea of alpha and an alpha pair has long been debunked. Didn't he even by the original researcher? Sorry, go ahead. No, I was I was sorry, I just jumped in there, but I was just about to ask a question. That didn't he, the guy, I mean we need to drop some names here of the researcher in the paper, but didn't he actually then go on to publish years later that what he did was well, not what he did was wrong, but what he found and the conclusions he came to were actually wrong, but nobody seems to remember that. People fixate on the first paper, not his second paper, where he goes, actually, after further study, it's not entirely correct. I'm actually gonna kind of retcon something that we we said, Jen. We said uh 1922 with the Pekin order, and I think we've sort of totally forgotten the most important idea of a dominant, and the first concept of dominant, it just popped into my head, Mendel, Gregor Mendel, as in like a dominant gene. Like we totally miss that. I'm like, oh my god, we're the worst biologists ever. It's like we would it's well everybody people have learned we learn Gregor Mendel and we learn about Mendel in like secondary school, you know. So, like, this is it, it's like certain traits will dominate over others, and they'll pass on to the next generation. And he did it with peas, so like I can't before chickens before birds, we did it with peas. So I just I just think it's so funny that I completely forgot about that. My brain just fell over, and I'm like, oh yeah, and it's like you know, there's certain genetic rules where dominance takes place, and we didn't even think of any of that. Yeah, you're just giving me um PTSD from school right now. Oh am I sorry? It just I was saying I just we're talking about the history and stuff as well, so like it's even further there now. Obviously, we know that genes and alleles are slightly different, and you know, but it's still the concept of biology and that it's like it's there from like a cellular level all the way through to behavior, which I just kind of find fascinating. Um I just love how you can actually remember all this stuff as well. Like, as soon as you said Mendel, my brain was like, Oh yeah, but if you'd asked me what did you learn in secondary school about dominancy, I just would no, that would not have competed at all. It was because you just said um, you know, you were talking about like you know the idea of like I know we're jumping from wolves and dogs and we're going back and forth. Hopefully you can follow our our mad brains. Um, but it was because you'd said about like you know, it being like alpha and in films, and it's something that's so ingrained into our own social context. And I'm like, oh my god, it uh you know, it's something that we learn when we're teenagers. You do it's basic biology that we that's been around since the 19th century, and then you're like a hundred years, and it's like, yeah, this is the concept has been such around for so long, so it is understandable that we try and integrate it into our normal interactions with our horses and our dogs, and our husbands and our wives, and our partners, and our friends because it's been there since we were a teenager, and I just love I love if we take that because we know it's correct, and we take Mendel's his work there, and you know, dominant genes will you know there'll be more of them the traits that you take are from the dominant genes. Um, does that mean that the dominant genes are getting respect from the less dominant genes? Oh no, yeah, it's just like you will submit. No, it's just a it's a not it's an interaction between those two cells, right? You know, and it's not emotional, you know, there's no underlying current of respect or relationship or partnership, it's just interactions that have a result, and the result was called a dominant like outcome. Yeah. And the thing is, it's funny because okay, now I know we're getting into genes, but for those that are interested, um, you have genotypic and phenotypic. Um, so for example, blue eyes or green eyes or brown eyes will be phenotypic, so that's what we see, and then you are genotypic, which is underlying. So it gets really complicated, and we have, I mean, we're well, we're like 10 minutes in and off the rails. Um so to get us back onto the rails, if we talk about the social dominance theory, because obviously you've dived into genetics, which doesn't necessarily play the same one. I said we've talked about uh I'm not gonna pronounce that name, Ebb's work. You could have just pronounced the last name, Eb. You know it's double-barrowed, E B B E. It's a double-barrowed name. Sure respect, now Barbara. Alright, okay. On Peckin Order, and we have chickens, and that kind of laid the groundwork. But yeah, the the point is that we've been talking about it for a long time and it's really ingrained. Um I really want to talk about the wolf paper. We talked about the wolf paper. Um, did we talk about the wolf paper? No, we haven't talked about it. Oh my god, I'm so sorry. This is this is because this is the one that I feel is the most interesting because the author came back and changed his outcomes. This is why I find this one so important. Well, from a science perspective as well. So it's really important, like you know, science isn't fixed, and we develop more ideas, and you know, Mendel's work again talking about the genes that has been developed and grown, and some of the stuff is right, some of it was wrong, and it was developed over time. It's exactly the same with our social theory of um of dominance. So this was originally done in the 1960s. Um, I don't have the exact date, I can't actually find the original paper term, which I find really interesting. So, this may also go to the point that this author did this original study on wolf populations, and this is where the idea of alpha came from. You know, this lead, wolf, and everybody listened, yad yada yad, and all that sort of stuff. Done and dusted. This researcher came back and went, actually, the observations that I met made were not correct, it's actually closer to this, but it's so fixed within you know our social population. As I say, it's very hard to find the original paper, and I have struggled to find it. Um, and I have looked for it, but I think it's because it's caused so many issues, and the author has come out publicly and gone, this is incorrect, and really tried to change things so that we're not using it anymore. I wonder, is the paper just gone? Like, I wonder, did he go, I'm just taking this down because I'm sick of it being cited, you know, and because it's caused so many issues? Yeah, very, very possibly. So I'm getting a lot of review articles. So I think the original guy was uh Rudolf um Schenkel, animal behaviourist, who published his then groundbreaking paper in 1947, The Expressions Studies of Expression Studies of Wolves. But then later it was redone, so then Schenkel and uh David, Dr. David Mech in 1960s, then came up with new publications, you know, 30 years later, basically debunking their own work because 30 years of worth of research and information, you know, it doesn't mean that it was awful or their stuff was bad, it's just like you work with the data you have, and that's the information they had in the 1930s, and then they improved on their stuff in the 1960s, debunked a lot of that idea that you're you're your alpha male leads and everything like that. Unfortunately, it's so fixed um within our social population. Now can I can I go on a diatribe, Jen? Am I allowed to? Um can I start the title on it? Yeah, sure, go for me. Uh start the clock. So, one of the reasons I think that the concept of alpha and dominance has proliferated within our own human society is because of the way we structure our society and then we try and bring it into how we interact with our animals. So, if you think back to when these publications were first publicized. It was during World War I and World War II. And prior to that, we lived in quite a patriarchal society. I would argue, we probably still do. Um, and you had all these men go off to fight two giant wars, and you had a huge portion of the population of women stay behind and start to work in factories and pick up everything else, and then suddenly women enjoyed working or working, and this idea of the patriarchal society and men going to work and women raising the children started to shift at the same time that all these dominance and alpha and everything else started to come out. Men no longer felt a need for, like when they came home, they didn't have the same jobs and structures that they had, and their social dynamics started to change, and then it really up, you know, created a big upheaval for us and our society. Then these studies started to come out with the alpha dog and a certain dominance and all this sort of stuff, and these men who had gone to war seen terrible things, weren't getting the mental health care that they needed when they returned, suddenly didn't have a place in society that they did have before. And these studies kind of fixed this is all just my hypothesis, these are like the adlines of a maniac, but I find it really interesting that it's fixed so in our society that even though you have top researchers turning around and saying, I got this wrong, this is actually quite different than we first did. You will still watch a Hollywood film, and people will refer to the jock on the this is very American on the football team as the alpha, you know, he's quite an alpha male, even though we know that that's not a thing, but we're still like, oh yeah, absolutely, you know, like it it's I find it really interesting. Um, it is you didn't interrupt me or tell me my clock had finished running, but you know, you have you have that face of like hmm, she's gone off the rails again. No, it is it is something that is always worth bearing in mind that research, like everything else, is impacted by the global affairs and what's going on in the world, and let's not forget that as well, you know, back in the 1920s, 30s, 40s, probably 50s, I don't know all my history very well, but how many female researchers were there? What access was there for female researchers or reviewers? And when we start talking about theories and especially dominance, which does have an involvement with uh you know gender and sex, then we can't get away from human bias, and this is why peer-reviewed papers are so important that you will write your paper, but then you know, somebody else needs to go and review that who isn't connected to you, who will have an understanding of the topic, but they have no emotional bias, so they can review and you know deconstruct your paper and find out the flaws. That wasn't always done to that standard as we have it now, and back then that would have been you know, men researchers sending it to men researchers, and whether we like it or not, there will be a certain amount of bias there. Now we are going a little bit of a tangent now, and sexism in the equestrian sport and sport in general is going to be one of our topics for another podcast. So I'm gonna draw a halt on that topic there. Can I make one more point? Just to