Micro-organisms at work!

When I first came up with the term hidden horse I thought it sounded quite snappy, was neatly alliterative, and seemed to fit with a lot of what I wanted to say, but as time goes on I realize how appropriate it really is, because there literally is another animal hidden inside your horse, or more accurately there are billions of them!What am I talking about? Parasites? Worms? Aliens??? No! The answer is micro-organisms. The weird mixture of bacteria, yeast and fungus that lives inside you horse’s gut and without which there would be no horses. Together these bugs create a living ecosystem within your horse, and just like the larger external ecosystem that you and your horse are part of, it is very finely balanced and very susceptible to damage from human activity. You can poison it, you can kill its inhabitants, you can destroy its atmosphere by pollution and if you do this, you will kill your horse.

So, it makes sense to learn as much as possible about this environment and to become deeply knowledgeable about the best ways to protect it, because we must always be aware that having a digestive system like this, is a monumental difference between horses and most other mammals including us. Because of this I want you to start to look at your horse in a different way, instead of seeing just the familiar physical assembly of bones and muscles and skin you know and love as your horse, start to imagine the ‘hidden horse’ beneath the skin. Think of all those billions of micro-organisms as one single animal and realize the crucial fact, that:

 The health of the outside horse is totally dependent on the health of the inside horse. – It doesn’t work the other way round!

 Learn to love that inner horse because keeping it healthy is the key to owning healthy horses.

This is a big problem for us humans, we do not like to think about having ‘bugs’ living inside us, in fact we are pretty revolted by the whole idea. We immediately think of parasites such as worms. The movie Alien played brilliantly on this fear of innocent humans becoming incubators to rampaging baby aliens. We also have a great fear of micro-organisms, much of our medicine is based around fighting and killing off these organisms. Generally, we think of them as ‘bad’ bugs, the agents of disease, infection, putrefaction , decomposition and decay. But the definition of bad bugs is only a human one, without these micro-organisms we would break the circle of life, there would be no absorption of decaying organic matter no decomposition of dead bodies no absorption of nutrients into the soil – there would be no soil! And let’s not forget the ‘good’ microbes we use to break things down to create some of our favorite food and drinks, without these bugs there would be no cheese, no yogurt, no bread and most terrifying of all, – we would have to live in a world without beer!

So whether microbes are good or bad really depends on your perspective, in fact our are digestive systems are stuffed full of microbes, more than that, our whole world is covered in them. Microbes have been found on the edges of space and down to a depth of 3Km into the Earth’s crust. With every breath we take, every drink we swallow, with every mouthful of food we take, like it or not we are consuming microbes.

We are naturally able to consume all these things but horses are real specialists and because of that they have developed certain physical differences to the basic mammalian digestive system. To start with they have a much larger and longer digestive tract than other mammals, the reason for this is that horses base their diet on fiber. Fiber takes a long time to digest. Carnivores like us on the other hand, have a much shorter and ‘faster’ digestive system because the proteins in meat quickly begin to decay. So we deal with them much more directly by enzymes and other chemicals, but horses take their time.

Probably the biggest physical difference though is an organ called the cecum, this organ is huge, in a large horse it is over a meter long! In the human it is called the appendix and is tiny, we can even have it removed without problems, but not a horse.

If you want to know more about this subject I’ve just finished reading a fascinating book called ‘Healthy Horses: Horse care with effective micro-organisms’ by Ernst Hammes. Now this may not sound like the most gripping of titles but trust me if you are a horse keeper you should read it. You can buy it from Amazon here. It was originally written in German and has quite a few useful quotes, my favorite is this, the author says (in his jolly German way), “Death begins in the colon”. Which is true, but if I can put that in a more positive light, ‘life begins in the colon’ or even ‘health begins in the colon’. All because the horse relies on the inner horse to break down their food.

 This is just an introduction, in future posts I will return to this question of the ‘inner horse’ hidden inside your horse because it really is the key to understanding diet and health and hoof care and all kinds of other subjects connected with happy, healthy horses. Until then…

 May the bugs be with you.

To learn more about natural horse care, positive reinforcement training, paddock paradise etc. Buy my book Revealing your Hidden Horse at lulu.com This article is copyright. Mark Hanson All rights reserved © 2012  
Author Mark Hanson

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Practice The Basics

Well, okay perhaps not quite Shakespeare, but stick with me, it’s still useful stuff…

In the last post I introduced a form of learning called classical conditioning. I described it as a type of learning that takes place when one or more events come to predict another event. I said that this type of learning was emotional and so takes place automatically whether we like it or not. I explained that because of this we can sometimes make the wrong association between events and that this can often lead to superstitious beliefs about the world. You can read the full post by clicking here.

There are of course other types of learning that we have much more control over, simply because we have to think about them. One example of this is called operant conditioning. Here we have another one of those user (un) friendly terms that scientists come up with where a nice piece of jargon is used to replace perfectly easy to understand English words. Scientists -Grrrrr! Anyway once again ‘conditioning’ just means learning and once again I’ve managed to boil this term down to a few simple words. Operant conditioning happens when we:

Think – Things – Out.

When we think things out, we usually follow that with a specific action to make something happen. This is the basis of positive reinforcement training and especially clicker training. Here is a simple example:

First I have already classically conditioned the association between the metallic clicking sound so that the horse has learned that when it hears the click it predicts the arrival of a reward – usually a small piece of food. The horse gets quite excited by this type of event because classical conditioning works with the intuitive, emotional part of the mind. Now say I position myself at right angles to the horse, take a deep breath and relax. I place my fingers on its flank, then I wait. I do not (despite what you might have heard elsewhere) increase the pressure of my fingers if the horse does not respond. I just wait. The horse might be a bit puzzled by this because it is obvious that I am expecting some sort of response. It is possible that the horse might feel a bit uncomfortable and will move its back-end away from me just to get away from my fingers or even just to look back at its flank and move as it does so, to see what I am doing. The instant the horse moves its back-end away from me, I [click!] and reward.

 The horse has now learned something! However, (and this is crucial), I must immediately repeat the exercise. I will explain why in a minute. Once again I extend my hand and touch the horse’s flank in the same spot. Now the horse starts to ‘Think It Out’ It starts to experiment, – to see if what happened before, will happen again. It takes a step away and once again it hears a [click] and gets a reward.

Horses are fast learners. Very fast, they have to be, they are prey animals. The horses who were slow learners did not survive. So they are very good at thinking things out and assessing the advantages and disadvantages of things that they come across in their environment. If I repeat the exercise a third time, the horse will already be ahead of me and have worked out that if it feels my hand on its flank all it needs to do is move its back-end away from me to hear a click that predicts a reward. It may even start moving away from me as it sees my hand approaching its flank. I don’t really want it to do this at this stage, I only want it to move away when it feels my hand there; so I stop moving my hand toward it and drop my arm to a neutral position. I then take a deep lazy, low energy breath and relax even further. In short, I do nothing and let the horse absorb the implications of this. The horse initially worked out what conditions gained a click but now it has learned what conditions do not earn a click. So it will start to think-it-out again. It wants the click, it’s excited by this, so it will experiment and try to recreate the precise actions that earned the click. This is reasoning and thinking-it-out.

All this takes longer to write than to do, but this is the basis of positive reinforcement training. The most important thing to notice is what happened when the horse did something ‘wrong’ – nothing! It had neutral consequences, no punishment, I did not correct the horse, I simply offered the opportunity to have another try, I call it ‘earning a free go’. When the horse anticipated my hand signal and moved before I had made contact, I only had to remain neutral and invite him to try again. He remembered the conditions that had earned the first two clicks so he adjusted his behavior and earned a new one.

I mentioned just now that it was vitally important to repeat the event as soon as possible. This is because there are four steps to learning anything. As usual these steps are universal and so they work with any species including us. Here is a quick outline of them:

 The four steps to learning anything!

Step one: Linking

All brains basically work the same way. when a brain receives a new bit of information it stores it. The way it stores it is:

 By linking the new information to something it already knows.

