The Science of Feel and How Horses Actually Learn - Dr. Andrew McLean

So I typically kick the episodes off by having the guests tell us who they are and what it is they do. Hello everybody, my name’s Doctor Andrew McClain. My PhD studies are centred on cognitive science, in particular understanding the horses mentality, and basically before that I was a zoologist. And I guess I still am because that’s how I see the world. I’m really curious about animals and in fact I never really favoured horses.

I like all animals and as a child I was particularly interested in birds. But I grew up in a family dedicated to horses and so I became naturally someone who ends up falling in love with horses, as all of my brothers have as well. And two out of the three brothers made their lives with horses. They are both jockeys, but one of them also was an equestrian like myself. Then for me, I pursued zoology and the reason I became in the position that I am now is because as I was competing in eventing, mostly I wanted to know more about why the horse does what it does and why the horse learns to do the things that we ask of him.

Because many people had been telling me. I had a lot of lessons all the way through my eventing career and I managed to get to a point where I represented Australia in a in an international but Trans Tasman event, largely where Melbourne 3 day event was attempting to vie for the Olympics. And during that career I wanted to know how I could train the horse better. So it was a little bit of a selfish reason, but as I went through my career I became of course really obsessed with learning processes in horses. And then later on I became more interested in welfare and in in all of that too.

I began to delve into elements such as attachment theory and arousal and effective states in horses because these were the missing elements in our research. Because when we were originally researching myself and professionally Gravy from Sydney University, we were very much focused on learning abilities in horses because no one had really written about that in any kind of way that informed trainers. And that was really what I wanted to know. And as a result of my PhD, I’d already gone into that in a fairway. And Paul Mcgreevy had as well in his work in his PhD.

So drew us together for that reason. And throughout that career, people started to say that’s all very well to know about how horses learn, but in actual fact, there are other things such as the bond between humans and horses that really matter. And we agreed. So we decided from about 2014 onwards that we would start to research that, and we did. And then it was only later that I became interested in there, as I said earlier, the welfare aspect.

And that was because I went to a presentation by Professor David Mellor about the Five Domains model, which I thought was a really wonderful advancement from the Five Freedoms model, which is basically about caring for horses, but not about or animals, but not essentially about how the animal itself feels about the world. Whereas the Five Domains was very much centred on the animal itself and how it perceives all of the things we do, the effects we can have on their mental state through nutrition, not caring enough about its physical environment. But it didn’t mention human interaction. So I spoke to Professor Mellor at the conference and said I think it really needs to have more depths in at this model. The next day he called me and said I think you’re right, I think we should go ahead with it.

So we did and we put together the 2025 Domains model of animal welfare, including behavioural interactions, and it’s been incredibly successful as from a scientific perspective, I don’t think there are too many scientists could say that The Five Domains has now had over 120,000 downloads and almost 1000 citations in scientific literature and people everywhere, institutions are adopting the Five Domains model of welfare, ranging from pony clubs all the way through to the International Federation of Horse Racing. So that’s it in a story, That’s my career and I still ride since I have a thoroughbred that I love very much. He’s a wonderful horse and we have a great time together. Awesome. So let’s start at the beginning and touch on how do horses learn for the common rider, for maybe the trainer listening, how do you Cliff notes, how horses learn?

I think that is a really good starting point because previously people had always talked about if you ride well and most treatises on riding, for example through Pony Club and Equestrian Organization were about riding the horse well. But nothing to do with training. And yet horses are learning something every step of the way. Every second we are with the horse is learning something. Either learning to react or not to react.

So for me, the important thing to remember is that when we’re training, horses are basically learning through positive and negative reinforcement. There’s some punishment aspects to Punishment is really essentially about deleting A behaviour and removing a behaviour. But in terms of positive and negative reinforcement, they’re all about increasing the likelihood of a particular behaviour. And negative reinforcement, despite its awful name, negative is not about anything particularly awful. It’s really just about the removal of something the horse finds somewhat uncomfortable or aversive or highly aversive, any of those things that are on the negative side, but that horse wants to remove them.

When you do, he learns whatever it he thinks it did that made that removal happen. For example, when you squeeze with your leg on the horse when he first is starting, it’s a bit irritating. So the horse might toss his head and you keep your leg on because that’s not what you want. And he might move backwards and you keep your leg on because that’s not what you want. But as soon as he steps forward, you release your pressure and hit.

