Equine Emotions
discussing neuroscience and equine emotions – and how we can strive for better
Engaging the CARE system





Turning Fear into Curiosity



How to Change Behavior

But adding and subtracting behavior isn’t the only way we can progress and support our horses’ behavioral improvement. Management is an important tool, it can be as easy as switching which stall the horse goes in, rearranging some fences, reorganizing your turn out groups, putting up some temporary fencing or partitions. We can also use food placement and different feeder styles to reduce issues with resource guarding or food anxiety. Using the support of their peers can help a horse overcome difficult or stressful situations. Visual barriers can help reduce social anxiety or stress related to certain environments. With various management techniques we can help reduce the likelihood of unwanted behaviors occurring, reducing aggression, anxiety, and promoting a healthy lifestyle. Even if we address unwanted behaviors through training, using management can help reduce how often the learner practices the unwanted behavior, reducing the strength of the behavior.
Fear Causes Punishment

Overcoming Trauma
So your horse has trauma…
Sometimes we bring our wonderful new horse home, only to discover that their emotional damage runs deeper than we imagined. They don’t always believe us when we say “your life is different now”. We may not always know the cause of their trauma, and to be honest, it’s not always important to know exactly what happened. Many people get hung up on what might have happened in their past to make them feel and behave the way they do. In honesty, it doesn’t matter so much where it came from, just where they are now. Understanding their current triggers and responses (behavioral and emotional) really is the important part. A horse with trauma tends to express this one of two ways, by shutting down or by becoming reactive. But again, the solutions will be similar regardless of which direction they swing. Regardless of how they express their trauma, the problem has the same root – fear, conflict, confusion, or lack of healthy connections.
We have a few points to create – security, connection, control, and clarity.
A sense of security in their home and their resources is vital. When discussing security we are talking about their physical sense of safety, this involves their environment and their resources. This comes down to ensuring their environment is what suits them best. Whether they need the security of protected contact from other horses/humans or space to measure their own comfortable distance. Our sweet rescue, Taina, had no confidence to meet other horses loose in a field, she would hide as far from them as possible. But being able to meet the horses over a fence and through stall doors gave her the confidence to greet them and assure she could escape if needed. We also need to consider access to resources. Feeling secure that their needs will be met is vital to an emotionally balanced horse. This can be difficult with “easy keepers”, but providing slow feed options to ensure they never run out can go a long way to helping a horse feel secure in their resources. Knowing their physical needs for safety and access to resources are met can go a long way to soothe their anxiety.
Connection is another vital ingredient to an emotionally healthy horse. Horses are social beings, a huge part of their sense of safety comes from living in groups. Even if they feel safer separated from the other horses, knowing they are nearby is very important. Especially for horses who have anxiety over access to resources, they may prefer division from other horses, at least at first. Usually horses will find at least one or two other horses they bond with, adjusting their turn out or living environment so they can be with a horse they feel safely connected with. A huge key to telling if a horse feels safely connected with another horse is if they mutually groom. While other animals like sheep, goats, or donkeys may make good companions for a horse, unless previously bonded with them, they are not the ideal single companion. Our blind mini, Butterfly, struggles with relationships with other horses because she is not able to read their visual language. She enjoys her relationship with other horses when divided by a barrier, but in full contact the lack of clear communication is frightening for her and she becomes aggressive. However she lives very comfortably with her sheep, they are noisy so she always knows where they are and soft, should she bump into them. They also don’t bite or kick at her. But she is able to express mutual grooming and healthy equine-specific relationships with horses over a partition.