Everyone’s minds work in this way. Classical conditioning is about one event predicting another, it is also about one event being linked to another event. You might remember in the last post I gave an example of the smell of the dentist, hospital or your old school suddenly bringing to your conscious mind all kinds of memories. This is because your mind has linked the memory of this smell to your experiences of many years before. This process of linking is totally unconscious and goes on throughout our lives. It is also the most important aspect of learning anything. When I started prompting the horse to move its back-end it heard a click and so it linked the action to something it already knew, the association between the click and the reward.

 Step two: Repetition

Right. Homework for this evening is to learn by heart the soliloquy from Hamlet, you know, “To be or not to be.”..it is only 270 words! Well okay perhaps not, but if you absolutely had to learn it, – how would you go about it? Would you just read it through once? Or would you read it through over and over again and practice it enough times until you could repeat it from memory? Repetition is the key to memory, or at least, long-term memory. The more we repeat things the more we embed them in long-term memory. Even with horses we have to use repetition to get what we have taught them embedded in their long-term memory. I suspect that because horses are fast learners they are may be even better than us at learning things through repetition. Perhaps not Shakespeare though, but certainly physical movements and so on.

 Step three: Generalization

The third step is the magical one. The more we repeat things the more the process of linking goes on and the more links we make with memories in our experience the more generalized our knowledge becomes and the more applications we find for it. For example, many years ago I learned to drive a car. I passed my driving test in an old Mk 1 Mini (yes- that long ago!) But I soon realized that this didn’t mean the only vehicle I could drive was a Mk1 Mini. Because I learned the basics of the clutch the gearbox, the accelerator etc all those years ago I’ve gone on to drive hundreds of different types and makes of vehicles, manual, automatic, left hand drive, right hand drive, trucks, vans, tractors and even combine harvesters etc, etc. It is because of this ability of our linked-in brains to adapt to new situations, I know today I could reasonably confidently jump into almost any type vehicle and more or less know how to drive it. And I’m sure you could too. The point here is how ever our knowledge blossoms it starts with learning a simple basic fact or skill and continually adding variations of that skill. This how all knowledge and learning works because it grows and changes into other things.

 The more clicker training you do, the more simple things will grow into more complicated things. For example, moving the back-end of a horse might be combined with moving the front end so you now a horse that moves sideways leading onto lateral work and so on. This means that you are teaching the horse in a sequential way where each new action stems from what has gone before. This is how all education should work.

 Step four: Maintenance

 This step is often overlooked. All it means is that we should occasionally revisit the things we have learned in the past in order to keep them fresh. Often though we find when we do go back our perspective of the action has changed because of what we have learned since. So in a sense we are now reviewing the basics in the light of greater understanding. This is why musicians such as pianists constantly return to the most basic practice of all which is musical scales.

 Never neglect the maintenance step it is vital to keep your understanding and that of your horse. Here is an example of this: I expect in the past most of us have taken some type of examination, for a short while we revised and reviewed and perhaps became real ‘experts’ (for the purposes of the exam anyway). However, since that time we may never have had occasion to revisit that knowledge and as a consequence completely forgotten anything we ever knew. Sometimes final exams, really are final. But supposing we had from time-to-time revisited that knowledge and done a quick review? The chances are that we would still remember a great deal about that subject and because we kept up our interest have actually added to our knowledge and understanding of it.

These four steps are common to all types of learning and all species. Your horse learns in these four steps and so does your dog and yourself. When you get to really understand positive reinforcement training you will start to build up whole groups of routines that move from very simple repeated behaviors to complex and spectacular routines. Some people like to sit down and plan all this on paper and move step-by-step and logically, others take a more organic and intuitive approach and allow the work to develop as they go, either way, it all starts in that magical moment when you first see the horse Think-It-Out.

To learn more about natural horse care, positive reinforcement training, paddock paradise etc. Buy my book Revealing your Hidden Horse at lulu.com This article is copyright. Mark Hanson All rights reserved © 2012  
Author Mark Hanson

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Be afraid, be very afraid

One of the fundamental principles of a training method such as clicker training is something called classical conditioning. It is one of those slightly irritating scientific terms that at first glance doesn’t really mean anything. Science is full of this stuff, perfectly good English words with unambiguous meanings are replaced with jargon terms that just obscure and complicate the (usually simple), meaning. Anyway that is enough of my rant against the scientific community for one morning – need more coffee. So let me demystify this important term for you.

I have read whole books that try to explain classical conditioning, they go into long complicated descriptions of the work of Ivan Pavlov, a Russian scientist who originally invented the pesky term and generally the reader forgets what the book is about by the end of the explanation. So in response here is my explanation, I’ve managed to edit it down slightly to er… one keyword.

PREDICTS.

Well I better give you a little bit more than that. Firstly The term conditioning just means ‘learning‘, see what I mean about making things unnecessarily complicated? So classical conditioning is a form of learning. Here is my full definition.

Classical Conditioning is where the subject learns to link two (or more) events so that the first event predicts the second.

This type of learning is something that all animals do including us. Let me give you some human examples. Have you ever been to the dentist or a hospital or perhaps revisited your old school? Did you notice the distinctive smell that these places have? Perhaps your experience of such places was not particularly good and suddenly a whole load of negative memories come flooding back. This is an example of classical conditioning where the smell of these places has become linked in our experience with something negative in such a way that the smell predicts unpleasant consequences. Of course in just the same way other events can predict something extremely pleasant and positive. The events can be smells or sights or sounds or anything, – the important thing is something is learned.

When we first start to clicker train an animal we take a sound (the click), and associate it with something pleasant and positive such as the arrival of some food. So the click predicts the arrival of food. As I have discussed before it is not actually the food that is the pleasant thing, it is the emotions that the food evokes.

This type of learning is very intuitive because it works directly with our emotions, – good or bad. It is because of the intuitive emotional link that we don’t have to consciously think about classical conditioning it just happens automatically and that sometimes gives us a small problem. Classical conditioning is the basis for all kinds of feelings and unfortunately is often associated with superstition. Because we don’t need to think logically about the associations we sometimes make the wrong associations with events. Here is an example:

Saddling a horse. Have you ever tried to saddle a horse and found the horse is resistant in some way. The usual conclusion is that the horse is being deliberately awkward. (Always a good idea to blame the horse - apparently). However, now we understand classical conditioning we should consider that perhaps the appearance of a saddle is an event that predicts something unpleasant for the horse, similar to the way the smell of a hospital or the dentist might do for us for us.

Okay, it might be something simple and obvious, for example, if the saddle is not a good fit its appearance might predict a potentially painful experience as it rubs his back. Or…

• It might be that the horse has learned the whole experience of being ridden is one that it doesn’t like because it is going to have a large and painful piece of metal put in its mouth.
• It might associate being ridden with being hit with a riding crop, or jabbed with spurs and so on.
• It maybe that the horse has learned that it is going to be taken away from the safety of the herd. A big thing for a prey animal.

It might be a combination of all of these things. Remember the definition? One or more events predict another event. So in the horse’s mind the saddle predicts negative things.

What the horse is doing is making a guess, an assumption based on previous similar experiences and during those experiences, the horse experienced pain. So the horse has learned that the appearance of the saddle predicts an approaching experience of pain.

Classical conditioning is emotionally intuitive so it is very powerful but when it predicts pain, then it becomes turbo-charged, which is why grown men faint at the idea of being given an injection. The actual physical pain is probably no worse than getting a scratch from a bramble but the anticipation for some people, is pure torture.

An extreme form of this is called a phobic reaction. Phobic reactions to things are very physical, typically breathing becomes very rapid as the lungs suck in oxygen, heart rate increases pumping blood to the muscles in preparation for fight or flight. The skin starts to sweat, the mind becomes locked on to the frightening event and a whole host of other mental and physical changes take place but the key to it all is the initial classically conditioned anticipation of something bad about to happen. Now if this sort of reaction can occur in a predator such as a human, how much worse might this be in a prey animal like a horse?

There is however a bright side to this, fortunately classical conditioning is just as powerful when associated with positive things. Perhaps you use positive reinforcement in the form of food while you work with the horse. What if every time you saddled the horse you did lots of fun and rewarding activities? What would the classically conditioned appearance of the saddle now predict? That’s right fun and reward.