The horse learns, ah, that’s how it works. And it’s the same with the reins. When you first squeeze on the reins, the horse may do anything. He might toss his head, he might do anything. And as soon as he slows down or stops, you immediately soften the pressure of the bit.

And the horse is very quick to learn these things. And I train elephants as well across Southeast Asia. We have a charity called the Human Elephant Learning Program, and they learn exactly the same way. In fact, all animals do learn through negative reinforcement to some extent. Horses are just particularly good at it because they’re very, they’re quite sensitive.

And so they learned to turn from the pressure of 1 reign as a director and as soon as he turns his four legs, you release the pressure and he learns to yield his hind legs one way or another because as soon as he goes, you release the pressure. So that’s the basis of it, and that’s operant conditioning or negative reinforcement, which is a subset of operant conditioning. But the horser also learns through classical conditioning, and that’s where he associates previously unknown and unassociated stimuli with what he already knows or what he already can do. Even physiologically. You can reward anything, pretty much an eye blink or whatever.

You can put it on a cue and reward it. Classical conditioning is about how horses learn cues. So therefore, if you give the horse a voice command before you walk forward and you say walk on and they give him the pressure and you do this continuously, he very soon learns that walk on comes before the pressure because he’s always seeking ways to avoid any pressure and become paired. But he also is very clever to learn all of your all of the other aspects that are in the environment at that moment. For example, if a bird happened to call at the same time, he said walk on and he walked on if it happened to happen, which is unlikely, but if it happened to happen, that would be necessarily part of the whole cue system.

So why I’m saying that is because when you’re riding horses, that’s why whatever sport you do, I think every sport have slightly different postures to do it correctly. Raining has a different kind of seat because it’s a different saddle too, as does dressage. But whatever you do, it means that when you ask the horse to do something, you’ve got to remember he’s really listening to everything. And when you give him a light aid to go, plus some postural aid of your body, then he learns all of that as the complete set. And the better it becomes at all of these light aids in every different way, whether you go forward or back or whether you go faster or whether you want it to go longer in the stride and whether you’re turning and the way you use your shoulders relative to your hips, all of those things, he’s very sensitive enough to learn it.

And so when you do prepare those things perfectly well, he learns it and you can use less and less obvious reign aid to the point where it becomes invisible and nobody ever sees you use your reins and they and the horse is really happy because he’s completely he doesn’t need any other stronger shouting from the reins or legs because he’s learned it from your body posture. But in saying that, and this is the kicker really is that if you just use your body posture and no reins and legs, after a while there is no responding. It begins to diminish. And people don’t realize that because I’ll often say to me when you’re in workshops, they’ve said no, look, I only use my seat for stop. I don’t use my reins.

And I say, yes, you do. You’ll use them to some extent because our studies show that even in the top level riders, there’s a quite a spike in the rain aid when you use rain intense geometry measurements. And I get them to show me and so I get them to loop their reins and stop the horse with their seat. And they’re right, the horse does stop. But if you do 5 or so repetitions, the stopping becomes more and more poor.

He doesn’t stop now in two nice beats of the rhythm like he did before, and now it takes four or five steps and very soon after, about 5 repetitions on average. Horses don’t stop from the seat. And that’s why there’s always a little bit of rein aid. And the critical thing in training is to remember that because we get so carried away with body posture. And I think we should be obsessed with it too.

So I’m not denying it. But we forget what lies underneath. And what lies underneath are the rain aids for stop slowing, shortening and turning, and the leg aids for going faster, up again, longer and yielding sideways. These must be kept polished because these were installed through negative reinforcement, which is based on pain or pressure, whatever you call it. And if we leave them untouched and unpolished and we never go there and just test what he still knows, it should be done on a daily basis.

But if we leave them uninvestigated on a daily basis, they diminish and his reaction to our body postures becomes poorer. Problems begin, even severe problems of confusion, we call them conflict behaviours, can begin to arise. So that’s why a really sensible program of training and retraining must centre on the correct installation of leg pressures to the very lightest possible pressures for all of these things of stop and go and turn and yield. If we do that on a daily basis, we’ve got the horse perfectly tuned each day and gradually that becomes a habit. So let’s say I’m working with a horse and I work with a lot of off the track thoroughbreds and sometimes they’re taught that pressure on the bit means go faster.