just to oh didn't know because you said it there and it was uh she sighs at me. Hear that, see that, you hear that guys? I'm not leaving that in. That is what I have to do with. Um the just because you said it there, you have like I think it's just worth saying, like, behavioral science started from human behavioral psychology, and the same researchers like moved into animals. So we talk about bias as well. We look at where those human ideas are so ingrained in particularly a hundred years ago, to how we understood dominance, those biases very much translated in. So, yes, sorry, I'm sorry, Jen, I'll stop talking about because no, actually, that does link beautifully into what I was gonna say. And we're you know, I'm just gonna pull back to the wolf research just so we can close that chapter, as it were. Um you know, what was the mistake? You know, we haven't actually talked about that. So, what was it that was identified between these two papers that they weren't happy about? And the big issue was that the original paper took and they caught, they went out there and captured some wild wolves and just stuck them in an enclosure together, expecting them to just perform normal wild behaviours, and nobody really stopped to consider that the environment would have an influence on the results of the study. So then, 30 years later, they reviewed this, and after being able to observe it's gonna say dogs, wolves in the wild, they very quickly realized that there are very different behavioural patterns and bonds and social hierarchies there. So they later corrected that part of the study, and Dr. David Mech in 2000, this is a statement that he put out. So, attempting to apply information about the behaviour of unrelated captive wolves to the familiar structure of a natural pack has resulted in considerable confusion. So taking wild dogs and putting them in captivity and comparing them to wild dogs in the wild, wild wolves in the wild, it's it they don't match up, so it did create confusion with the literature and the research. And such an approach is similar to trying to draw inferences about human family dynamics by studying humans in refugee camps. So that's why I wanted to link it to what you just said there. So he himself said that the information we took from this study is like saying we're we can we can get an understanding and how your normal, your average, sorry, uh two, you know, man, wife, two point, is it 2.1 kids, 2.4 kids plus the the the statistical average family. You can get good information about that family by studying humans in refugee camps. And the concept of alpha wolf as a top dog is particularly misleading, and that's his own statement. He says the concept of alpha wolf is particularly misleading, they debunked it. And the thing is, when you think about it, we look at that as a research, and we're like, oh my god, you took a load of wild animals and moved them into a different environment without understanding their species-specific needs and not meeting those needs, and then attempted to study the behavior based on that. I mean, what you could say about that paper if you really wanted to was that like you know, creating it getting a population of you know animals and moving them to a different location and probably putting them in a very small enclosure increased aggressive incidences, which it seems really obvious now, but it had nothing to do with dominance hierarchies. Nothing, everything to do with the environment and the access to resources, and yeah, that is something that has been researched in horses, which I'm very glad to see, and we will get into that. Yeah, so I think where did we go after that, Jen, really, from a history perspective? So we had the dogs, and then that sort of fell into a massive wave of dog training that revolved around dominance. Because of this study, we saw a lot of punitive and positive punishment training techniques because it was like, well, this is how dogs talk to each other. Remember at the start, I talked about within populations and between, so dog-on-dog interaction and then human-to-dog interaction, totally different, and we know now that dogs don't see us as dogs, they see us as humans, they're humans, and most animals will see us the same, same with horses. But it was considered that it's like, okay, well, you know, dogs will sort of lunge and snap and bite and you know, do all this sort of stuff because this is what we saw in this dog study. So if we want to train our dogs, that's how we'll do it. That was kind of a massive wave that came with dog training, and just as the dog world has now completely removed that from a standard way of training, I feel like the horse world is almost picked up where the dogs left it and now gone, okay, now we'll bring it into our training, and we will create a dominance effect for our horses and we'll train that way. Um which we'll get into now, I think, where the history of dominance theory in horses and dominance hierarchy has first come from. Yeah, I don't know whether it's come from a training perspective. I think using horses in military context has strongly influenced how we work with horses. I mean, horses horses have been domesticated for hundreds and hundreds of years, and obviously the first they were meat and then farm animals. But going back to, I think it was the because I did the paper and I research on this in my first degree, uh, is one of the Chinese dynasties, and I won't even try to pretend which one it was, but we're going back a long time. It's one of the first documented uses of stirrups, um, which is why I know this, because I did a study on stirrups, um, and it was used, we think stirrups came into use to allow uh military personnel, soldiers, fighters to get onto their horses really quickly for battle. It was quicker for them to get on and off. So that's potentially where stirrups come from. Um but once you're using an animal as a tool like that, there is no you you there that horse cannot have any autonomy. So the forceful use and the forceful training in horses had to be brought in, and it's through the military. Well, okay, we had Xenophan way back in the Greek time, but even then, back then, we were asking the horses to do a job that is really scary, they were going into battle that they could die from. There were forceful techniques. I mean, if you read the works by Xenophan, it was actually very nice, but ultimately not everyone abided by that, and horses galloping into battle, the big spurs, big bits, barbed wires, the horse had to go. And if you think about even in World War One, where they're pulling carriages across these fields, like carriages of cannons and you know military equipment through fields of mud. Food, yeah, food, bringing surfaces off the field. Yeah, you're not gonna stand there with a treat and a clicker to get that horse to move. You know, the big sticks are gonna come out, the the the prods, the whatever forceful techniques were going to be used, and forceful techniques were going to become normalized. So it's funny. Just sorry, Jen. The you know we talked about just the say the wolf study, and that we said we removed these animals from a normal population and put them into a different one, and then suddenly there was more antagonistic behavior. I feel like again, the same can be said for humans. It is we took a lo a human population and went, okay, cool, we're all gonna take you guys to war with these horses, and suddenly put them into a really stressful environment. And the humans into a stressful environment. Environment. Yeah, that's what I mean. Both species are pointing to a stressful environment. So the the the behavior is going to change, you know, drastically. And I think this leads us nicely into like the second section, which kind of ties into where we're going history-wise, into the idea of resource guarding and resource control and territoriality, which is where dominance kind of took us. Because just like Mendel, where it was a really broad understanding of genetics and dominance, and now we have a very complex understanding of genes, just like dominance launched us into this understanding of a type of behavior that animals performed, it's now a lot more subtle and nuanced, and it gave us this idea of what a territory was, population dynamics, how animals moved across the territory, either defended it, or if it wasn't a territory they defended, it was a resource that they wanted to control and guard. So, just before we do that, you were allowed one diatribe. I just want to add in Oh go for it, yeah. You know, like I said earlier on, this is early research, and you have to consider the use of the horse in current global affairs at the time of this research. And I don't want to sort of blame or yeah, like just blame people in the past for how they were, because when you consider the research that was coming out, you know, Mendel, Pecking Order, the Wolf Study, what was going on in the world and the use of horses in our culture at that time, I can completely understand why it was justified and why we genuinely thought this is how it all was, because like I say, those forceful techniques would then become normalized because that's what was needed, and then if the research is also saying top dog is needed, pecking order is needed, I can I can understand why we were the way we were. I just wish, I just wish that people just took a little history lesson and realized that life isn't like that anymore, we don't need to be like that anymore. It was there for a reason, it's justified, it's not where we are now, and we need to be better. Yeah, we're talking about the history of dominance theory, and hopefully, in our very structured and it was structured. It starts. It was only stars. We have shown that there is an evolution to it, and it's not that you know, we're not as I say, like we're not looking back at these previous studies and going, oh, they're terrible, they did it wrong. No, they paved the way for future studies, which is how science works. Yeah, you know, we do a study, we look at it, we go, great, that's great learning. What did we learn from it? And then we repeat studies and we we knowledge share between different species, and we go, oh, we learned this and this species. Oh, I wonder if that's applicable to that one. Let's do this, let's tweak it, let's look at the methodology and improve upon it. And it it's a springboard for learning about other areas of animal behavior, and it's constantly growing. And we only we do the best that we can do until we know better, and then we know better, we do better. So for a long time, one of the things that you know, there was a paper that came out about uh lowering horses' heads, right, to to help them relax. Um, and it was a method that I used quite a lot, you know, and I used a lot of negative reinforcement to do it, you know, because I was like, okay, you know, we'll lower the head, then I'll then I'll de-stress them. Okay, this is going back a good 10 years. Um, so what did I do, Jen? I put a lot of negative reinforcement on the lead rope or the bridle and the bit to lower the head. And I was like, ah, now you're relaxed, right? I don't know