I have been particularly struck by the change in attitude of horses when they switch from a bridle with a traditional bit to being ridden bitless. The bit, no matter how you dress it up, (pressure, release, stronger, weaker comfort, discomfort etc.) works by increasing and decreasing pain in the most sensitive part of the horse’s body, its mouth. Therefore the appearance of the bit can only predict one thing, pain.

Now given that traditionally we humans are foolish enough to sit on the back of an extremely strong and powerful prey animal, whose main reaction to coercion is flight, for our own safety we must control that flight reaction, unfortunately thousands of years ago we learned ONE way of doing this was through the use of pain, the consequences of which are often… – well, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to work out what frequently are ‘the consequences’.

When you ride a horse bitless, pain is removed from the equation. The bridle no longer predicts pain, which means consequences no longer predict pain. Congratulations! You don’t have to control the horse’s flight reaction any more, now you can concentrate on communication, – which is what riding (should be) all about.

So that is classical conditioning, in the next post I will look at an even more irritating term, operant conditioning, – whatever that means! To find out Click HERE

To learn more about natural horse care, positive reinforcement training, paddock paradise etc. Buy my book Revealing your Hidden Horse at lulu.com This article is copyright. Mark Hanson All rights reserved © 2012  
Author Mark Hanson

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Buster

In the last post I introduced the concept of adaption. You can read about it here . It is an ability that all horses have as part of their ‘tools’ for dealing with the world. It is a powerful drive, I believe it is as powerful as their biological desire for safety, food and reproduction. It is also one of the reasons we find the horse an attractive species for domestication because its innate ability to adapt helps us achieve many of the things we want to do with it, for example, we can use the natural instinct to belong to a herd to form a relationship with a horse, one that leads on to training it.

I mentioned that there are many natural things a horse can adapt to but there are unfortunately many unnatural things we impose on the horse that it can never adapt to, I gave the example of horseshoes. In these cases when the horse is unable to adapt it will adopt the opposite strategy to adaption that of coping. Horses that are attempting to cope usually are forced to do this when they are exposed to unavoidable types of stress, also known as negative punishment. These stresses are often associated with the environment in which the horse is forced to live. There are four classic examples of this, I have mentioned them many times, they are enforced stabling, clothing in the form of blankets, horseshoes and diet. All of these are aspects of an unnatural and alien environment which is imposed on the horse under rigid control of the human owner and to which the horse is expected to adapt to.

Because the horse is unable to adapt to these unnatural stresses, coping with them leads to the all too familiar consequences, sickness and disease, for instance, behavioral problems, lowered immune responses, physical breakdown and colic. Ultimately the consequences of coping lead to the horse either being sold on because its failure to adapt makes it unable to fulfill its function, or leads to premature death.

There is another situation that is (all too) common in the life of a horse where it is forced to adapt to unnatural and enforced circumstances and that is when it becomes ill and is treated by a vet.

Here in the UK vets and farriers have something in common, they are both legally allowed to shoe horses! Fortunately few vets actually take advantage of this freedom the law allows but they have it because they may need to perform surgical procedures on the horse’s feet. More worryingly farriers occasionally also perform what amounts to surgical procedures on horse’s feet but I won’t digress on to that topic.

One other similarity that vets have with farriers is that they also work from a rigidly traditional utility model. Like most utility models it is based on accumulated knowledge of what works and what doesn’t work and also what is practical and efficient. In the case of vets that usually means it is based on either drugs or surgery. Another aspect of both the veterinary (and medical!) utility models is that a great deal of their knowledge and procedures comes straight from the battlefield. Which is why vets and doctors are very good at repairing damaged tissue in the form of traumatic injuries. It is also why in the case of vets, the mental and behavioral needs of the animal are seldom addressed.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not ‘anti-vet’. My own father was a vet and I grew up in a busy veterinary surgery. I absolutely respect vets and I know from personal experience the dedication this vocation demands from individuals that choose it as a career. That said, like most of us, as an adult I also have to deal with vets as a client and without question, I am prepared to pay for the knowledge and expertise of the vet brings to my animals. However, I do also have two minimal requirements of a veterinary visit.

1. I expect the horse to be better off because it has been seen by a vet. I am not foolish enough to expect a miracle cure, neither do I expect the vet to be infallible but I certainly do not expect the animal to be worse off as a result of the vet’s visit. I hope that is not unreasonable? I won’t go into details but I once had a vet attend a horse and it was a further three weeks before the horse was as sick as it had been before the vet’s visit! I changed my vet immediately.

2. I do not expect to be given advice based on human anthropomorphism rather than knowledge of the biology of the species.Really these two points are aspects of the same thing. Anthropomorphic advice will make the animal worse. The worst offenders are ‘box rest’, ‘diets’, and the completely unjustified use of antibiotics ‘as a precaution’. This last one is at best a superstitious diagnosis and at worse leads to bacterial resistance rendering the drug useless.

In previous posts I have covered subjects such as laminitis for which the usual treatment includes prolonged periods of box rest and a ‘diet’. This is an example of the vet imposing on the horse a treatment in the form of an environment that is in all probability going to make the horse worse. This is because the horse is unable to adapt and can only attempt to cope. It is also a diagnosis based on human superstition (“take two aspirin and go to bed”) and a lack of acknowledgment of the basic biology of the species. Horses digestive systems cannot tolerate long periods of inactivity because their function is based on living micro-organisms, not chemical enzymes like ours. Neither is a horse’s diet based on the predator idea of refueling.

So why do otherwise intelligent, well-educated, well-intentioned and knowledgeable experts make diagnosis that may make the patient worse? The answer lies in the traditions of the utility model. The veterinary utility model comes largely from the Victorian army. Its methods and procedures are not based on ensuring the long-term health and well-being of the animal, they are based on returning that animal to its working role as quickly as possible. This is why modern veterinary treatment is based largely on drugs and surgery, because those are the most effective tools to achieve this. Even though today most horses are no longer strictly working animals, the demands made on them to compete and win prizes mean that the vet has to get that animal back and functioning at whatever its ‘job’ as soon as possible. This what the owner is paying the vet to do. Neither the owner or vet is concerned with the long-term health of the animal, they are only concerned with ‘fixing’ the thing that is preventing the horse from doing its job.

This is short-term treatment based on the horse’s function not its well-being.

A classic example of this and part of the inspiration behind this post is one of my rehabilitation horses Buster. Buster is an Irish Sport Horse and has joined my herd for rehabilitation, (that is to be rehabilitated back into being a healthy horse). At his previous yard, he had suffered a long list of problems mostly involving injuries to his back, feet and legs. He had been in almost constant and regular attendance by vets, he had gone through a whole series of imposed treatments at a cost of tens of thousands of pounds. These treatments had resulted in him spending three years on box rest and Buster was getting worse and worse. The amount of pain and suffering this horse must have endured in that time is unimaginable, and yet I guarantee that every human being involved in his treatment had nothing but the best and kindest intentions towards him and would find the idea that this animal was actually suffering and getting worse as a result of human intervention horrifying. In the end the final diagnosis the vet delivered was that no more could be done and Buster should be humanely destroyed.

Fortunately for him this was the point that Buster’s owners decided not to accept the vet’s advice. I believe that today Buster is well on the way to recovery. It is only two months since he arrived in the herd and his progress has had its ups and downs but he continues to progress improve everyday and will make a full recovery and go onto live for many more years. He has not had any visits from the vet and he has not had any drugs or chemicals imposed on him. So why am I so confident that he will get better and how is it achieved?

First Buster no longer has a ‘job’ so there are no time restraints he does not have to be back at work in three weeks. Secondly he is undergoing a complete detox, no more drugs or chemicals. Thirdly his digestive system is being allowed to regrow naturally and he is starting to digest fiber efficiently. Fourthly, he lives in a herd 24/7 on a track system and has unlimited travel available day and night. Fifthly, he is in a herd and learning to be a horse again and getting fully socialized, in other words he feels safe His mind is adjusting and reprogramming itself towards health and well-being.

The most important aspect of Buster’s new life is it is a new positive environment, his body is adapting to.

It is his natural adaptability as a horse that is repairing the damage to his body not drugs or surgery.

All we have done at hidden horses is put him in an environment that has allowed his natural tendency to adapt to do the rest. I know this sound incredibly simple but I know it will work because it has worked with other horses in the past. This is using nature to do the hard work, this letting the horse’s mind and body heal itself by adapting naturally.