How should someone who’s dealing with a horse who maybe doesn’t understand that rain aid start to apply that so that they can get that good prompt halt or whatever it is that they’re looking for? OK, that that’s a good question because that is the most important thing with retraining race horses is that they don’t understand the bit. And people get around this by just costly riding and doing all sorts of things that they do in circles. But it’s a long road to fix it. And the best way is to start on the ground and teach the horse that when you stand still so you don’t move because that cues the horse you want to give him no real cue to it.

But when you put some pressure on the bit where you hold the reins towards his chest, as soon as he steps back, release the pressure and keep doing it until he does it from a light aid. And also check that when he steps back, if he continuously does these steps with say his left front leg, make sure he also does it so you can set it up that he can do it from his right front leg. Because the different diagonal pairs of the horse have different reactions to rain aids, just as they do to leg aids as part of laterality. Why we find horses so different lateralised right through to their brain. And so we need to check that they’re evenly stepping backwards.

In other words, at the steps just as immediate, just as soft, and just as long as the other one. Because commonly you’ll find when you step horses backwards, then when they do one step, you do you. You try and reward more steps. And so you will see that horses typically their hindquarters go to their right. That’s the most common because horses, I call them right front leg runners, most of them because 3/4 of the horses, it is about 75%, the right front leg does not decelerate particularly well.

And that’s why you see most horses heavier on the right and stiffer on the right side, hollow left, that kind of characteristic setup. So when you’ve got it on the ground and the horse can step back easily, then you say, right now let’s walk. And when you walk you this is still leading the horse. You ask him just gently with the with. So you’ve got contact.

It’s not a sudden shock, but just with contact, you increase the contact and as soon as he stops release the pressure just soften. And you want that to have happened within 2 beats of the rhythm, complete by three, so that by the third beat, the horse is actually square, because the last step should be 1/2 step. So you can even train squareness on the ground so that instead of stopping suddenly with his legs separated, you want him to see it rather like music, a decline in the music where in the rhythm where he’s got 123 and the steps get shorter, stop. And that’s perfect. And that sets him up for under saddled work.

So it makes so you can do so much on the ground because you can see the legs and you can reward the right moment. Whereas when you’re on the horse’s back, it’s harder to know precisely when. And then you can also do trot holes or in trot to walk transitions. I should say also in two beats complete by three. Two beats means the front legs, by the way, not back legs.

Because it’s too complicated for people to learn back legs and there’s no point because whatever a front leg does, a back leg does after it anyway. So everything’s at 2 beats for the front leg. So you can go, now you’re walking and then you’re trotting. So forward leaning pressure to ask him to trot and now he’s trotting. Plus a voice command.

If you like it, then you ask him to walk with a rain aid. And you want that also to be just as soft as to walk the whole. So when you’ve got these things, but you can test it out in a bigger way. If he’s a racehorse that really leaned on the bit, or I shouldn’t say he leaned on the bit, the jockeys did, and the trait is dead horses don’t do that voluntarily because the bit’s really aversive and the mouth is sensitive and the tongue is particularly sensitive. So when you’re training a horse is bit strong, you might do trot holds, and there you ask for the hold from trot to walk in hand in say, 4 steps of the front legs.

Then as it gets better, it’ll do it in three and eventually when he does it in two beats, he’ll not only be square, he’ll probably be square by the when he does it in three bits, but when he can do it in two bits, he is also through. And throughness means that the hind feet step one hoof print closer to the front legs in the hole. That’s all just one hoof print. And the throughness is a really important thing because what it essentially means is that the hind legs are responding to the rein aid immediately. Because what with the horse appools and when he has a poor stop response, in fact, all his downward transitions a bit ruined or not working, what is when you ask him, the front legs might slow down, but the back legs keep on doing giant steps.

You’ll see with a horse with a bad stop button, the horse might be squarish in front, but the hind legs are massively separated. Training these things in. And I don’t know why people don’t focus on this every day, because you can train a horse. In fact, there’s a famous guy in Paris who actually did that. He trained his horse completely in the ground for one year and said that when you wrote it was perfect in all three gates.

And I’m not surprised that I don’t doubt it because we in our system, I teach a diploma course and we spend a lot of time at the war and it just is so easy in the trop. There’s, it’s safer, there’s less resistance. The horse knows the answers to the questions because you’ve done it on the ground. So under saddle you also repeat those things under saddle just to check that there’s no differences. And if there are, you use a little bit more right out.