about you, but if anybody forced my head down, I don't think I would feel relaxed. I don't, you know, that kind of way, like it's it's almost like saying, Oh, as a human, if you lie down or you get into the fetal position, uh, it'll lower your heart rate and it'll create relaxation. Now, Jen, if you lay on top of me and force me into a fetal position, like to the ground, Barbara, I don't think I would feel very relaxed, right? And I know I'm being a bit tongue-in-cheek, but the point is I don't do that anymore with negative reinforcement. I might do it with positive reinforcement, I might do it with scratches, I might do it with something else, or I might just go, okay, put your head down in grace for a while. It's a little bit nicer and they have a bit more control over their environment. The met the principle of the fact, you know, helped us understand, okay, well, are there certain postures that are more comforting for the horse? But the technique on how we do it might change and unfold. So it's similar to dominance, it was a jumping point for us to go, okay, can we better understand how these animals communicate? But maybe trying to submit ourselves and pin down a dog to insert dominance is not a correct way to do it. I'm looking at Barbara right now thinking, I thought that was my diatribe. You just stole my diatribe. And we just went onto a tangent for negative reinforcement. Oh, guys, we've been wanting to do this particular podcast for a while. There's just so much to it. And Jen was like, I have to go by this time. And I was like, Yeah, you're gonna miss that appointment. Yeah, okay, right. We're gonna put a pin in history before we go on any other tangents. God knows what's gonna make it to the final cut. Let's move on to how territory and resource control is an influential factor on what we know as dominance. That's why I was sat here like. I'll kill her. This was mine. You just took my you just took my defeat. Now we're talking about other research and training techniques. We're talking about dominance bar bugs, and now you're pinning dogs to the ground. Oh, it's really funny. You just said, like, you know, it wouldn't be nice to be pinned to the ground. I might do a positive reinforcement though. I'm like, what you're gonna pin? You're gonna pin me to the ground and then defeat me cookies. No, I meant like of course I might like help them, like you might help put your head down in the grave. I know, I just had this image of image one, you pinning me to the ground. I'm gonna be like, you will relax, you will relax. And then number two. Get in the bath, Jen! Oh, this is just this is just an episode of Blue Pills now. Oh my god. Oh do you want to start this next section then, since I can't be trusted? Yeah, I think I will. Um, so guys, we are now gonna talk about territoriality. Uh that's not even how I how you say it, territory, um, and resource control. And we're gonna talk about how dominance theory manifests in these things. So it's a really fascinating aspect to look at because it shows the practical implications of dominance in the animal kingdom, and territory refers to how animals claim or defend, you know, areas of their own. And this can be done aggressively. It can also be done, you know, non-aggressively, scent markings and as such. And this behaviour is directly linked to dominance because the most dominant individuals typically control the best territories, and these territories, territories, can be crucial for accessing resources like food, sheltering, shelter mating opportunities. You know, think about your lines on the savannah in Africa. We've all seen the Attenborough documentaries. So, what's really important about territoriality or defending a territory is that it is different species will do different things, right? So horses don't have a territory, but lions do, right? So this is this is where the zoology brain comes in. So a lion, for example, you'll have a pride of lion and they will defend a territory, and within, and that's a spatial, it's spatial, right? So it is an area and it's population within that area. Zebras and wildebeests will migrate and they don't have a territory, they move within different territories. So usually you have a like a lion population that will have a boundary or territory, and the zebra, wildebeest, and other you know, ungulates will move through that territory and they will migrate, and then the lions will eat them as they come through. Then what happens is when resources start to run low, if there's not enough food, there's not enough water, then the lions start to move slightly outside their territory to try and find it. Now, what's really important is again, this is where learning theory comes in. So the pressure that is placed upon the lions in this situation is hunger, it's a physiological pressure, and they're being driven. Oh, my lights fell on top of me, they are being driven to expand their territory. So there's there's a physiological behavioral need for them to do that to try and seek it. The problem is if they do that and they move into a different area that's you know presented by another lion pride, that's when you get this clash, this antagonistic response, and where you get the idea of dominant who's gonna win that antagonistic fight between the two prides of lions to then get the resource, and the resource is the territory, and therefore more food. Yeah, and I think it's really interesting and noteworthy to you know, just remember that's a lion, and hopefully, if you when you're listening to this, you can hear David Attenborough in your head talking about the migration, and you know, when there's episodes of those lions and the whole pride is getting hungry and they're awaiting the return of the Wildebeast and they're awaiting the return of the zebra. It's because, as we've just said, these animals, horses including, are nomadic. They move, they range, they don't stick within their territory, they don't scent mark the same way, they don't stick within those boundaries. And yet we have this idea that horses will protect their territory and their space and their territory. And hopefully, you're sat there listening to this, starting to have some light bulb moments and going, oh yeah, that doesn't quite make sense. You know, the other thing is we're talking about territory is a very predator thing because it's about keeping the best hiding spots, feeding areas, um, hunting grounds, whereas your prey animals, they're gonna migrate and find the food. They're gonna migrate and move, move to the resources, and it actually moves into a whole and it you can nearly do whole degrees just on ecological dynamics and population dynamics. It's a whole different thing, it's really complicated, and I found it very boring in college because it was very math-based, but it's it is very mathy, um, but ultimately it's like it's you can't get away from the concept of dominance, resource guarding, and territoriality without understanding how population dynamics shapes and influences behaviour and individuals. As I say, the best way to to understand it is to understand it when it comes to competing for resources and space, as Jen talked about there. You know, food, resting spots, water, mating, all of those are resources, and depending on how the resources are divided, that's when you get antagonistic behavior over territory, where those critical resources, you know, are in depletion and then lead to conflict. It really depends on what the actual natural ethogram of that animal is. So a natural ethogram is their normal behavior in the wild. So let's go back to that wolf study really quickly. When we talked about those wolves, we took them out of their natural population where they may have had hundreds of miles to roam and their territory, and then we put them in a pen that was probably x number of meters by y number of meters. So we reduced their territory. So suddenly you've changed taken the territory away where they would have normally looked for all those resources, and what happens? Now you get antagonistic behaviors. So it didn't necessarily have anything to do with dominance, but had more to do with population dynamics and territoriality. So if it sounds like I'm talking a lot on this, this is what I did my undergraduate masters in, or my undergraduate dissertation, should I say. Uh, I actually did it on fish, uh, which is why I'm able to say territoriality, because I have to say it way too many times. So I did my uh undergraduate dissertation on territoriality in epistogram magazines, and I have to say that 20 times fast as well. It's a Latin name, it's a type of uh fish that uh uses population dynamics and fights um for resources and space. Um, and yeah, so this is something that I spent a lot of my time doing was staring at fish and watching these interactions between them. And when you changed the population dynamics and had less fish in a tank, and you gave them more space, lo and behold, and more resources, they didn't present the same territorial fighting behaviour that they're known for. You increased the population of them, you put more of them in a tank together, took away some of the resources, lo and behold, they started to interact more antagonistically. Yeah, I think it's a brilliant point, and you took the words right out of my mouth, is the fact that this idea of you know dominance and resource guarding. So resource guarding is a thing, but it's misunderstood very often as being a dominant trait, and that you know, the Alpha Stallion wouldn't let other horses eat his grass, he would protect his grass, it's just so wrong because they move to find their grazing for the best grazing, and they the whole herd will move. But like Barbara just said, you know, we think about our horses in the domestic setting. If we think about those wolves taking wild wolves and putting them into a smaller area, it really irks me when horses get labelled as being, oh, they're the aggressive dominant one in the herd. I'd love people to flip that and go, that horse is having a really hard time, and they're feeling the need to display all these distance increasing behaviours and resource uh what's the word resource guarding behaviours because they're feeling really insecure, they're feeling there's too many horses and there's not enough space. So you get these horses that are showing agonistic behaviours over the stable door. That horse is not being dominant over you. That horse isn't in enough space and feels really insecure about the available space it has. So he's trying to keep people away because it doesn't have enough and he already feels insecure. You put that animal in a bigger space and give them the option of leaving, which is what would happen in the wild if two horses had an interaction and it wasn't a nice one. There was all this space for those two animals to then depart and leave. You don't get that in domesticated setting, and the majority of us on livery yards and you know, domesticated settings, no matter how big your field is, I can guarantee you the horse would prefer to have more and overpopulation in fields around the gate. You know, these issues are very often they're