The track system and environment here is not some gentle paradise. In many ways it is quiet a tough environment. The horses have no stables to protect them, they must find their own shelter. They have no real access to green grass and live on a 90% fiber based diet that they must go out and find. They do not wear rugs or blankets and are expected to cope with whatever the climate throws at them. Their feet are not ‘protected’ by metal horseshoes yet they travel around the track day and night so that the ground is constantly abrading their feet. Finally social life in a herd is pretty rough. The lower ranking horses in the herd especially pick up quite a few minor cuts and scrapes. Higher ranking horses will drive them off their pile of hay most days and if they don’t move fast enough they might get a kick or a bite. But these are all conditions that horses have been adapting to for millions of years it is their natural way of life. It is the process of adaption that keeps them healthy.

I said that Buster had ups and downs, initially he lost weight as his digestive micro-organisms made the adjustment to a natural fiber based diet. He also suffered a hoof abscess, probably the worst abscess I had ever seen. These abscesses are not the result of becoming barefoot, they are common in horses that are shod, some vets regard them as so common that they accept them as an inevitable part of being a horse. There is very little that can be done to treat them they are usually allowed to come to a head and burst. The pain the horse experiences is similar to laminitis in that hydraulic pressure caused by fluid is trapped within the hoof capsule. The horse usually experiences almost total relief when the abscess bursts and the pressure is released. This abscess however was particularly bad and Buster’s whole leg swelled up. How would a vet have treated this? Probably drugs and/or surgery.

It is likely that they would have (rightly) given pain relief; then possibly some sort of anti inflammatory drug followed an antibiotic. Other physical means such as cutting into the abscess in order to release the pressure plus perhaps a poultice to draw out the infection are likely. Finally it is certain that the vet would have prescribed at least a week of box rest, probably more.

If we look at this treatment we can make some interesting observations.

Anti inflammatory drugs are often based on steroids such as cortisol, a natural occurring chemical produced as a result of stress. Horses are an animal that relies on bacteria to digest its food. Antibiotics are likely to affect the health of the gut micro organisms. Physical surgery is by definition invasive and potentially is a source of infection and is certainly a source of further stress. Stress lowers the immune system. The horse will have to be dressed and have new poultices applied, this is also highly stressful. Finally box rest is enforced isolation resulting further stress is something that the horse will have to cope with as it cannot adapt. This will lead to further sickness, disease and depression.

In contrast this is how Buster was treated for his abscess. Buster stayed in the herd and continued his natural behavior of moving and foraging for food around the track. Although he was in pain I knew there was little that could be done and that the sooner the abscess burst the better. Nevertheless, I gave him some pain medication. He only actually stopped moving and stood in a corner for about an hour when the abscess burst. He immediately returned to his normal activity of movement with the herd. The swelling in his leg disappeared rapidly over the next two days. From noticing the first slight lameness to the swelling and bursting release of the abscess to returning to normal life was less than 30 hours. Contrast that with the long drawn out process of conventional veterinary treatment perhaps lasting many days or weeks. Buster dealt with the whole episode with minimum stress and returned to normal health in the shortest possible time, but the important thing is he dealt with it all himself.

This is so simple yet it is so powerful. I think it is the key to a whole new way of thinking about sickness in horses. Naturally there is no reason for vets not to use antiseptics or antibiotics, there will always be physical injuries that need treatment with either drugs or surgery and it should be part of the skill of the veterinary surgeon to know when their use is appropriate; however, wouldn’t it be fantastic if vets were to realize that so many of the diseases they see in horses are a result of the environment in which they live? Simply by thinking of the bigger picture and changing the environment, they would be utilizing the powerful natural drive to adapt in a way that minimized the need for powerful chemicals and invasive surgery, without side effects, yet put horses automatically on the path the well-being and health.

At the very least a more holistic approach based on the natural biology of the horse would make vets and owners aware of the potential of traditional (utility model) treatments to actually make the horse worse. Surely this is something that must end?

Finally I would like to see vets becoming a source of knowledgeable expertise and advice on natural diets, track systems, barefoot life and the benefits of allowing the horse to be a horse.

But that might just be a little too simple I suppose.

To learn more about natural horse care, positive reinforcement training, paddock paradise etc. Buy my book Revealing your Hidden Horse at lulu.com This article is copyright. Mark Hanson All rights reserved © 2012  
Author Mark Hanson

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The power of Adaption

“The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.”
- Albert Einstein

One of the things I’ve discovered over the years and it never ceases to amaze me, is the brilliant way that horses adapt. As a species they have spread all over the world and in the process have adapted to some of the toughest environments on the planet. Desserts, mountain tops, tundras, swamps and so on. Horses live in some of the driest, coldest, wettest, hottest places on our planet and they thrive. In order for them to do this they have developed remarkable physical features.

Horses seem to have an inbuilt ability to adapt to their environment. I believe that this is one of the most powerful drives within a horse and one that we humans frequently overlook. When we take ownership of new horse and put it into a new environment, the horse will attempt to adapt and for the most part they do this relatively successfully. The sort of things we might ask the horse to accept are new climates, new sights, new smells, new physical objects, new routines, new companions and new diets. Generally these are all similar to things that the horse would encounter in the wild and so the adaptive process is relatively natural. The problems arise when horses are asked (or expected) to adapt to unnatural and alien environments. How can a horse adapt to isolated confinement from the herd, – sometimes for 24 hours per day? How can a horse be expected to adapt to the technology of a different species, – as when metal shoes are nailed to its body? How can a horse adapt to alien foodstuffs such as black treacle or fish products? How can a horse adapt to being covered by artificial clothing, often for many months of the year?

The answer is that it cannot, however, what it can do is attempt to cope. Coping is an attempt to deal with stress. Stress is something that horses naturally experience in the wild, perhaps from seasonal climatic conditions such as drought or from social competition or disease. The important difference here is that this type of stress comes to an end. The rains will come, the herd will become balanced, the horse will recover from disease. In the artificial environment the stress never ends, at least not until the human ends it. The horse is trapped until the human releases it. The shoes are on until humans take them off. The diet will only change when the human changes it. The rugs are on until the human decides it is time for them to come off or the human wants to ride. In behavioral terms this is a life of unrelenting negative punishment and millions of domestic horses live their whole lives like this and ultimately:

A life lived in a constant state of coping leads only to two things, – sickness and disease.

Sickness and disease are signs that the horse is unable to adapt. The body breaks down. Immune systems become compromised, leading to allergies, digestive disorders, injury, obesity and suffering. The all too familiar story.

I said earlier that the ability of the horse to adapt is one of the most powerful drives in the horses nature. So perhaps we should consider whether we can use this natural ability to work for the mutual benefit of both our species?

When a horse adapts successfully to a new environment it means that the conditions within the environment no longer cause it stress, naturally the opposite is true, when the horse fails to adapt and can only attempt to cope it means that conditions within the environment continue to be a source of stress.

Let me give you an example of horses failing to adapt. Horseshoes. When people ask me about keeping horses barefoot (often because they want to argue about it), I ask them a simple question:

How old is the farrier profession?

Nobody knows the precise answer but records date back to medieval Europe, the dark ages and most likely beyond, at least 6-700 years. If you think about this and you think about the numbers of times farriers have fitted shoes to horses – many tens of millions of times, and lastly you think of all the accumulated knowledge that entails, well logically there should not be a lame horse on the planet. – Right? Wrong. The following is often quoted, – seldom disputed

“Of the 122 million equines found around the world, no more than 10 percent are clinically sound. Some 10 percent (12.2 million) are clinically, completely and unusably lame. The remaining 80 percent (97.6 million) of these equines are somewhat lame… and could not pass a soundness evaluation or test.”

Walt Taylor – Co-founder of the American Farriers Association, and member of the World Farriers Association and Working Together for Equines program.[American Farriers Journal, Nov. /2000, v.26, #6, p.5]

So 90% of horses are actually lame. It has taken humans at least six hundred years to achieve this, my question is, how long will it take until we get it right?