If he does it in five beats to halt from walk, he does it in two. And there’s all sorts of interesting exercises you can do. You can say to people, well, I’ve done this with Grand Prix riders. I’ve taught many, including Olympians throughout Europe with problem horses or horses they had little problems with that. They thought little, but they infected a lot of other issues in the Grand Prix work.

I’ve asked him to OK, let’s see if you can stop the horse in walk when he’s walking. Can you? Oh, sorry, I mean from halt. Can you walk just six steps and halt on the 6th? And often they’ll get it wrong, even good riders, and they’ll realize that they’ve the horse actually halted in seven or five.

In other words, there’s something either too abrupt and a little harsh or there’s something too allowing and not quite clear. So it’s really important to be able to do that. And it’s interesting because when you halt on the in an even number of steps, you’ll finish on the same leg, but when you hold her odd number, you’ll finish on an odd leg. You can even target the right front leg so that it’s it’s even. So I focus a lot on the walk because as Boucher and de la Geer in the air and many people have said, the walk is the mother of all the gates.

And it’s a nice thing to do because the wall is the only gate where all four legs are separated. So the Walker, all beats are separated and the speed of the walk is only around about 50 to 55 beats per minute per leg. Whereas when you get up to trop, it’s 70 to 75. And that’s a lot faster to get your timing right. So it’s really worth it to get the walk really good.

And you can also do movements. There’s plenty that you can do. You can do Rovir Trevor, you can do half pass, you can do Pirouette. Everything, because the age is essentially similar to what you would do in Kantor, except in Kant you’ve got maybe one leg back to initiate Kantor, but it’s the same button, so you can correct all the imperfections in the walk and you can see them. Yeah.

And I think it’s easier to do things when it’s a bit slower, and especially for the thoroughbred types who they can think quickly. So sometimes forcing them to slow down and forcing ourselves to slow down can actually be more productive. So one of the things you mentioned was that you started focusing on sort of arousal States and horses. And one of the big things that I find with problem type horses is that they might be really good at up regulating but not necessarily good at down regulating. Why is that?

Firstly, because horses are very good at upright regulating, because they are creatures of flight and unlike even cattle or any of catalyst, Oh no, not all of them, because antelopes are more like horses. But the bigger cloven hoofed animals, the artiadactyls, which we call them in zoology, those ones typically have horns and they can defend themselves and that their flight response is much less. If you see a cow for example, with its leg caught in wire in the fence, they don’t lose their their mind, they don’t panic, they just shake their leg and get the wire off. When it’s your horse in there, it’s a completely different scenario. The horse just full on panics and that’s the nature of the horse because he doesn’t really have any protective mechanisms like cattle do.

And so that’s really the cause of it. In fact, the part of the brain that modulates fear called the amygdala is the largest of all domestic animals in horses. So is and that amygdala is essential for the horse to be able to regulate what is a fearful situation. And sometimes it’s really important that it is important to panic from the horse perspective, but the things that we can do to down regulate that, for example, a lot of making your training really clear, that’s one thing. So for me, part of training, the rules of training that I’ve learned from understanding cognition in horses is that it’s very common for us to learn to do 2 aids at once and often 2 opposing aids with such as rain and leg at the same time.

And it’s even been misinterpreted in the German system is that should happen. And that’s a huge mistake. And in fact, I don’t think that Steinbrecht, when he wrote that meant that when you look at his original text. But nonetheless, that’s a bit of a diversion. But to you, it’s common for riders to use rains and legs together.

And that is a really big mistake because that raises his arousal levels because who on earth can do 2 opposing responses at the same time? As a human, you can’t stop and go at the same time. And to have those signals on it, it’s nonsensical. And you can certainly get to the highest, most beautiful levelling dressage without doing that. Getting making training clear is really important.

Then the other things for his regulation, it’s not just what you do, but it’s the other 23 hours. So it’s also important to recognize that the horse being sensitive, being food for almost everything on the planet in terms of bee predators in its original environment, the horse is naturally really wary and nervous and takes a lot of salvation in touch, in grooming each other. They spend far more time touching each other than other animals do. They’re always grooming each other. And a lot of it is to soothe them, to say they’re there.

It’s all OK because the more insecure a horse is, the more he’ll want to do that. So we should be really aware of the fact that they’re social animals and give them social opportunities. So I’m trying to change the world to tell people to say builders, to say stop building these ridiculous fancy stables that look appealing to people with gold knobs and start building possibilities for horses to touch each other. Because. And even these chat hatches, as we call them, can be slid across and shut if need be for some reason.