man-made, it's because the environment is because of population density, and it's also in we're going to talk about resource gardening in a second. It's about the resources that we offer the horses, we don't put enough out, or they're inappropriate, and that creates conflict. And again, horses get labelled as being dominant or aggressive, and it's like, no, that horse is a reflection of our management issues and our management flaws. And it's it's so interesting because again, it's a domestic setting, we've also drastically manipulated the horse from a physiological and a hormonal perspective, and taken them out of their natural dyads, so their natural population that they would be in. So if we just look at like differences in sex, because you talked about like, oh, you know, this the lead stallion won't have this sort of myth that perpetuates wouldn't let you eat their grass. Uh, majority of domestic horse species are gilded, like you know, male, the majority of male horses are gilded within a population, um, and females are intact, right? So we've already changed that dynamic massively in our domestic horse population. Um, so the hormones and the physiology are going to be different as well as their natural diad, the way they would live normally in a natural population. However, as a general rule of thumb and why this is important, and this is very broad, but across animal species, females tend to defend territory based on food ability. Okay. Um, so again, this is why the stallion thing is wrong, because it would be more likely that a mare would defend food. And the reason for that is because it's important for gestation and growing new life ultimately. Food is really, really important resource for a female, you know, which is why no one should touch my food. Um, so it is because they are growing new life and they tend to they need to be able to nurture that food within uh is a really really important resource for for most females. Again, this is very broad. However, males will tend to defend access to females because it's their chance to reproduce. So this is the whole argument with the selfish gene and perpetuation. So whatever is more likely to get your genes to go into the next population, you're probably going to defend pretty hard. So this idea that a stallion wouldn't let you take food, they're more likely to defend access to a female than they are to food. Whereas a female is more likely to defend access to food. Yeah, absolutely. And what I love just there is both the stallion and the mayor are hashtag being dominant because there is a resource that is important. Does that mean that they are a dominant individual in the entire hierarchy of that field of that herd? No, not necessarily. You could have a low-ranking mayor who will defend. Well, actually, we're not going to talk about horses as such because it's slightly different, but just you could have a low-ranking female in a population defending the hell out of her food resource. That doesn't necessarily mean that she's top-ranking, but also you could also have a younger, less established male in a population again defending the hell out of his female because that's the only breeding male female he has. That doesn't actually mean he's the top-ranking male. He might then get kicked out of the band or herd or whatever animal species we're talking about, but just by performing that behaviour doesn't automatically mean that they are the top of that that structure. And we're very, very quick to assess and watch a herd of horses for all of 15 minutes and go, oh, that's the boss, that's the alpha. It's like, no, no, you've you've you've just walked in and seen 15 minutes of their life about that one individual resource that doesn't tell you much about their whole social structure as a unit. And it's it's I'm so glad you brought that up because like, as well, there's you know, you have antagonistic displays and you know, distance increasing displays, but you also have stereotypical displays. Now, this is different from like stereotypical behaviors that we see in stable voices. Um, you think about like deers rushing these giant antlers and they rot together. Um, their goal is not to hurt each other, you know. It's it's really costly for a prey animal to actually get involved in an antagonistic interaction because if they get hurt, if either of them get hurt, so a lot of it is posturing, a lot of it is displays, a lot of it is, you know, I don't want to say throwing their weight around, but if they are rushing or competing for resources for a female, the last thing they want to do is actually hurt each other. You know, they a lot of it is about trying to display that they are the fittest or they are this, they are trying to sell their wares, um, so to speak, and it's not a way it's not to try and hurt each other. If the whoever is successful will then get the resource, and critically the other animal goes, Okay, fine, I'll leave and go and find it somewhere else, you know. So again, it's a learned passion of behavior. And I've just had a light bulb moment here that I've never thought about using in a conversation, but let's talk about two stallions, right? Two, you know, a band, uh a soul a bachelor band has approached an established band of horses, and you've got your original stallion and this newcomer, right? And they're posturing and they're having some conflict, and they're trying to work out whether I can take some mares or we're gonna tell the new bachelor band to go away. Okay, so you've got you've got it, you've got agonistic behaviors, resource guarding, we've got some conflict there. What then happens is those two stallions then depart and never talk again. But for some reason, in the horse human dynamic, we're told to use dominance to create a bond, to create respect, to create a horse that will listen and want to be with us. But way back, if we want to look at the horses in the wild and use that as our reference point or your validation for your training technique, these agonistic behaviours between two stallions result in those two stallions leaving and not talking again. They don't form a relationship, they don't form a bond. That's not how bond and partnerships are formed. It's the it's the end of a relationship. You're more likely, I hope in this example that you understand when we talk about territoriality and resource gardening, you are more likely to create a better bond by providing that resource that's sought after. Yeah. Like be their friend, not doing being their friend. It's like it's like the opposite. You know, if you have not that I'm condoning, you know, having a a lion friend, although I've got two little tigres fast asleep at the moment, kittens for everybody else. We just call them the tigres. Um because she's too fancy to say tiger. It's actually from a video game. Those of you who played Fife Far Cry, there's like a point in it where they get attacked by a tiger tiger and they go tigre, tigre. So now every time the kittens pounce on something, we're like, Are you tigre? Um it sounds very well. I thought you were just being slightly French. It was very fancy. No, it's probably okay. Right. If you like, you know, from a a lion perspective, like if you wanted them to stay within the territory, you would provide them with the resource. If you want them to bugger off out of the territory and never see them again, take that resource away from them, you know. And I know I'm comparing apples and oranges here, but when we look at horses and them needing a resource, if they're a migratory species, provide that resource and they'll stay. And if you look at how we domesticated a population of horses, the chances are it was exactly the same way, like we're hypothesizing because it's very hard to understand from an archaeological perspective, but exactly the same with dogs and horses. You know, the chances are that they came and were domesticated by us and came into our camps and they slowly developed that relationship with humans because we provided a resource that helps them stay and then form the bond. There's a provide that resource. There's a city somewhere, it was on one of David David Attaborough's um we're we're talking loads about him today. Um he did a documentary and it was um like animals in cities, and it's somewhere in Africa where there is a pack of hyena that have almost become domesticated, and they will come into the city and people are feeding these hyenas. And you know, hyenas, for anyone who doesn't know, are like seriously aggressive and scary, and it's not something you'd want to come across at night. But this pack or group or band, please, I don't Barbara, I don't know the correct word for this, don't hate me. Um, have basically come near domestication through people feeding them, and they're not showing aggressive behaviours to these people, they're coming in, having their food. I think they're scaring off like other like rats and things. There's a the whole point of the episode was like a key cohesiveness between wild animals and people and how we can start working with animals. That was the the nature of the programme. Um, but yeah, that's a perfect example. There's they're being fed, and Barbara still can't stop laughing because there probably is a correct term for a band of hyenas. She's nodding, guess. What is it, Barbara? Cackle. A what? A cackle. A cackle. Oh yeah, no, I do remember that now because I was like, oh, that's brilliant. Because hyenas laugh, ha ha ha, and it's a cackle. Funny, I'm just I'm just gonna call you answering. Hyenas are wonderful, absolutely wonderful. Uh yes, they are fairly terrifying because they've got a massive jaw bite, and you know, um, have you been in South Africa? Yeah, I you know, you don't want to be bumping into them because they are a powerhouse of an animal. Um, but talking about, you know, our our wolves and um, you know, papers that were done, it used to be believed that hyenas were quite a um and it's probably because of that stereotypical laugh that they have, um, and because they tend to be very good about stealing resources from other uh other um predators, but it used to be believed that they were quite an uncaring, they had this image of like you know, being uncaring and you know, horrible to their young and terrible in a pack, and because they used to steal from other animals. So we anthropomorphosized and we were like, Well, because they steal that carcass from a lion, therefore they must be really selfish and they're evil, and there was all these like weird sort of ideas that we brought into it. And research that we did, they have these amazing familial bonds, like they have this huge like family group. Um, there's like a mix of different responsibilities between ants and you know, uncles and and other kind of siblings, and they are just incredibly clever animals. Um, I actually just I love them. That and the African dog, um, but diatribe. Um that was an interesting diatribe. We like that one. Not that we don't like all of them, but that was a particularly nice one. Sorry, I caught my own insult there. I didn't mean to. It was fine. That's okay. So I think great point for us to laugh. We're moving