It might also be useful to consider the relatively new idea of barefoot trimming, this has been going for probably less than two decades and yet every day brings progress and understanding and more rehabilitated horses. So why such a difference? The answer is actually simple and lies in what I call the utility model.

A farrier’s job is to produce a horse that is able to fulfill its purpose.

On the other hand, barefoot trimmers have a different goal, they begin with the aim of producing a healthy happy horse that is sound and pain free for life. This is why in less than twenty years the barefoot movement has made huge strides in the understanding, practice and theory of keeping horses without shoes. They would probably be the first to admit they are not perfect and there are many different ideas and techniques competing with each other but because they all have a similar goal they move forward eventually rejecting ideas that do not work and developing new ones that do. The farrier profession on the other hand has never needed to progress beyond one solution, which is why we are still applying 12th century technology to horses feet. This is a good example of humans failing to adapt and develop new ideas. Farriers do not need to produce a happy healthy long lived horse they need to produce a horse that can fulfill its function. As a horse cannot adapt to being nailed to a metal prosthetic they are left with only one option that of having to cope. I repeat:

A life lived in a constant state of coping leads only to two things, – sickness and disease.

Barefoot trimmers work with the horse’s natural ability to adapt, they don’t just consider the trim they realize that the environment and consequent movement and especially the diet are even greater factors. If you put a horse on a track system, you give that horse an environment it can adapt to, and it the process of constant adaption that actually does the work of maintaining the horse’s feet. This is why horses in the right environment seldom need more than a maintenance trim. The longer the horse is in the environment the less work the trimmer has to do. This is an example of adaption producing good health. So the process of successful adaption is also the key to good health.

This post is just an introduction to the powerful concept of adaption. In part two I want to look at the greater picture of how adaption affects a horse’s health. So standby vets. I will try to be gentle with you. To read the second part of this post click here

To learn more about natural horse care, positive reinforcement training, paddock paradise etc. Buy my book Revealing your Hidden Horse at lulu.com This article is copyright. Mark Hanson All rights reserved © 2012  
Author Mark Hanson

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William Bennett

Any kind of reinforcement based training is based on rewarding your horse in some way for doing the ‘right’ thing. But the subject I want to address in this post is what do we actually mean when we say we are rewarding the horse? Because rewards are many and varied and some rewards are more rewarding than others. Scientists have come up with a word that describes the degree of reward rather well, they call it ‘saliency’. Here is a definition:

Saliency: the state or quality of an item that stands out relative to neighboring items.

To put that another way it means how important something is – relative to things that are less important. Here is an example:

Say I was training my dogs using a food reward, perhaps, lovely bits of raw liver (yummy), now I suspect that you could train a carnivore such as a dog to ride a bicycle while whistling ‘the star spangled banner’ using raw liver. They love it! But suppose you used the same reward to train a vegetarian horse (please don’t actually try this) how rewarding do you think the horse would find gory lumps of liver?

In scientific terms how salient is this reward using a scale of 1-10?

For the dog it is probably up there as a 10, for the horse it would not even make a 1. This shows us that saliency is not a fixed thing it is highly variable, so not everything, even if it is something that is generally acceptable to the type of animal has the same level of saliency for the individual. A good example here in the UK is Marmite (Vegemite in Australia), yeast extract everywhere else. Famously people either love it or hate it. I happen to be in the ‘love it’ camp so it is very salient to me but I know lots of people who can’t bear the taste of the stuff and actually avoid it. (They don’t know what they are missing!) So for these people Marmite is of very low saliency indeed.

There are probably thousands of factors that affect saliency, including, previous learning experiences, cultural differences, personal beliefs and even gender. And it’s not just food that is rewarding, humans seem to find money quite salient, others are very attracted to material things and possessions, some people want power and influence over others, equally, there are many folk who get a buzz out of caring for others or contributing to the common good.

So perhaps when we are thinking about things being salient we should consider exactly what really happens when we get rewarded by a thing or an event? Is there something that links say a human with a sense of satisfaction at public service or caring for others and a horse who realizes he only has to take a step backwards to receive a piece of carrot? What do all these events have in common, whatever your species?

The answer is EMOTION.

It is the emotion behind the reward that is the rewarding thing, not the physical reward itself. So when I say saliency is a variable thing I really mean it is the amount of emotional reward that is variable.

Clearly, some things are more salient than others and it is logical to assume that when we want to use this knowledge in positive reinforcement training, the more salient something is to the horse the more effective it is as a reward. To put that another way, the harder the horse will work to achieve the desirable emotion. This is why a horse will work just as hard for just one small piece of apple as it does for a whole bucket full, – because it is working for the emotion not the physical item. Sometimes in clicker training we actually withhold the arrival of the (physical) reward in order to get more effort from the horse, for example we might ask the horse to touch something such as a target two or more times before we click and reward. This works because the emotional reward is actually greater when it arrives. In other words, by withholding the reward we have increased the saliency.

So now we can see that the saliency of an item changes, because it is linked to emotion.

The next question we should ask ourselves is how salient to my horse are the things I use to reward it?

Here are some common things we use to reward horses:

1. Food

2. Touch

3. Release of pressure

This list is pretty much in order of saliency or emotion. Most horses find food very salient because food is one of the most powerful basic biological drives of life, (along with sex but we won’t go there!). Horses spend up to 75% of their life looking for and consuming food.

Touch is more difficult because it is closely associated with affection especially in the minds of humans. It is true that horses are very tactile animals and apparently enjoy the touch of other horses, you can often see them mutually grooming each other and this seems to be an emotionally pleasurable experience for them. Most of us will know of a horse’s itchy spot somewhere on their body they like to be scratched and once again they will show pleasurable responses to this. But there is also the question of the degree of saliency, if you tried walking up to a newly captured wild horse in order to give it a friendly hug how do you think this animal would react? (Don’t try this one at home kids). Would your friendly human approach be likely to be seen as affectionate or threatening? To look at this from the opposite perspective, if a large Siberian tiger walked into the room right now and came over and gave your face an affectionate lick how would you feel?

This is one of the difficulties with using touch as a reward it is relative to the relationship that you have built with your horse and what one party might assume is friendly and emotionally rewarding, the other party might find traumatic and terrifying. If we also consider that a horse is a prey animal and we are a predator thus we are biological opposites just how rewarding is a prey animal going to find the touch of a predator?

Don’t worry I’m not saying don’t touch your horse but I am saying don’t assume your attempt at being friendly is interpreted in the same way by the horse.

Release of pressure is based on the behavioral law of negative reinforcement where something negative is removed from the horse’s environment. It is especially common in training systems such as natural horsemanship, where a lot interactions between horse and human are centered on ‘pressure and release’ or ‘advance and retreat’. There is one obvious disadvantage to this in that, before you can remove something negative you have to put it there in the first place! Another disadvantage is that if the horse does not produce the correct behavior the pressure is increased. When this happens the horse then has three basic options. It can attempt to avoid the pressure through its natural defenses of flight of fight, however these are not acceptable to the trainer and so can only result in yet another increase in pressure. This is training by punishing what is wrong. The final option is that of becoming ‘compliant‘; overcoming the instinctive urge for flight or fight and working out what is the minimal effort needed to avoid the pressure and obtain the release of pressure. Another name for compliance is learned helplessness, it is a state of mind always typified by minimal effort and frequently linked to depression, – in both horses and humans!

The question is, given what we now know of saliency and emotion how salient is release of pressure as a reward? I think you can see that being forced (coerced) into performing some action that you may or may not want to do, which can only lead to minimal effort and possibly depression is not something any animal is likely to find rewarding.

Training any animal by punishing what is wrong, either through increasing pressure or correcting the wrong behavior, is very inefficient because of minimal effort. However training by rewarding the right behavior is very efficient because the horse is now working with you, it wants to do the right thing in order to earn the reward and to receive the good feelings associated with highly salient emotions.