But generally allowing horses the ability and the opportunity to touch each other when they feel like it is massively important for their psyche. And any human psychologist who deals with human issues of depression will recognize that the single most important ingredient for depression is isolation. And for humans, it’s about being with each other. But for horses, it’s actually mostly about touch. So, and that’s important for training if they can have touch.

And so that’s important to give them those opportunities. And also being a grazer, the average amount of hours they spend foraging is 13 or a little more according to some of the literature, but it’s around 13. And that’s a long time. Now, people probably don’t want horses that have sport horses to eat for 13 hours. But you can make it hard for them.

You can make it slow feeder or bowl with food all they need. They don’t have to actually ingest a lot. All they have to do is fosic for it start the movements of their mouth on the slow hay feeder where they gets just get one slice of hay is really good because they’re doing what they meant to do. It’s a wire, a hard wiring. It’s like a massive railway line in their brain that says eat and and and in nature they must.

So allowing them those things is really very important and then also giving the horse some possibilities of agency of their own lives where you can allow them to roll or move around and have some exercise is important. I do understand that in some countries in this northern part of North America and Canada and northern Europe, it’s often the only ways to have horses in stables in the winter. But giving them that chance to exercise and do things is really important. So all of those things help the horse regulate, down regulate when we want him to. And scratching horses at the base of the wither, because horses are the only creature that we know of whereby if you scratch them at the base of the wither, the heart rate lowers around 10 beats a minute when it’s raised little.

And that’s again, because there’s such massively insecure animal, they need that touch. They have a plexus of nerves just in front of the wither there that’s directly associated with that. It’s quite interesting that they need that touch and quite vigorous rubbing there and that’s very good thing to do. So I think all of those things help the horse to down regulate. Yeah, it’s funny.

I cookie horses a lot and by cookie, usually it’s like an alfalfa pellet or whatever. But I have one gelding in particular where he would much rather me take my knuckles and groom into his wither. And to him that is just like the ultimate reward. Some of my mares are like, yeah, I could give or take you touching me, but the gelding for sure loves the physical affection and you go pretty rigorously and your knuckles end up all black and whatever because they’ve been rolling out in the sand. But yeah, it’s interesting how sometimes I’ll work with young horses who maybe are learning to lead and not be terrorists for their owner.

And I don’t cookie them because they’re melty as it is and they find the ultimate reward is just that physical sensation of me grooming into them. And so it’s interesting that it does down regulate them because I just assumed they liked it because it felt good, but it physiologically feels good as well. Right. We’ve actually saved a horse. I have more than one horse actually with a very severe colic, but constantly rubbing the base of his neck while he was down.

And the vet said, look, we really should put him down. Now this is the end. It’s so bad. But we did, we said no, we want to keep on doing this. And we did it for 4 odd hours in the early morning.

Now it’s hard to test that empirically whether that was what, but it was an extremely bad case of colic. But then further to that at Penn State University and there have been studies showing that when they also do, that really helps horses in their recovery. So it’s really underrated. The horses need for tow to this extent where top level equestrians. Still occasionally there’s a few that are beginning to do it correctly, but mostly they just finish around and smack the horse on the neck.

And the trouble is there’s not any quantitative or even qualitative difference between that and a punishment. The horse goes to bite them or some of them might smack it. It’s really not a great way to down regulate a horse or to make him feel good. And one of the studies that was done showed that at the top level, patting the horse tended when the reins were loose, tended to make the horse run a little bit quicker. So it’s not really anything very useful.

So we shall be really rubbing horses and treating them as horses and they’re not humans and we need to do horse things to make them feel better and not just do things to show the public because the public don’t know anything about it, but they’re probably just as happy to see you patting the horse. But for the horse, it’s a meaningless thing to do. So I think do need to look at all of those things. And you can also, I haven’t mentioned positive reinforcement, but for a horse that’s in a high state of regulation, using positive reinforcement can really help as long as you’re rewarding it for something, teach it something in a new place. So for example, we might target train or click train a horse in a place where it finds it a little bit fearful.

That can be useful. For example, with my Thoroughbred, I’ve taught him through clicker training to do a very slow, small pirouette top canter in hand, so that I could pretty much walk with him, stand beside him while he cared. And I did that because he had the worst canter I have ever felt and I felt a lot of canters. I lived on King Island and the mother of my horse was from a group of horses were washed up from a shipwreck. They’re a wild Kurd now.