on. Yeah, let's do it right. Intra interspecies and intra species behaviour, guys. So that basically means we're finally going to talk about dominance in the horse-human interaction. So, I mean, to start with, I just want to say that um for pretty much all behaviourists, the majority um of every in fact, can I just say all? I'm pretty sure every single leading group um of behaviourists and equestrian bodies across dogs and horses do not advocate for the use of leadership and dominance concepts in horse and dog training. Just as a as a just general statement. Most position statements do not condone the use of leadership and dominance concepts in horse and dog training. I said it a second time because I think it means twice. Yeah, I think it's worth clarifying that is, you know, international awarding and governing bodies for animal welfare and animal training. We're not talking about um training memberships as in like, you know, somewhere where you can become qualified as a certain type of trainer and somebody's built a business around that and it's become marketed. We're talking about, you know, the International Society of Equitation Science. We're talking about the International Association for Animal Behaviour, uh, you know, council and training. We're talking about um ABPC, ABTC, yep, A S A B, all these and all of them, all of them that are actually the governing bodies that work on an international level, which are there to support government in making legislation on animal welfare and all our sports and all this stuff. We're talking about the big bodies. Because ultimately, when it comes to creating a cohesive relationship with the animals that we choose to live have in our lives horses, dogs, cats, gerbils, whatever, you know, ultimately the position statement is that we see those animals in their own dyad, whatever their own normal natural behavior is, and that we don't see them as an animal that needs to submit to us because that is not conducive for them or us. Um Jen talked about earlier about riding into battle, you know, in that situation is very far different, it is so different from where we are now, um, and it's a completely different context. So using the same techniques that were used during that time to achieve our goals is just not appropriate now. Absolutely, and I want to just read out a the odd set there there's a whole mission statement from the International Society of Equitation Science that hopefully we will put into the show notes if you want to read this for yourself. Um, I was going to pick out the odd sentence. So they state in their mission statement regarding the use and misuse of leadership and dominance concepts in horse training dominance hierarchies, alpha positions, or leadership in a social group of horses are man-made concepts that should not form the basis of a horse-human interaction. That horses are social animals that mainly interact with each other on a bilateral level and are unlikely that they have a concept of rank order that includes all members of a group. So this linear up and down top to bottom ranking is not supported. Basing human interactions on dominance concept may be detrimental to horse welfare. There are unfortunately examples of riders, trainers, and handlers who believing they have to place themselves in an alpha position in relation to their horse. Resort to training procedures and or practices that elicit fear and in some cases may result in abuse. In nature, horses will avoid rather than seek out conflict. I think that's one of my main takeaways. Those are only a few sentences, by the way, guys. There's there's there's a whole mission statement. It's one page, it's not too lengthy, it's really worth reading start to finish. But one of my favourite parts of that is that horses will avo in in nature, horses will avoid rather than seek out conflict. But those trainers and riders or coaches that you know promote the idea of dominance in the alpha are actively seeking conflict and using pressure and fear-based techniques, and it's just so dangerous. It's also making your life so much harder. Yeah. You know, it really is like because the beauty about understanding horse behavior and animal behavior is that you suddenly get a window and an insight to make your life easier. You know, so then to to for me, and this is as a personal note, like when we look at all the research that's out there, and you know, we've covered it, I know we've jumped around a lot, but we've covered a huge amount of it today. When we look at all of that and that knowledge and that understanding, I'm like, this is amazing. We can just make our life so much easier with our horses and safer. Because ultimately, as well, like you know, if we just keep trying to put ourselves in a position where we're like, oh, I need to dominate this horse, I need to be the leader, I need to show him who's boss, all these sort of things, you know, at a certain point, this horse is probably going to become more dangerous and difficult to handle. Yeah, you know, in a number of situations, um, you know, they're they're going to want to get out of dodge out of sense as they want to actively avoid conflict, you know. Um, and this can happen as well. Like, you know, you think of an emergency situation, say you fall off your horse or they get spooked, and where they're gonna go, they're gonna go, well, I'm gonna run as far away as I possibly can right now, um, and potentially get themselves into a more dangerous situation. So I actually think it knocks onto a load of different things. I just need to apologize, guys. I was just reading the summary, the document's actually five pages long, but it's still worth a read. I just thought I should put that in there. Um but there's also one other sentence I want to, I won't read it all out, but basically it talks about how the concept of dominance hierarchy and alpha position and leadership has been people's attempts to describe the complex dynamic social structures of how horses work in groups, and it's kind of an indication of people's lacking understanding of what's actually going on. So, because you know, there's maybe been historically researchers, trainers, coaches, whatever, that haven't been able to understand what they're looking at, what they're seeing, kind of attaching themselves and taking, oh, the dominance hierarchy, oh, that kind of explains it in a way that I can understand, so that must be true, and now we have cognitive bias and all that jazz, doesn't mean it's true, and unfortunately that then becomes widespread, and that's why we're doing podcasts like we are today, to say totally understand it, it's an easier concept for people to understand and get hold of, it's very linear and very box-ticking, and we love box-ticking as human beings, but it's not right, it's there, it's more complex, and you know, when you're working with horses and you're trying to do the right thing, complex is difficult and it feels uncomfortable because ultimately we don't speak the same language as them, Jen. Like we're trying to take a really subtle, highly evolved language that horses have developed between how they can communicate together that in you know, the between it within species, and then we're trying to understand that so that we can develop that communication with them, which is an admirable feat, and that's where it's coming from. And we're trying to you know make it into a really easy and accessible way of us uh you know communicating with them, you know, but but dominance just isn't the path forward. Dogs have I say have had their kind of renaissance, they've done all of this and they've come out the other side. And I'm hoping we'll see the same for horses. We we tend to sort of be a little bit behind. Um, there's just more dogs in the population, they tend to have a bit more research, easier to research too, um, for the most part, um, just by their size. Um, but when we look at papers that are done on studying behavioral indicators with dogs, and these are like 10-20 years old, we can see that like what we would have once termed as a dominant behavior in a dog is actually 24 behaviors and seven different body positions that all mean different things. So when you think about that, like that's and being able to read seven different positions and 24 different behaviors and actually look at all of them and go, okay, well, which one does this actually mean? That's really complex, yeah. And and dogs also compared to horses, have less body positions and less behaviors because they also have vocalization, yeah, and they don't need to stay as quiet, whereas horses need to stay quieter because they're a prey animal, so they have even more subtle behaviors and body positions that they use to communicate. And we can't even possibly like the other part of kind of dominance is this idea that the dog the sorry the the dog or the horse is seeing you as a dog or a horse, but they don't, they see you as a human, you are their human. That's it, you know, um very much so, like, and it is they don't see you the same way because there's no way that we can move and create those body positions and behaviors the way a horse does. So we're not speaking the same language, we'll never speak the same language, so there's no point pretending to be a stallion, there's no point pretending to be a mayor and to dominate because they're never gonna understand that. What they're gonna do is fill that vacuum in their understanding of the world with how they perceive it, and they're gonna create their own associations, you know. A stallion may kick another stallion to drive it away from a resource, you know, that that he wants. If you go up and kick your horse, your horse is not gonna go, oh, I need to be driven away from that resource. They're gonna go, Who's that dickhead who just kicked me? You know, that hurt. I don't want to hang out with you. Anybody kicks me, I don't want to hang out with them. Like what episode is it? One of our episodes from season one. Um Barbara came out with an absolute blinder. Um, what he said, what what dickhead do you respect? What dickhead do you respect? I stand by that. I'm gonna get tattooed on me, you know, and then ultimately, yeah, that's it. Like it's for me, I just the mind boggles, you know. And I just I I say I'll go on record, it doesn't mean I don't turn around when Monty is scaling something and go, Monty, it's that, you know, like of course I do, because that's that's my own self-talk, and we talk about that in the the other episodes. Like, that's how we communicate with ourselves as well. There's other things that are going on, you know, but our animals are gonna still associate that with something else. Like, I haven't dominated Monty, he just goes, Oh, I shouldn't scale the curtain, you know. Barbara yelled at me, like, I know what's gonna happen next. She's gonna be like, you know, exactly. And and that's it's an associate, it's an association, not a dominance. Exactly, and it's a learned response, and it's positive punishment, operant conditioning, and this is all the stuff that our original researchers didn't have access to. If if if the um Pavlov's dogs, classical