To learn more about natural horse keeping, positive reinforcement training, paddock paradise, barefoot horse care etc. Buy my book Revealing your Hidden Horse at lulu.com This article is copyright. Mark Hanson All rights reserved © 2012.Author Mark Hanson

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Perhaps I should begin by dealing with some confusions that might arise from the use of the term NHK. In the horse world the word ‘natural’ has become synonymous with the phrase Natural Horsemanship, but NHK is not associated in any way with NH. Natural Horsemanship is very much a system of training horses based on the teachings of individuals. It is a system because it is associated with levels of achievement usually defined by a series of exercises that have to be achieved in order to progress through the system. In other words the subjects both horse or human, have to adapt to the goals and rules of the system. One of the big differences between NH and previous traditional training systems is that in natural horsemanship there is an acknowledgment of the emotional needs of the horse and that is incorporated into the goals of the system, hence the label ‘natural’ being used. In addition some of the training outcomes are based on observations of ‘normal’ behavior of the horse in a wild situation. Unfortunately they are also based on an interpretation of these behaviors and often this is a very human interpretation based on the things humans want to achieve.

NHK is not a system it is a philosophy about horses. Like Natural horsemanship is based on observed and recorded ‘normal’ horse behavior, (we call this the horse’s ethogram). But in natural horse keeping we take these behaviors and ask two questions:

1. ‘Can I construct an environment in which a horse is able to show this behavior?’

2. ‘Can I then incorporate this into a realistic management situation?’

A good example might be: Horses are herd animals, can I therefore create an environment in which they can be herd animals? Actually the answer is usually pretty simple. Yes!

Or:

Horses are creatures of movement, normally they travel several miles every day. ‘Can I construct an environment that allows them to reproduce at least in part this traveling behavior?’ Once again the answer is simple, construct a track system or paddock paradise. Place food around the track to motivate them to travel around the circuit.

And so on… In this way we can construct a holistic management system. Notice that I am not talking about ‘my’ horse or individual cases. NHK is very much an holistic approach. I see my herd (as a whole) as an integral part of the environment in which they live. I extend this to include benefits for conservation, I encourage diversification of native grass species, I plant wild flowers to encourage insects, which in turn encourage mammals, reptiles birds and amphibians. I use solar panels to charge fencer energizers. I collect rain water to provide alternative drinking points. I even plant ornamental plants usually grasses, such a sedge, bamboo, pampas grass and small trees around the yard to create a pleasant environment.

Horses naturally live in what I have called ‘nutritionally poor environments’. That is usually areas of very sparse tough vegetation, that are high in fiber. This is the type of environment that horses have adapted so well to exploit. Once again the track system used in NHK helps create this. The movement of horses around the track in the winter time actually destroys a strip of grass around the original field, so the horses have little or no access to grass at all, in other words a nutritionally poor environment. This has many advantages, it means I can ensure that the herd only consume a long-fiber diet of hay or haylage. It also creates quite a sterile and alien environment for worms and parasites but also a good environment for species such as earthworms and beetles, which in turn attract birds and mammals. Because the track has hedgerow on one side, then a track then a hay meadow I now have three environments where there was only one.

This focus on the environment rather than the horse is incorporated in my seven principles of natural horse keeping. If you have not seen them before here they are and of course you can read bout them in greater depth in my book Revealing Your Hidden horse, available on the home page at hiddenhorses.com.

Principle #1.

Our management of the horse must always create good-health and well-being in the herd.

Principle #2. We base or relationship on the Natural Behavior of the horse. That means: Life in a herd, a life full of natural movement, a diet that closely relates to the natural fiber-based diet.

Principle #3. Horses need to move. Constant movement any time, day or night is a fundamental right of the herd.

Principle #4. Management is based on the environment, – not just the horse.

Principle #5. The opportunity to feed is the main daily activity. Up to 16 hours + per day!

Principle #6. There is always something to look at or do. Horses have a right to live in a stimulating environment.

Principle #7. RESPECT THE HORSE AS A HORSE

Look especially at principle #4.

At this point I should also deal with another myth, that Natural Horse Keeping = Wild Horse Keeping. Well perhaps it might be a nice idea but I don’t have 30 square miles in which to keep my horses but I can still create, (using only a relatively small area), an environment that allows horses to show much of their natural social behavior, to form bonds and to travel, exercise and interact as they want to do.

So why do I do all this?

The Romans had a saying: “Mens sana in corpore sano”. If your Latin is not what it was, this translates as, “a sound mind in a healthy body”. Perhaps we can modernize that slightly by making that “A healthy mind in a healthy body”. I believe that in order to keep horses healthy we must also keep them mentally and emotionally happy. In fact most diseases and behavioral problems should first be addressed by looking at the environment in which the horse lives, which makes this a holistic approach. Almost all problems I see in the horses that come to me, are as a direct result of unnatural environments and management. I can sum this up by saying that, the further we move a horse away from its natural model the greater the problems we will have with its general health. With this in mind the secret of happy and therefore healthy horses, is simply to move them back towards the natural model. The more natural the approach we take in our management of our horses, the happier and healthier they will be.

Let’s take a few examples of common practices leading to all too familiar problems and then try to find a NHK alternative.

1. Keeping horses in ‘houses’ or ‘cages’.

Simply put horses in the wild never have involuntary incarceration in a cave as part of their ethogram. This is the basis of the vast majority of examples of equine dis-ease. It is because these alien environments are places of unavoidable negative punishment. This always results in unavoidable long-term stress, as a result the body becomes flooded with stress hormones resulting in suppression of the immune system, leading to skin allergies, breathing problems and stereotypical behaviors (stable vices). Etc. etc. etc…

In their natural environment, horses do however have the ability, through choice, to find natural shelter from the elements within the territory known as their home range. We can reproduce this in NHK by offering many choices for the herd to shelter, it is easy to put up wind baffles, using material such as builder’s netting, we can adapt open barns using the same netting, we can choose fields that have shelter from trees, hedgerows or geographical features, such as slopes or ramps.

2. The wearing of clothing.

Needless to say no animal normally wears clothes! Neither have horses developed this habit in over 50 million years of evolution. However they do adapt to seasonal change within the environment using their incredible natural coats. Life in a herd environment in which horses have the freedom to adapt to the change in seasons and the physical environment allows them to develop long protective coats in the winter and short cooling coats in the summer. Internally, their bodies and immune systems also change and adapt throughout the year.

3. Diet

Some readers might be surprised to learn that I regard this as the most important condition of all. In recent years our horses have been forced to attempt to adapt to increasingly strange and alien ingredients in their diet. At the top of the list come cereals and molasses. I have written extensively elsewhere on this topic so I won’t go over it again, but suffice to say, the more boring and straightforward their diet is, based on long-fiber and the ability to access that food ideally, 24 hours per day, the happier and healthier they will be.

4. Horseshoes

Once again, I have written many other posts on this subject. Horses in the wild do not wear shoes and the use of such items is incompatible with natural horse keeping, in fact I regard it as incompatible with keeping horses altogether under any system of management. It is technology that is hundreds of years old and it is time we came up with something better. NHK is a management system designed to cater for horses throughout a long healthy life, possibly 40 years +. Horses under NHK management once again have full contact and interaction with their environment, it is the aim of this type of management to try to develop a system in which the horse’s body is actually maintained entirely by the environment. This is possible through the use of track systems, constant choice of movement and exercise and most important of all, a sound understanding of the horse’s digestive system and attention to its diet to achieve this.

Beyond NHK

Finally I began by looking at a training method such as Natural Horsemanship, I said that although NH is great step forward in the attempt to understand things from the horse’s point of view it is still a system. Systems by their nature are coercive, either in the case of NH or traditional methods they use ideas such as pressure and release, or threat and punishment through correction and sometimes force. All of these methods are incompatible with a holistic approach. I have also covered this topic elsewhere, and in-depth in my book. The reason I do not use these methods is that any form of coercion will eventually produce one of three side effects, they are flight, fight and compliance (sometimes called ‘learned helplessness’). The problem is that these are all reactions to stress and the last one is typified by a minimal effort and is often mistaken for obedience. Because of this it is sometimes seen as a desirable outcome of training.

In NHK I take a different approach and only use positive reinforcement methods to teach the horse (rather than train the horse) to think creatively to become engaged emotionally in the learning and to enjoy it! In other words I reward only the ‘right’ thing and ignore the ‘wrong’ thing. This actually expands the basic definition of NHK and starts to develop the individual while at the same time taking into account and respecting the psychology of the horse.