Don’t forget about your own connection with your horse. This will be important in helping overcome human-related trauma, but also giving them a safe relationship to depend on when other aspects of their life are imperfect (like travelling, moving homes, or medical issues). To develop a strong emotional connection with your horse, not just a good working relationship behaviorally, you’ll need to spend TIME. Horses connect with one another through touch, shared space, and shared resources. So we can mimic this to develop our interspecies relationship. Grooming in a way that is satisfying to our horse, not with the intent to make them clean, but to feel good. This is especially easy in the buggy season when our horses are itchy and appreciate a good rub down. I like to spend this grooming time out in their space, rather than bringing them in and putting them on a tie or in a closed stall (if we can). This way our relationship becomes a part of their life, not divided or separated from their day. Sharing space and sharing resources is easy, but requires time from us, which we often dismiss as “not constructive” because we aren’t doing anything. But this further integrates us into their life, rather than being a separate or interruptive part of their day. No, you don’t actually have to graze grass with them, but spending time sitting with them while they graze or doing positive training can go a long way to building positive associations.
Riding Extinction Bursts
Once a behavior has been learned to be a source of reinforcement and the reinforcement ends extinction will begin. So if a behavior was reinforced but now is not, the behavior will begin to fade. A behavior that is not maintained with reinforcement won’t maintain itself, it will begin to be less reliable, accurate, and consistent. The behavior won’t just fade away, it will actually burst like a bubble. Starting at the narrow point of the accurate, correct, and consistent display of the behavior. As the behavior goes un-backed up the learner will begin to vary the behavior (maybe I really need to do it a little different?) often making the behavior bigger and more dramatic to try to get the reinforcement response they were looking for (if you don’t want it like this, how about I do it twice as big?!)
We might recognize this in the form of a temper tantrum with a child. If last time you were at the store, your child asked you nicely for a candy bar at the counter and you got it for them, but this time they ask and you say “no”, the child may not understand why and become frustrated. They will try asking many more times in various different ways, getting more emotional and frantic while they try to earn this reinforcer they are getting all the more desperate for. Until eventually they are in a full blown temper tantrum screaming and shouting for that candy bar. Now if you give in and reinforce this tantrum, you’re speeding up the process in which the child goes from asking nicely to complete hysterics, because it worked. If you don’t reinforce this behavior it may happen a few more times, until eventually the child gives up trying to get the candy bar (but you’ve also lost the asking politely behavior). The child may also try various other methods that may be inappropriate – like stealing the candy, or trying to sneak it into the basket without you noticing. All the typical ways of avoiding punishment may be attempted that can become dangerous or inappropriate. Because there has been no appropriate alternative way to earn this reinforcement or understanding of why the behavior is no longer working.
If we can remember to a moment where something has worked for us in the past, but is no longer, and how upsetting and frustrating this is for us, we might recognize how easily this tantrum is to trigger. Of course, as adults our tantrums may look different, getting angry might be quieter and more subtle, than screaming and trashing around in a public setting. Remember the last time you put money in a vending machine and your snack got stuck? How mad did that make you? The last time you sought out attention from a special person in your life and it wasn’t given? How heart broken were you? What other attempts did you make? How many ways did you try to fix your behavior to try to earn that social reinforcement you were missing?
This phenomenon of behavior bursting before extinguishing happens with all species and carries with it the same feelings of frustration, confusion, anger, and desperation. So when we’re training our horses and reinforce a behavior we like, then decide later we no longer want that behavior, be aware of extinction bursts. Even if you didn’t originally intend to reinforce that specific behavior. For example, often when people start hand feeding their horses the horse learns to invade the human’s space and take treats out of the human’s pockets directly (why not it’s easier than waiting?) We decide we don’t like this new “mugging” behavior, and find it rather rude, so we stop hand-feeding, but the horse gets worse and worse, eventually even biting! Now we are resorting to punishment to defend ourselves, our horse is frustrated and we think “hand feeding was such a terrible mistake!” But what really happened was a misunderstood extinction burst. The lack of clear behavioral criteria with the food in the beginning, plus the sudden removal of reinforcement for a behavior that had previously worked is the combination that lead to the inappropriate expression. Just like the child at the store counter.