conditioning, everything we know in learning theory was done first before dominance hierarchy, I think our the way we interact and train and work of animals would be really different, and I would love to see what that was, but that's not the reality we live in. The reality we live in is that the concept of alpha dog and alpha horse has been widely used in traditional training methods, and these methods often involve asserting dominance over an animal to establish control. However, as we've talked at length, research has shown that these approaches are flawed, can even be harmful, and they rely on the comparison of wild to domesticated, and you just can't do that because as soon as you put them into a domesticated setting, you're controlling the environment, you're controlling their resources, and if it's not done correctly, you're increasing the agonistic and aggressive behaviors regardless of dominance or hierarchy. You could have one animal on its own, and it will show your aggressive and agonistic and distance increasing behaviors if those resources are still limited, and there's no social structures there for it to show dominance over, but it will show the aggressive behaviors because that's what's actually happening. I think the last one that I kind of wanted to make a point on, um, because I know we could talk about this for hours, was I can almost hear people saying, like, well, hold on a second, you know. If this was so true, then why is it when I'm watching the horses in the field and one horse starts walking towards the other side of the field, the other horses follow? Surely that following is dominance. Um so I'm gonna I'm gonna bring this to to a human example. Um, you ever seen people cue? Um, you know, cueing is wonderful. Cuing is a wonderful behavior that humans perform, they do it everywhere. Um you don't the people that you're getting behind in the queue look like they are making a good decision, right? Oh, we get into this queue, or oh, I'm gonna move into this one. What happens when a new till opens? Like just one over. Somebody will go, oh, that means I can get there a bit faster. That's that's a resource. So they move across, and then someone else goes, Oh crappy, I'll go do that. It's not because that person, that stranger you met is dominant, it is because they've made a good decision that will get you out of the shop faster, right? It's one of these things, and then what happens sometimes as well? You have an altruistic exchange where somebody else will go, Oh, you've only got two things in your basket, you go in front of me. It's the reason I'm using that example is it's fluid, it's non-linear, it changes all the time, and different interactions can happen with strangers as well as individuals that you know. Absolutely. It is so complex, and it's the same with horses. It's summer, it's really warm, the flies are terrible at the moment. But one horse is particularly irritated by the flies, more so than the other ones, and is driven to seek shelter. They go and find a spot that's great and gets away from the flies, and the other horses go, Oh, I wonder if that's a good space. I'll go and follow. The biting flies start stop to produce negative reinforcement, and they learn that that's a good place to be. If that horse took them to an area that was had even more biting flies, the other horses would turn around and go, He's an idiot, I'm not following him again. Yes. Yep, yep. And this is Barbara's coined a lovely term that I love using uh reliable leadership, be a reliable leader. It doesn't mean dominate and force your horse into submission, it means make good decisions for your horse, for your animal. And if that means, oh look, there is I'll give you an example. I was riding Ruben out on the roads a couple of weeks ago, and he was a little bit on edge. Um, we just you know hadn't gone down this route, so he was a little bit on edge because it's just a whole bunch of new stuff he hadn't seen before. And although I went at a quiet time of day, there was a decent amount of traffic, and then you know, it's harvest season, and there was somebody, I I don't know all the it was a tractor with a big bit of kit, right? I don't know if it was a spreader or whatever, and I could see him in the distance, but he was coming from behind me, and I made a decision for me and Ruben. I know that he is better off when we face these things, so I made that decision that I the road was quiet, I cut across the road, I rode back down the road towards the tractor. I made that decision for my horse as well, being because I know we're better off doing that, and that I have a bit of a technique with Ruben that has just happened out of trial and error, that once I get to a quarter of the way past a vehicle that I know he's a bit worried, we go into trot and we get past it quickly, and we can stop and do positive reinforcement on the other side. That is not me dominating my horse and going, You will get past this. That is a learned response that we've learned over time and I've reinforced that he almost does it on his own now. That once we get just he gets level, but think about the car door of whatever machinery, he will pop into like this lovely little trot, and then we stop on the other side and he gets his treat and reward. And yeah, that's something that I've done on the ground in hand first. Whenever we saw something dangerous or scary, it was we're gonna walk towards this, you know, to get past it. I'm not gonna let this creep up behind you and scare you, and very often I'll put myself in danger's way, as it were, in the horse's mindset beside. So none of that was dominating with my horse, but now we do that pattern, he's so much safer. There's you know, and for reference, guys, we've been knocked to the ground twice on the road. Me and Ruben have hit the deck twice around traffic, so it's a really this is a really big deal. Um, so that happened through building positive associations, doing my positive reinforcement work, being really he's good off the leg for negative reinforcement that has to be there, but I've reliably made good decisions for us that have a better outcome. If I try to force him through that, all I would do would be increase the stress around that scenario, and then create associative learning with a higher anxiety and that object, task person environment. So, like, you know, if you create more anxiety and then they see something, you know, they're can connect that associative learning in a totally different way. So, you know, if we're using um like a trailer, for example, my horse won't go into the trailer, you know. I need to show him who's boss, I need to show him how to get into the trailer, like you know, um, like he's taking the piss, he's the alpha, blah blah blah blah, and we increase the adrenaline and we increase the stress, and this trailer sitting right there, you know, there's two things that can happen. Like we're gonna associate the person with all that negative reinforcement or that positive punishment in that situation and that higher resonance stress, which is a state that a horse doesn't naturally want to be in, they want to have a lower level of stress, or we're gonna associate it with the trailer, and every time we bring out the trailer, then it's gonna associate with that, and we're gonna connect to those things that we don't necessarily want to. So, as I say, by using the idea of dominance and leadership, it's actually just making our lives a lot harder, you know. And I say this from a perspective going like, I want to make your life easier, I want to make it safer. I don't, you know, we're saying it to try and support you to go, okay, there's an easier way to do it, and we can help you do that. Funny you say about the road, Jen, and the positive associations. I told you we bumped into kayaks on the canal then uh two days ago. No, oh my god, oh I love when Blossom gets big to you know, timed it like she's 50, she's 15-1, you know, 15-2. Um, you know, whichever you want to think, you know, and normally like quite low frame, you know, she'll walk about suddenly. I've never seen her get so big. It was you know, I'd spotted them two kayaks on the canal, uh, going the opposite direction to it. Oh, they were coming towards us, and suddenly she spotted them, and god, she got big. She got so big, you know, proper giraffe, um, and just absolutely planted. Um now, I've had blossom for a long time and talk about good decisions for your horse. I was like, Okay, they're canals, you know, they're they're coyots, they're coming towards us. Um, and all I did was like put my hand out to to fist bump, and she wouldn't check in, she was too busy focused. And then she finally checked in and touched my hand, and she got a treat. And then I went, Can you step forward? And she went, I'm a bit scared, but anytime that Barbara asked me to step forward, something good happened. She has made good decisions for me in the past, so these are a bit scary. So, even though this is a little bit hard, I'm gonna take a step forward and I'm gonna, you know, and I'm gonna get something, and she did, and wonderful bit of capturing of a behavior. It just happened to be that the kayaks decided that they were gonna turn around and go the opposite way. Oh, perfect. It was just it was the most perfect bit. So for the reason Gen said perfect is there's a form of negative reinforcement happening there. So Blossom takes a step forward, you know, made a good decision. Here's a treat, and at the same time, the kayaks turned around and went the opposite way, so it's removing the pressure, you know. So all of a sudden, oh, if I go forward, they'll leave me alone, you know. So it's it all just stacks on to itself. It's how do I escalate? It was just really nice. I could totally forget to tell you about it. Um, and then she went from being a giraffe to slowly starting to come down, and then she started getting a little bit excited and then sort of trotting after them. No, but I love that I would just I was gonna say, like, that's another technique that you can use when you're out on the road. Yeah, is say you have had a scary. I mean, this is we're going off a tangent here, but it's all useful training techniques as well. If you've had a scary moment on the road of your your horse, but you know the vehicle's gone, the tractor's gone, or whatever, and you've stayed on and you're all fine, go after it. Like if your horse will ask for a couple of strides of trot, and as that car or tractor or whatever zooms away, your horse is almost chasing it, and there's negative reinforcement is as the horse is going towards the object, it's the distance is increasing, the pressure is reducing, and it's one of those little bits of training that you can just make use of in the moment. Um, it's just helpful, and that's great. The kayaks turned around with your turned around. This is it, and it was just it was just a beautiful moment. It's what we call capturing, guys, um, which is when something just immediately something just kind of happens, you know, by the the will of God or you know, the fates of the horsey god or Zeus or whoever you want to believe in, um, you know, it just