To learn more about natural horse care, positive reinforcement training, paddock paradise etc. Buy my book Revealing your Hidden Horse at lulu.com This article is copyright. Mark Hanson All rights reserved © 2012  
Author Mark Hanson
 

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But anyway here goes…

Flanders was a black and white ex-show jumper. She had a beautiful white blaze on her forehead and the rest of her coat except for three ‘socks’ was coal-black. Apparently in her day she had been well-known, even famous and I’m sure had won quite a few rosettes and cups for her owners. When I knew her she was an ‘elderly’ horse at around 18 years old. Her body condition however was actually very good, but as is the case with many horses from the utility world, she had ended up as a charity case at a riding stable, where I happened to be working at the time.

Flanders big problem was her feet. Her hooves were distorted and had split and cracked over the years, different farriers had put her through the usual range of corrective and remedial shoeing without success. As a consequence Flanders lived the last few years of her life in considerable foot and leg pain. She was one of several horses at the yard who received a twice daily dose of pain killers (bute) in her feed. But despite everything her condition got worse and worse – and the human world started to run out of ideas.

Eventually the owners of the yard, took the advice of professionals and decided that there was nothing more that could be done for her and the decision was made for her to be humanely destroyed. This type of decision is very difficult for anyone and I don’t blame the owners or indeed the many farriers or vets that had advised on her condition over the years. Individually no one person was really responsible, although maybe collectively you could say that Flanders’s fate was sealed by committee.

The slaughterman was booked, the day and time set. The only question left was who was going to take Flanders to her final end. Needless to say there were no volunteers. My colleagues and I all knew what was coming. It was late September during a week of those surprisingly warm, sunny Autumn days when the wind drops the world seems very silent and still as the leaves fall. In the yard, all of the staff were feeling very down and avoided talking about the subject, though most of them visited her stable that week and said their goodbyes. A s is common such situations that somber mood also passed quickly onto the other horses in the yard. The only horse who seemed unaffected was Flanders herself.

I knew it would be me. On the morning of the dreaded day my boss called me to one side and she asked me if I would do Flanders one last kindness and take her to her field where the slaughterman would meet me. I had grown up in a veterinary surgery and I had seen the death of animals all my life I knew it was never easy, I also knew this was going to be especially tough, – but I agreed I would do it.

I always liked Flanders, although she was in obvious pain she was always good-natured and willingly tried to do what she could. As I buckled her head collar for the last time I felt like the worst kind of traitor, a betrayer of trust. Still, I tried to act as nonchalantly as I could and keep things just part of the normal routine. She seemed happy to follow me out to her usual field, we opened the gate and I led her in, but rather than turning her loose we walked together up to the far corner under the trees. As we walked I watched at her out of the corner of my eye and noticed how well she looked, her coat gleamed, her muscles were toned, this all seemed so wrong and unnecessary. Even now I felt like running to my boss and begging her to give Flanders over to me. I knew I could get her back sound again even though nobody else could, I knew I could do it, – and at the same time, I knew I would do no such thing. Flanders was enjoying her last few minutes of life.

She seemed a little puzzled about the change in routine, even so she began to graze quietly, until she saw the pick-up truck arrive and the slaughterman opening the gate. Her head went up, she snorted and I knew that she knew.

I was quite shocked at this. Surely, she couldn’t have known, could she? It was impossible for this animal to know the intention of a distant human being and what they were here for. Yet Flanders knew, without a shadow of a doubt, this man who was entering the field had come to take her life. Immediately she went into full flight mode jumping and bucking and pulling me helplessly along and then just as quickly she froze and stood trembling as the slaughter man backed the truck up to us in ominous preparation for the act that was to come.

He was very professional, and ‘all in a days work’, he even greeted me with a cheery, “Hello Mate”. But then I suppose seeing my troubled face, he gently explained what he was going to do and what might happen and how I should keep clear of the hooves when she went down. He prepared his captive bolt gun putting in a tiny copper cartridge. It didn’t seem big enough to take the life of such a large animal.

He approached her and strangely his presence seemed to be almost calming to the horse. She didn’t resist. I held tightly onto the rope halter and he raised the gun to her forehead and fired. The shock-wave slapped into my brain and painfully rang in my eardrums.

Flanders white forehead blaze now had a small red hole in it. Her body stood for a second, then she collapsed in an undignified heap. She hit the ground as if she was made of heavy rubber. I watched almost in horror as the tiny red hole began to ooze blood more and more than the ooze became a gush and her legs began to thrash and scrabble as if the essence of what had been Flanders was desperately trying to escape her body. And then she was gone.

She really was gone. The lump of flesh that still twitched and the scarlet blood that steamed on the grass was no longer Flanders. I was shaking a little as I knelt and unbuckled the head collar, my throat felt dry. The slaughterman was busy in the back of his truck with ropes and straps preparing to remove the body. He began to whistle. I left him to it.

A lot of things changed that early afternoon as I walked back across the field. Something inside me seemed to harden, I even felt a little angry. I was not angry at the vets or the farriers or my employers, I was angry at the system. I knew that horse did not need to die, I knew that an 18-year-old horse is not particularly old. That was where it began, up until that point I had been interested in all animals, now I knew I would devote my life to understanding horses and questioning the system.

Hindsight, as they say, is a wonderful thing and looking back I know that if I had understood the things I do today Flanders would still be alive. If I had known then about the damaging effects of anthropomorphic diets, if I had understood the science behind the modern hoof trim and the importance of allowing horses to be horses and returning them to herd life. If I had only known then about modern innovations in environmental horse keeping like track systems,and the damaging effects of long-term shoeing there is no question I could have saved her life. There is no question she would be living, totally pain-free in my herd today. She would be in her mid 30s now, so yes, she would be getting on, but she still might easily live another 10 years.

But back then I didn’t know any of this stuff. I believed what the system told me to believe. I believed the vet and the farrier and the nutritionist. I believed in tradition and routine. I believed in ‘show ‘em who’s boss and ‘leg,leg,leg’. In short I believed in the system. This was even before I discovered natural horsemanship as a first tentative step on the route to HiddenHorses.

But that sad September day was the starting point, and I’m pleased to say that today every post I write, every horse I can help in some way has just a little bit of the memory of that coal-black horse with the three white socks and the white forehead blaze.

I would like to do more to help horses like Flanders. Several times in the past I have had to turn down another horse that the owner wanted to get rid of. I’m not saying it will meet the same fate as Flanders, – but ultimately it might. Over the last few weeks I have started work on putting together a rehabilitation rescue facility where horses that have been rejected by the system and have come to the end of their utility can be rehabilitated to being horses again and where they can live out the greater proportion of their lives in the company of other horses, as nature always intended they should. A place where horses can all have long-term (barefoot) futures in the company of their own kind.

But that is still part of a future journey, another stop along the way, but that is a journey that began on a sunny afternoon in September fifteen years ago.

To learn more about natural horse care, positive reinforcement training, paddock paradise etc. Buy my book Revealing your Hidden Horse at lulu.com This article is copyright. Mark Hanson All rights reserved © 2012  
Author Mark Hanson

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They are both familiar words and on the face of it they might both appear to mean the same thing but there is a subtle difference between them.

Training is a common term we apply to horses, we often think in terms of training our horse in order to have the horse do for us the things we think a horse should do, often according to our perception of what we define as the horse’s job or function. For example, if we define our horse as a dressage horse we might spend many hours developing the horse’s ability to perform certain physical actions necessary to fit with our idea of dressage.

One approach that many trainers instinctively take is to use correction of the wrong behavior to continually refine the right behavior. The trainer will have in their minds the idea of what the ideal behavior looks like and will, through a process of continual repetition correction and refinement, move the horse closer and closer to this ideal. In a way this will echo the ultimate goal of the dressage trainer, the performance of a dressage test, where the judges will once again evaluate the performance of horse and rider against a perceived notion of perfection. The winning horse rider combination is the one that comes closest to this ideal. Other horse/riders are evaluated in order of ‘least failure’ to achieve second/third place etc…

This idea of teaching through correction and comparison against a perceived notion of perfection is one that is pretty familiar to us humans as it is very similar to the way our own academic education system works. Years of study and evaluation and assessments culminate in the ultimate final exam. The ultimate evaluation of success or failure.