Understanding this pattern can help us recognize it and avoid it. However there are some trainers who try to use this to their advantage in training, we call this “riding the extinction burst”. Where they train a behavior, reinforcing it lightly and unpredictably. This helps the horse understand what behavior is wanted, but then when it’s not reinforced they exaggerate and vary the behavior making it bigger and better. Then the behavior is reinforced again to stop it from growing beyond this exaggerated point. As the behavior settles back into it’s normal lower expression, reinforcement with be withheld again, causing it to begin bursting again. This is extremely upsetting, confusing, frustrating, and enraging for the learner. It becomes just like gambling, even addictive. It’s an inappropriate and dangerous approach to training. It can easily lead to an outburst of behavior that’s misplaced, it creates negative emotions that could easily be turned into aggressive behaviors. This is the most inappropriate use of R+ training I’ve seen out there. Extremely dangerous for human and extremely upsetting for the horse.
So let’s make sure we work well to prevent this dangerous cycle. As we’ve seen removing the reinforcement isn’t the ideal option, avoiding the problem doesn’t solve the problem. So we need to use reinforcement appropriately:
- Rate of reinforcement – make sure your RoR is high enough to match the effort of the behavior, in early learning this will begin very rapid and can settle into a more relaxed rate as the horse becomes comfortable with which behavior earns which reinforcement.
- Food value – using a lower food value can help reduce the learner’s desperation for the reinforcement and reduce the amount of over the top effort they will put towards that behavior. So make sure to match the value of the food with the difficulty of the behavior (for your individual, a high spirited horse may need more satiating and low value food compared to a mild-mannered, quiet horse, who may need slightly higher value, more interesting food to be a strong motivator)
- Food quantity – using larger quantities of lower value food is more appropriate, like getting a bag of rice rather than a candy bar, it’s satiating and satisfying, but not exhilarating.
- Alternate source – making sure there are other options available to the learner, so their only source of reinforcement isn’t just through working with you. This will reduce their desperation and frustration levels. Using hay or a treat toy while you’re training can help this.
- Focus on calm – reinforce soft, mild expressions of behavior if the horse gets worked up while training…
- Dial it down – provide a moment of satiation, using an easy behavior you can reinforce heavily and frequently, then break down the criteria of the behavior you’re having trouble with, into smaller and easier reinforceable steps.
What do horses feel?
Did you know that modern neuroscience has learned an awful lot about how animals feel emotions? We now have knowledge of which emotions animals feel, to what degree, and how these influence their behavior. There is so much more to learn and understand, but I thought it might help to give a brief overview. One particular neuroscientist, Jaak Panksepp, has done research on the core emotional systems. These systems are expressed in different ways and triggered by different things among varying species and individuals, but they feel the same within the body. With combining this information with behavioral science, ethology, biology, genealogy, and so on, we are learning much more about these emotions, how they are expressed specifically in horses, and how this information affects our training.
A basic overview is here:
More details in our book Equine Empowerment: A Guide to Positive Reinforcement Training
What is Learned Helplessness and Tonic Immobility? Is it necessary?
Learned Helplessness and Tonic Immobility are a big topic on the internet right now. Seems education is spreading around, I’m so glad for this. For the well-being of horses everywhere, understanding these commonly used and exploited coping mechanisms are not only dangerous, but also cruel. If you’ve studied psychology or seen videos of animals “hypnotized” or doing “yoga” or maybe the awful shark flipping techniques, you may have heard of these topics, it’s been shown to be something present in all species of animals. To start, there is a lot of misconception about what these terms really mean, so let’s clear that up. We’ll let science define the terms to keep us all on the same page. Continue reading →
Learned Helplessness
Obviously not…
Have you never been so scared in your life that you are frozen with terror? That you disconnect with reality? You imagine its happening to someone else, not you? You just go limp and pray for it to be over quickly? This is tonic immobility, this is such extreme fear the horse feels they have already lost, the monsters are there to eat them, they disconnect with reality. Nothing, nothing, nothing about this emotion is funny.
Often animals who experience this a few times in their life fall into this state more and more quickly. So while running (possibly in fear not play) then falling, a serious sliding fall, and then feeling trapped by the leg is actually a horrifying experience for anyone, it may not have been the horse’s first time feeling this way and fell into this state of shock quickly. Perhaps they were “laid down” by humans, or sacked out, or twitched regularly… who knows. But still. Not. Funny.