Relationship Bank

Relationship Banking

Every experience you have with your horses adds or subtracts from your relationship. Good experiences together add to your relationship, classical conditioning, learning history. They build strong positive associations with your presences and your trained skills. Bad experiences classically condition our relationship in a negative way, it takes away from our relationship and the reliability of our cues.

When aversives happen in our lives or training, whether intentionally or unintentionally, it takes little bits away from our relationship. If you think of it like a scale or bank account, we make appetitive deposits and aversive removals. So think carefully about when and where you want to spend those aversives, because emergencies happen.

Personally, i feel that life provides enough unavoidable aversives, I will save them for times i can’t achieve what we need positively or dont have the time to build it positively, like emergencies. Since all our horses are rescues, most start with a highly negative, “in debt” relationship account. We have to work hard to build it up and keep it strong so when medical and unavoidable crappy life things happen, we have a relationship strong enough to withstand it.