The problem with this whole approach to training (and education) is that it is deeply coercive and based on avoiding failure rather than achieving success. It certainly has very little to do with personal development of the individual’s strengths. More importantly learning through the avoidance of failure will result in a state of mind I call compliance. Compliance is always demonstrated through the principle of minimal effort. Subjects, whether horse or human, will use their intelligence to work out what is the most efficient way of avoiding the coercive thing, in other words, they will always put in the minimal effort because they have no incentive to do anything else.

It is this notion of minimal effort that makes these systems incredibly inefficient. It sometimes takes years to train a dressage horse to make even the most basic movements even though we are often told that all these movements are developed from observed natural movements that all horses can (apparently) naturally do. In other words, we spend years teaching the horse to do something it already knows how to do and yet it still fails when we test it. – Bonkers!

In the human world of education with its emphasis on assessment and qualification most of us spend many years being trained to pass exams. Our state educations systems consume more and more resources, not only in measurable terms such as money but incalculable amounts of human potential and yet, because of the principle of minimal effort increasing numbers of students leave the education system barely able to read or write. Of course, a few students ‘make the grade’ and succeed and even excel within the system, but that is exactly the point, it is only a few students, a relatively small percentage of the original intake that somehow seem naturally able to adapt to the requirements of the system.

So if this is training, what is teaching?

I define teaching as essentially a positive process of recognizing and developing the natural talents of individuals be they horses or humans. All of us have certain aspects of behavior that we have a natural aptitude for. For example, in the human world some have a talent for imagination or design others may be particularly good at analytical tasks such as mathematics others may be gifted linguists or very good at practical subjects like engineering. It is the same for horses. In my herd I have individuals that appear to like solving problems or others that love to play and imitate. Some horses are quite tactile and enjoy manipulating objects and touching things. The point here is that all individuals are different, so to my mind, teaching should be a process of firstly recognizing and then developing the strengths of the individual. The teaching process should respect this uniqueness and be able to adapt to the individual.

So this is the basic difference between teaching and training. Training attempts to force the individual to adapt to the rules of the system, teaching recognizes the strengths of the individual and adapts to them. How do we do this? The answer is that we use positive reinforcement methods to teach – and only positive reinforcement. Because positive reinforcement is automatically emotionally rewarding, it overcomes the problem of minimum effort. It should never be in any way coercive, with positive reinforcement the subject engages emotionally and intellectually with the process, therefore there is always an incentive to do more, in other words, maximum effort. This makes positive reinforcement teaching highly efficient. Not only this, all the students that are taught using these methods will achieve success because all students have strengths and abilities that can be developed through teaching.

Some people might argue that this is all very well but we want horses to be good at everything, I would say to this OK but just as we cannot expect every human to be an outstanding musician or an exceptional architect, so horses may not be naturally suited to a life of dressage or show jumping but there is another factor here: positive fallout. As the horse develops skill in areas in which it is naturally talented, other areas where it is less naturally talented become useful and relevant to it, for example, a horse that is not particularly athletic but enjoys solving puzzles may come to respond quickly and enthusiastically to a behavior because it wants to do it. The positive side effect is that because of the quick response the horse becomes fitter and healthier the more times it repeats the action. This is positive fallout

In the past I have used the phrase positive reinforcement training (PRT), but perhaps I should now re-define that phrase as positive reinforcement teaching.

To learn more about natural horse care, positive reinforcement training, paddock paradise etc. Buy my book Revealing your Hidden Horse at lulu.com This article is copyright. Mark Hanson All rights reserved © 2012  
Author Mark Hanson

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A horse’s place within the hierarchy of the herd can be described in terms of its resource holding potential or RHP.

Simply put, the higher a horse’s position within the herd, the greater its ability to control and ‘hold’ resources, such as food and naturally the opposite is also true. The less ability a horse has to hold a resource the lower its position within the herd.

Last week I was able to observe this process over and over again because a new horse has joined our herd. She is a 15.3HH brown/white leopard spot appaloosa mare called Teo, (odd name I know.) Unfortunately every time I see her I want to launch into the ‘Banana Boat Song’ you know… TE—O etc. If you don’t know this song watch the excellent Beetle Juice DVD you will see what I mean. Anyway I digress…

This is how I introduced her to the herd.

I keep my horses on a large track system which runs around the edge of a 5.5 acre field. This means that 90% of the field is not used and later in the year will become a hay and wild flower meadow. I put Teo into the middle of the field, fortunately this time of year the grass is short and dormant so although she could nibble some leaf she could not gorge herself. The reason I put her into the middle was so that she could use approach and retreat with the herd and all the stage I call ‘politics’ could be got out of the way safely. The politics stage usually consists of meetings, nose touching, sniffing, squeals, snorts, spraying of urine in the case of mares and all that general horsey stuff that horses do when they meet a new horse. Generally this stage lasts a few hours and gradually the new horse will begin to follow the herd around the track. The next stage is to introduce another horse to the newcomer. For this I used the alpha male in my herd and Irish sport horse called ‘Ted’. OK actually what really happened was Ted took matters into his own hooves and jumped the fence into the field. I found them the next morning grazing happily side by side.

The key to this exercise is space, horses need space to make their approaches to the herd, they need space to get out of the way of a threatened bite. So then I allowed the rest of the herd into the middle to meet Teo. All went well – lots more politics of course but I expected that soon they all wandered back onto the track and began feeding on the piles of hay around the track. The whole process had taken less than 24 hours and I knew when the Alpha female Rosanna accepted Teo that she was now a full herd member.

For the next week I watched the herd return to its usual state of calm balanced energy, there were naturally a few more sudden squeals and some threats and displays but nothing serious and I watched eagerly to see where Teo would fit into the herd hierarchy.

This is where the individual and its resource holding potential came in. At the top of my herd is Ted, he has the greatest resource holding potential this means if he wants to eat from the hay pile of another horse he just simply moves in and starts eating, the other horse will move away. I also saw on one occasion when Teo moved toward his hay pile He deliberately moved forward and stood over the pile and swung his head down with flat ears as a threat, she turned and moved away.

It soon became clear that Teo was not going to be a low ranking member of the herd, she had quite a high RHP and very quickly was moving the two lowest ranking horses away. The surprising thing was that this morning I saw her moving Rosanna away from a hay pile. This has never happened before and would suggest she is moving into first position as the Alpha mare of the herd. She is naturally a very confident horse as you would expect but not aggressive, in fact Rosanna and her spend a lot of time together grazing peacefully together.

So how can we interpret this behavior? Well certainly not aggressively, the herd is not some place where each individual is constantly struggling to keep its place and retain its position through violence and threat. RHP is used by horses because it actually avoids violence and keeps the herd balanced and calm. This avoidance of confrontation and violence minimizes the risk of injury. A horse that is moved on by the others doesn’t go into some depression wandering around feeling terrible about its lot in life actually the opposite the two ‘happiest’ and playful horses in my herd are the two at the bottom.

We humans on the other hand live in a predator based society and lots of people observing behavior would be tempted to see it as ‘bullying’. It isn’t. If it were a group of say, human children behaving like this then yes, the children with the highest RHP would be seen to be the biggest bullies. But that is us, not horses.

The next thing to consider is what gives a horse a high RHP and makes them an Alpha horse? Well strangely it is not size, strength or even intelligence. Actually Molly my Shire horse who is right at the bottom of the hierarchy is probably the biggest, definitely the strongest and far and away the most intelligent horse in the herd. Rosanna the (former?) Alpha female, on the other hand, is the smallest! In the wild it has been observed that Alpha females especially are often the daughters of Alpha females so perhaps that is the answer. High ranking horses are often very confident horses and that is often down to the influence of the mother. Confident mothers produce confident foals. Likewise mothers that are low ranking and perhaps timid may well produce male and female offspring that are the same. If we also take into account the unnatural process of forced weaning by human interference that is also likely to be a factor. So as usual we are back with the old chestnut of, is it nature or nurture? Answers in an email if you have any comments.

To learn more about natural horse care, positive reinforcement training, paddock paradise etc. Buy my book Revealing your Hidden Horse at lulu.com This article is copyright. Mark Hanson All rights reserved © 2012  
Author Mark Hanson

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