happens to happen in the ethos, and you just get that moment to go, great, I can get my training in really quickly there, you know, and it's called capturing, it's just a moment that happens, and this is when you know, if we are reliable leaders for our horses and we've developed developed and understood their behavior, we can just grab that moment where it's there and go, great, perfect, we'll just grab that, you know, and solidify it. And so since we're yeah, we've gone off on a tangent. This is part of the it was great because you've led me back into something. So, since we're on the topic of positive reinforcement, there's something I came across on the abyss of social media, which is never a nice place to be. That potentially feeding an animal by hand is evil because it's confusing for the animal, it's confusing for the horse. If you feed your horse by the hand, it's evil and a really bad thing to do because the wild stallion wouldn't do that. Sorry, I have my hand, I had my face in my hands. Sure. Uh just there's just so many things want to pick apart. Well, obviously, it's not the same. They don't have hands. They don't exactly. That was where I was going with this. They don't have hands. So don't worry. Very first of all, I want to calm everyone down and go, you're safe. Don't worry, horses don't have hands. They're not going to confuse you with a horse because you have hands, you are a human, you are not a horse. And if we just go back to everything we've spoken about in this episode, these are domesticated horses in an artificial setting. At some point, we have to stop comparing domesticated horses to everything that wild horses do because wild horses have so many more choices, freedom, space, they can make their own decisions. We micromanage so much of their lives, and the use of positive reinforcement in training is just phenomenal. I mean, if you look back at some of the studies in dog training back in 2004, there were some researchers called Hilby and Rooney, Hilby, Rooney, and Bradshaw that found that dogs trained with reward-based methods are more obedient and exhibit exhibited fewer problem behaviours compared to the dogs trained using punishment-based methods. Now I know that's a dog one, but let's go back to 2004. We haven't been doing it's just as applicable, but it's important because this has been known as a useful, non-aggressive, non-conflict uh training technique back in 2004. But you know, research is in the equine world, it's not till about 2011 that the highlights are being benefited for positive reinforcement in horses. We are so behind in the equine industry, and it's a concept that we're still struggling with on the global scale of using it. But the benefits of using learning theory appropriately, which includes positive reinforcement, I can promise you it's not evil. Yeah, evil's just strange. There's two points. Yeah, it's two points I wanted to make that. I know I talked on one of my diatribes about um you know the aspect of sort. Of the the moral ideas of you know hyenas, for example, and the I you know, we we place our own kind of moral and social understanding onto animals because hyenas stole prey from other animals, so therefore are they kind of selfish and we have that sort of thing. Um, and we talked about the the development of human psychology within World War One and World War II. There was a lot happening in those times, and our own human biases have been caught up in all of that. I almost feel like the idea of adding the word evil to a particular training technique, regardless of what it is, because there's some people who will say, like, you know, a positive punishment or negative reinforcement or positive reinforcement, they'll say nearly all of them uh are evil that depending on which kind of group you are, and that's because we see certain training techniques as a moral failing or a superior model, they are human ideas. The horse don't care. There's no morality there, there's no morality, it just is. It's like oxygen, it's like gravity, it just is positive reinforcement exists, negative reinforcement exists, they are just things that exist in our world, and depending on what we're doing, you know, we are using one of those fundamental ones. If the you know, this person, as say you said found it on social media, is talking about you know, food, or they're just talking about positive reinforcement in general, and a stallion, you know, that we can't provide a stallion or a male horse with positive reinforcement, well, it's just a nonsense because ultimately we do it all the time in our studs. You know, sex is positive reinforcement. You know, we'd never breed another animal again. That's a different debate, you know, if we removed positive reinforcement, um, you know, and there are some really gentle, very kind stallions that are well trained to breed because we've used positive reinforcement by doing that. So again, uh it's just it's just not understanding the fundamentals and then placing our own human ideas onto it. Yeah. Second point I want to make, and this is, and I know I said earlier in the podcast, but this is just a general rule of thumb when it comes to ethology and understanding population dynamics. So if you if you forget anything else, just remember this. Um females tend to defend resources that are food-based, males tend to defend resources that are female-based, and that's just a really broad spectrum, you know. Um, but that also assumes that they're in a natural environment and not a domestic environment, and that we haven't interfered with their normal biological function, i.e., a castration. So we have completely altered the domestic horse. It is very rare that you have, you know, in most livery yards, a pregnant female. Um, so the chances are resources are going to be very abundant from a food perspective. Chances are we've castrated a male and they're not going to be as interested in the females. So it just evil. Evil for something that is a natural and normal behavior for a horse to eat. Yeah. I just I think as soon as we hit extremism, and we're we're talking about training. I know it's okay, Barbara. We'll end soon. Um just to um, and this isn't so much about dominance, this is more like human psychology, and just like a tip for anyone who I was going to do a post on this, and I wrote all these notes, and I never actually did it, so this will be my post on this topic. Um human bias is massive, and if you get a pressure release or dominance-based trainer, right, they are going to attract people who want that, and then they are going to see more of those cases and more of those animals that respond to it. Because what happened is you'll have you'll have Sally with her horse, and maybe she tries positive reinforcement, but unfortunately, the trainer maybe didn't actually have a good grasping of positive reinforcement, or didn't work, or wasn't done appropriately, and now Sally has an idea that positive reinforcement doesn't work, so she then moves to the more pressure and dominance-based trainer, and perhaps that person is more proficient in their application, and so results are seen. And now that trainer is justified in going, see, I told you this is how this works, this is how we do it. And Sally, the horse owner, goes, Oh my days, this is how it should be done. But the opposite is also happening, so you're gonna have Frank with his horse goes to the dominance trainer, it all goes wrong because the horse is put over threshold and it's not done appropriately. They then turn around and go, I want something different, I'm gonna go to positive reinforcement, and they meet a trainer who uses positive reinforcement, and it's really, really good. This is how we end up with these opposing sides within our industry of you're wrong, you're wrong, you're right, you're right. What we need to do is just step back and go, Well, okay, Sally, what you had was a really poor example of positive reinforcement and a really bad application of a training plan. It's not that the positive reinforcement is evil, it's just the whole experience didn't meet your needs and your horse's needs, and the dominance person and the pressure person did actually do more of what was needed in that moment. It doesn't necessarily mean that one is evil and one's negative, and vice versa. So that's my whole die tribe on that comment that, like you were saying, there's no morality here, but as a trainer becomes more well known for a technique, their own bias for that technique will become more and more and more because they're gonna see more horse owners that need that technique. And I think that's a whole other thing. I know this is gonna be a long one, guys. I hope you're enjoying it. The um I'm sure we could talk for hours more, um, but we I think we'll try and try and wrap up and probably go down another rabbit hole. Um, but when we talk about dominance, because we talked about at the start the original research and the history of dominance and where it kind of went to tended to be a lot of like aggressive interactions, which is why, again, from a training perspective, it's not appropriate to be overly aggressive with a horse to train the folks on the training, because they are very different from the majority of other companion animal species or species that we spend time with, like dogs and cats, though I would argue it's should uh the same is applied, but really from the perspective I'm saying it is because they're a prey animal, so their go-to is to commonly flee from a dangerous or painful situation. Now, and we think that a lot of the stuff that we work with horses to try and get them comfortable and happy without spooking or bolting and keep as safe as possible because horse riding is a dangerous sport, then I would argue that approaching a horse that we're trying to keep safe and quiet in most scenarios, approaching them with an idea of dominance and aggression again is just creating more problems for us. And horses, because they're prey animals, will readily learn to avoid potential threatening situations, especially if any of those attempts are associated with something that is painful or a behavioural problem. Yeah, and when they can't flee, because very often we've got them in a domesticated setting, that might be a small paddock, an arena, a stable, or they're tied up. When a horse can't flee, that then they're left with their other options, you know, freeze or fight, and again, then it becomes a learned pattern of what got them the best result. If a horse is put into a position where they can't flee, they might well turn to distance increasing behaviours. So that bite, that kick, and if that did increase the distance between that human or got that human to stop, that is a learning cycle. That's not dominance, that is that horse learning that it's useless trying to flee. Don't bother. The quickest way to safety or the quickest way to security is to bite or kick or do these other behaviours. It's got nothing to do with dominance or the horse wanting to dominate over you. It's got everything to do with the horse trying to keep their own sanity and their own safety. Yeah. And if none of those works, you end up