Horses were travelling from Ireland to Hobart in Tasmania and they hit the rocks on King Island. A group of wild horses came along and then pacing, trotting standardbreds jumped the fence and made it with it and along came my horses. He had a pretty bad canter that like a Terry used to hold his leg up, weren’t up, and he got him up to Grand Prix and show jumping. He was really careful, amazing, but getting into the fence was not difficult for me because I didn’t know any better. A lot of people wanted to watch him just because it was weird to work.

But this thoroughbred that I’ve got now, I couldn’t believe when I first started to care to him it it felt terrible. And I said to my wife, I can’t believe a Peppy’s got the worst candor I’ve ever had known since Sam, which was this horse I had when I was a teenager. So I’ve really worked on it. And also I’ve had help when I was away at an FBI meeting in January, I sent him to some friends of mine, Yoda Lloyd. He did work a lot of good work with his cat and got it going better.

And then I thought I really have to do more. So I started to get a better under saddle as further and then I thought I injured my tendon because I was running. I pulled my Achilles so I couldn’t ride. So I thought I’m going to do this in hand and I’ll do it through positive reinforcement. And I’ve had great effects there.

And as I said, doing specific things with positive reinforcement can really help down regulate them. But what we have to remember about positive reinforcement, because just like negative reinforcement in some ways, it isn’t a panacea for everything and horses can become really up regulated by too much positive reinforcement and it could also make them frustrated. Many horses that doing positive reinforcement spend more time with pain face. If you look at the pain face go with ears back then they should and then they would normally even with properly done negative reinforcement. So I’ve done a lot of work looking at trick trainers and even as a judge in horse competitions, young horse competitions.

I had one, for example, a few weeks ago that this lady had never known anything about positive reinforcement and just did all the trick training just through scratching at the Withers and tapping with the stick. And the horse was just so interested in her and had a really quiet face. But others I’ve seen where it’s purely positive reinforcement have ears back and tinted eyes, and only because the overuse of it turns the horse into a chronic gambler. And that’s essentially what it is. It’s inescapable, that view and has all the features of chronic gambling where you get tension because from the horse’s perspective, you’re just, you are a poker machine and you’re just delivering food.

But ultimately you have to start withholding food. And when you start withholding food because you want to shape it to the next level of the behaviour or you want to make the behaviour more resistant to extinction, then also you must start withholding food and putting the delivery of food on a variable schedule. And that in itself becomes frustrating. Now, if you only do some of it, it’s fine. But we do it all the time.

That’s what is often the outcome. And these people who have them just think it’s really normal until I explain to them, no, it’s not a good, that’s not a good state, you know, either. So I think we can work really well with the two. And we call that combined reinforcement. And one of my students, Ella Bradshaw at Charles Sturt University, she’s doing her PhD now on combined reinforcement.

So it’ll be really interesting because we’re going to be able to compare combined reinforcement to pure P negative reinforcement and to pure positive reinforcement and regulation elements. And we’re also looking at oxytocin, the happy drug to see when the horse is really happy to do these things and the interactions if they’re happy because we don’t have enough measurements of happy horses. Unfortunately, most of the research has been looking at unhappiness stress. It’s the easiest thing to measure because the same in dogs. We’ve been able to measure negative affective states in dogs for a long time and but it’s only a brewery recent we’ve been able to detect positive affective states through looking at pain scales in there and facial features.

It’s pretty exciting. But I definitely think the average horse trainer needs to deal more into positive reinforcement and the average positive reinforcement person needs to delve into the use of more negative reinforcement in the sense of recognizing that every time they the horse sinks with every time there’s any kind of pressure then to recognize what it is. For example, if you move into the horse’s space and the horse moves backwards, that is negative reinforcement. If you use even the lightest little stick tat to get him to raise his leg, that is negative reinforcement. It’s defined purely by the removal of something.

So we I think we have to be really honest and I find the horse will is really dishonest terms because the narratives are ridiculous excuses are awful. They’re nearly always about the horse. People at top level will say, oh, the horse leans on the beat as if it’s the horse’s fault. The horse seeks the beat. We’re in fact he’s more resigned to be with the horse’s mouth is not needing a beat.

In fact, that’s true right across. We can do everything just as well with the bitless bridle. We don’t have to use bits, and we need to lose our ridiculous ancient prejudice about bitless bridles, because they work perfectly well and you avoid all the oral conflicts by using a bit less bridal. But you can use the bit well too. But it’s not easy to do, and that is the problem with negative reinforcement.

