R+/R- Training Steps

There are a lot of misconceptions about how R+ and R- work, so i thought i'd clear it up with a simplified step by step comparison of how to get behaviors on cue.

Many people wonder if R- has to be aversive, even if its trained gently?

If trained with someone who understands the steps of R-, that the release reinforces the behavior, and to use only mild escalation, often horses can learn a great deal with relatively gentle aversives. We apply a gentle aversive, maintain or slowly increase it, the horse does what we want and we provide a release to let them know they got it. This can be done kindly, with great tact and consideration to the horse's feelings.

Until...

Until the horse doesn't want to do what we're asking, until the task is hard to perform, scary, uncomfortable, inconvenient or unclear. Then our aversive needs to be stronger to outweigh these things. Sometimes we need to use very strong aversives a few times to let the horse know that these small aversives we are using are kind warnings that something larger will come if they don't respond as desired... the history of strong aversives maintain the strength of the gentle aversives.

With R+ we shape the behavior with whatever shaping method we like, free shaping, using targets, capturing and so on, we can be hands on or on the other side of a fence, we don't even need to be near the horse to train them then as the horse approaches the goal behavior they are reinforced by something they like/want. We repeat until the behavior is how we like then we put it on any cue we like.

Until they don't want to...

Then we counter condition what's scaring them, build their confidence in what they find difficult, break down the skill into small achievable steps and ESCALATE THE APPETITIVE! Just like we escalated the aversive we can escalate the appetitive. The history of high value appetitives can work the same way the history of high value aversives worked with R-.

Its all the same, exact opposite. Training from opposite emotional directions, seeking/avoiding.