with freeze and learned helplessness. And that's not sorry, but that's not a complete horse. That is a horse who has gone, I have no choice. I can't flee, it's useless. I can't fight, it's useless. I have no other option but to just submit, regardless of what I'm feeling on the inside. And that that one I find the most upsetting. It is, and particularly, I think, because and hopefully people will see these on these training videos now. Like, you know, listen to what the trainer is saying and what the horse is actually doing now that you are armed with this information. If they're using a I need to dominate and be the alpha training technique, you will watch the horse. Is the horse trying to increase the distance away from the trainer? You know, or are they trying to decrease the distance? Are they trying to get closer to them or away from them? If they're trying to get away from them, you know, there's a reason for that. Considering we want to try and create a harmonious bond with our horses and work with them more. Wouldn't you want them to work closer with you, not try and get away from you? You know, and then when that all fails and the horse finally just stops moving, you know, and stops trying to get further away, the chances are that's closer to learned helplessness than actually any kind of dominance, because dominance doesn't exist in this situation. Yeah, I can under I can understand why does exist. Yeah, I can understand why people do want their horses at a distance because there's a fear-based thing that you know they're gonna get hurt or suit on, and like they want their horses to be at a distance for the lap like for their own personal safety. And I think that's where then people do turn to the dominance, like they must respect your space. It's got nothing to do with respect, we just need to establish boundaries. You know, if we can establish boundaries on what's okay and what's not okay, it is a learned pattern. We don't need to dominate that horse and apply loads of positive punishment and make ourselves the alpha to have that conversation of you can come that far, but that's fair enough. If you stay there, I'll come and give you a treat or a cuddle or take the pressure off or whatever. You're just setting a healthy boundary with your horse. It it does nothing for respect. All that all that horse is doing is learning to keep arm's length away from you. And guess what happens next? Your horse won't be caught in the field. That's just my that's my dig. I know. Um I know that's oh this this is it. It's like you're we talked about associative learning and and training as well, like you know, by you by missing misunderstanding the context of dominance, territoriality, and where it's all coming from, and by applying them incorrectly, you're teaching the horse actually stay away from people. That's the association that happens. So then when it comes to any other form of your training, the horse is gonna go, Oh, I remember this. The horse human wants me to stay away from them. Great! Oh, they're coming next catch me in the field. I understand what to do, I will stay away from the human, you know. Like, so it ends up having associative learning that we don't necessarily want, and they learn the wrong associations because we've created a vacuum. We've told we haven't told them what we do want them to do, we've told them all the things that we don't want them to do, so then they have to make up their own mind about what happens, and then you're flipping a coin, and you could have far more control over it by telling them what we do want rather than creating this vacuum that the horse goes, Hey, I'll fill this with whatever I learned by accident. So hopefully there's something that you guys have heard us say a lot, which is don't is not a behavior. Um, because you know, the dead dog was it I always forget this barbers of the dead dog dead man test or dead dog test. Well, so uh it's a dead man test, is is the way it's you know referred to. But Steve Mann, who just to be difficult, his name is Steve Mann, he's uh a prominent dog trainer and very ethical-based and excellent um you know uh dog trainer. He sort of coined it from a dead man test into a dead dog test. Okay, so that gives a fantastic example. It's it's the same kind of principle, I suppose. It's it's very much um, you know, you can say dead horse, dead dog, dead penguin. The idea is that a animal that is I don't know, you know, the idea in the principle is that you know, a non-living creature, you know, cannot perform a behavior. So, you know, Jen don't cough. Well, if Jen had passed away, Jen won't be coughing anymore. So great, training succeeded. You know, asking, so it's it's a way of framing our minds to say if you hear yourself saying don't do something, then you're already setting yourself up for failure. You need to translate that into a do. And that also applies to us, which is where the dead man test comes from. So it's coming from the human psychology side of things, and we've just brought it into yours. Like, as say I was a smoker for many years, and it was always like, Oh, I don't want to smoke, I don't want to smoke, I don't want to smoke. Well, all I'm doing is going don't smoke, you know, I'm going smoke, smoke, smoke, smoke. You know, instead of saying I want to become a non-smoker, it's just changing the narrative, and that's something I can achieve. I can become a non-smoker, you know. That's that's some that's a positive, it's an additive, and it directs your training in that particular way. And on that note, guys, we are going to start summarising, but I just want to signpost you guys to that fits nicely into one of our bonus episodes. So, in our bonus episodes, we're working our way through negative reinforcement, positive reinforcement, negative punishment, and positive punishment. And that what we've just spoken about there speaks quite well to our positive punishment episode where we will talk about where can positive punishment be used ethically, where is it appropriate, but also this concept of when you feel the need to say no to your horse, how can then we then turn that into a positive situation? So we're gonna listen out for that episode, that one of our bonus episodes. So, with that being said, Barbara, I think it's time we summarise and let these darling listeners go if they've suffered through this entire episode. If if they have, I mean, and it's gone everywhere. Um, like it really has. I don't envy future Barbara who has to edit this. Um and I I just want to say if if you're listening to this and you are a savant and you have researched and understood dominance theory, and it's something that you've looked into a lot and go, oh, they've missed this study, they've missed that study, or they've missed this nuance. Um, recording time, we are hitting two hours and five minutes. It won't go out that way because I will have to edit. Yes, this is actually edited very professionally. Um, we alluded to at the start that some of these studies are over like we have a hundred years of this research. So if there is stuff that we missed, don't worry, I'm sure we'll come back to it again. Uh, there's only so much research that we can go through, and there's so much nuance, and we just wanted to try and give you a flying overview that ended up being two hours. Um, so um be kind in the comments. There's so much in this, and yes, we have done tried to do it justice as much as possible. If there's anything in particular that you found we missed or you want more detail on, please do send us a message. More than happy to to dive into it in a bit more detail. There's loads of research out there. We didn't even touch on any of the uh studies that talked about you know feral horse dynamics, and so that's horses living in a free-range uh situation. There's loads of research out that on their behaviour as well. Um, so if you do want to hear more about it, by all means send us a message. So, in summary, guys, while dominance theory has played a significant role in you know the understanding of animal behaviour, um, undoubtedly it has, you know, its application and training in domestic animals is flawed, right? And it's outdated. And if we can embrace learning theory, that's negative and both positive reinforcement, it does offer a more effective, humane, and science-based alternative that will help remove a lot of the conflict and fear-based practices. Absolutely, Jen. Like I think moving forward, and this I you know, we wanted this episode to be positive. I know we've gone into the weeds, um, but us as dog horse penguin trainers should really embrace training methods that prioritize the welfare and the well-being of our horses and our animals, build trust, build cooperation rather than using fear and submissive tactics. You know, this research is a hundred years old, we're in 2024 now, let's move forward with the times. And with that, guys, that does conclude our discussion on the flaws of dominance-based training. As Barbara mentioned before, we haven't even scratched the surface on actual hierarchies and how they work. So please do send in your comments and messages. Is that something you want us to cover and what areas? As we said, the research is over 100 years old. So if we miss something, god no, the hundreds of papers that we have missed, like there's so much out there, and I really do encourage you to go and read some of it. Please be very careful of the dates of the paper you're reading, because as we know, the research has developed and changed over time. But in future episodes, we are going to delve into you know more science behind modern training methods and more practical tips on applying these with our horses, as well as some other wonderful topics. Also, I'm really sorry that we've destroyed most of Hollywood films for people. Yeah, I'm not sorry. They can all be sad with us now. Also, guys, since let's just destroy one more thing for everyone, because Donald hates it when it's holding this one. Every time there's a horse on a screen in a film, it whinnies. Horses don't whinny that much. And horses don't really announce themselves like that unless it's really scared and then it's a fearful behaviour because he's like, Oh my god, I'm so scared, where's my herd? Which would then alert the presence of predators. So it's a horse who like is so scared that he's willing to open up his location to predators. But when horses trot along, they just don't, they just don't they don't. Why no, they really, really don't. I mean, like, I can't watch most films anymore. We watched uh the new quiet place there a couple of months back. Oh no, are you gonna say the cat thing? Oh, the bloody cat. That cat would be dead within the first scene. Everybody would. That cat is that quiet. I'm putting a pin, I'm putting a pin. We are stopping the recording. Thank you guys, thank you guys for joining us for this amazing discussion. Um yeah, thank you, and stay tuned uh for our next one, which will be slightly more organized, less sporadic, and more concise. Yeah, thank you guys if you made it this far. You are amazing. Thank you so much, and we will catch you next time. All the best. Bye.