Generally in training, it isn’t as easy to do as positive reinforcement. You can use the kick to exactly catch the moment, but it’s not always easy to do that when you’re riding with pressure release and to know the exact moment. You should release this for this step or that step. It requires good cause tuition. If you’re just giving, if you’re just clicking or whatever your positive reinforcement signal is, that’s not going to be as effective as getting it when they give the release or the movement or whatever it is you’re looking to reward.

And I always say it’s, it’s like having children like you. You can’t only be the fun parent. You also have to like have boundaries and the they don’t learn. They learn from the release of pressure, whatever that is. And, and I agree that I think it was said on a podcast a few weeks ago that a lot of equestrians have their hand in the cookie jar and don’t want to say that they stole the cookie.

I wanted to touch back quickly on you had mentioned the up regulation when using a rain aid and a leg aid at the same time. So how? Because I think a lot of people struggle with this term of the half hole because they think they’re supposed to leg into the rain or whatever. So how would you define and execute like a proper half halt? That’s a very good question and I’m glad you asked it because I think it’s again, a narrative that most people don’t know and most teachers don’t know and they don’t teach it well enough.

Because 1/2 halt will be different whether you’re moving into whatever kind of movement, if it’s downwards or upwards or longer or shorter. So 1/2 halt essentially is half a halt. So it’s for shorter when you want the steps to become shorter. It’s usually a very brief aid because it’s not over 2 beats like normal 8 foot going quicker within the gate or slower within the gate or going up gate or going down gate almost catapults of of an aid. You just go whoop.

That’s because this it’s the same thing with the seat. The seat just go. It’s a very quick thing within 1/2 a step. And So what it does, it just basically is like half Holt and arrests the hind legs and puts the weight back a little bit. But if you’re going into something where you, you’re going, for example, a long longest ride, you would go rain 1st and then leg.

But there if you’re doing the opposite, you’re going to the end, you’re doing, you’re doing leg and then rain. So it can be one or the other on either direction. It’s just that it’s very subtle, but it’s subtle enough that you should be able to see it. I’ve been to so many lessons where. I’ve seen public ones in arenas, shows and things where someone’s given 1/2 halt and the instructor says that’s excellent, but I can’t see anything happening.

Sometimes a good half halt, you should be able to see that the force is just a little, it’s slightly arrested and then allowed to do this. It’s a preparation. So I think 1/2 halt can be one or the other, the rain and leg or the leg in the rain. It depends where you’re going. So it’s this and then that.

Yes. And the other thing I haven’t mentioned is that this is something I’ve learned actually 11 years ago because it was in 2014 at that. It was really very interesting and it confirmed what many trainers already do, but don’t necessarily know it. And that is that the horse can only be given an instruction in terms of its leg movements. At the very end of Stan’s beginning of swing as swing facer, one leg is just on the ground and leaving the ground and moving through the air.

Halfway through the air that we halfway through the swing phase, you can’t ask it anymore because it’s already thinking of landing. When legs are on the ground, they’re completely preoccupied with all the proprioceptive elements of staying upright and not falling over and keeping the gate going. And they’re really controlled so much by the gates, and the gates themselves are not brain controlled. The gates are actually in the spine of the horse, in the central pattern generator in the front of the Withers. And we know that even in this awful video on YouTube showing that when you basically slice the brain off the cat, or decerebrated, as they say, basically you remove all that part of the brain, you can still stimulate the spine to do warp, trot and canter.

So the brain of the horse, its responsibility is to be able to go faster or to go longer or to turn to change directions. So when you look at this again, emphasizes the importance of the walk as the basis of all your training. Because when you want to use a rain aid, for example, the best moment is just say you want to do a turn to the right is when you’re training the horse from the right rain using a direct rain. Or if you use an indirect turn from the outside rain, the most important time to use it is when the right front leg is about to leave the ground and then you get a bigger step. So that can massively help people in half past because most half passes, 90% of them are really pretty boring and small because the horse doesn’t step across.

But if you actually train them from the start and you go with the radar now and you catch him, he’ll do a big step and then say, good boy, well done and scratch him on the Withers and teach him those things. And the same if you want a shortener step, the best way to shorten this step for the horse’s psyche is to catch him just as that either front leg leaves the ground. If you catch him at the wrong moment, you can he’ll, he can still learn it, but it’s a lot takes longer and it’s not as clear to the horse. And the response is less strong and the same from the leg. The moment everybody knows that when you want a horse to yield his hind quarters, you would actually tap him on the hind quarters or use your leg on the rib cage on that side, you want that same side leg to crossover.

The same principles apply to every single leg. In fact, if you want the horse to go more powerfully forward, if one leg is a little bit not pushing off the ground, don’t tap that leg. Tap the other side. Because the more you tap the swing to go faster through the air or stronger through the air, the more power you put to the one in stands phase. Because the swing phase tells the stands phase what to do.

So it’s a it’s a little complicated to teach, but it’s not really. It’s just that because the horse worked in 2 diagonal pairs, it’s worth thinking that the right front leg and left hide are joined together by a rope. And by the same token, that diagonal pair in swing phase, if you get the swing phase to move faster naturally, the one instead phase has to do it too or the horse will lose rhythm and speed and fall over. It’s got to transfer, so it’s worth knowing those things and I’ve helped a lot of people with go issues like that because they’re just tapping the wrong side. If you tap the wrong side for everything, it’s really just pressure and release.

It doesn’t make any sense in the long run because you’re using a rain aid on the same side or just so many other complications. So it makes sense to know those things and to do that. The best example is when you’re training in Walk a Pirouette. And this is the perfect example of how all the aids are separated. So the first thing you would do would be to do a half hold and so shorten the step a little.

And then you ask the horse to turn with the rein. So the left front leg is opening and stepping to the left. And then you use your right leg to get the horse to yield a little bit, the right hand leg towards the left. And that’s at a different moment because the right hand anyway, and then you might, if the horse is stalling and you might say, well, because that was shorten the step length of not only the right front, but the left hand. So that shortening moment can happen.

Then it all happens rather than that’s why I’m often saying to people, it’s very, it’s like music. It’s like a Symphony, except that there are no chords. It’s really just all separate notes you’re playing on this piano, so you have to think of it like that. Many people, I’m not the first to say it, Borsche and many others have said this in the past, but it’s become much more, I think unfortunately since when dressage went to Germany, which was much more recent. Have a classical.

It’s no real classical German training to be honest. It’s mostly classical, even classical Swedish. But the Germany was really not even a single country until the late 1800s. So there was no hard approach to training. But they were very good at the Prussians, were particularly good at producing warhorse, and they adopted a lot of strategies from the French, which really helped them.

And they also threw a few away. But one thing they never really got was the separation of the AIDS, the independence of the AIDS. And that is part of French classical training. So I like to take a piece of each. I won a fellowship in 2014 to the United States to this national sporting library, which is the biggest repository of classical literature in horsemen.

It was the most wonderful experience. But I spent all my days in the bottom of this library looking at these texts, and I can read French, so it was actually not too difficult. And strangely, Old French is even easier when I say old 200 year old French is easier than modern French. But maybe it was because these books are very much like recipe books. About what but it was fascinating and all of those basic understandings about separating the aids.

It’s all there. But it’s just that since then there’s always been this problem that came from Steinbrecht where never use your rain without your leg and never lose your leg without the rain meant was don’t if you’re using a rain I don’t take your leg off. In other words, keep the contact and when you leg I don’t release the rain contact. But people have taken to mean use both together. That’s the problem.

That’s an interesting distinction because it’s not oh, OK, I just dropped the horse in order to use the rain or in order to use the leg. I am still having contact with the horse, but I’m not applying more pressure with the leg when I apply more pressure with the rain. Exactly that because since rain’s fundamentally mean decelerate in either down get shorter or slower, then how can you possibly how can any the horse is no genius as an animal. They don’t Their levels of reasoning are not quite that of a dog or a dolphin or others. There are grazing animals that are very good at associative learning, brilliant at classical conditioning, all of those things amazing a sequence of movements and learning remembering that sequence.

So that’s why they can learn to undo a lock through trial and error, learning at a gate on their stable door, and they’ll soon learn that sequence. We can’t expect them to be able to do 2 things at the same moment anymore that we can even expect another human to do it. I don’t know many humans that are very good at multitasking. Probably, if any could be women because they can do those things better than men can. They can have conversations while they’re making they’re making food or doing things, whereas men tend to just make the food and can’t talk or else have to stop the food.

This is what I do, Stop cooking and turn and then the food burns. But jokes aside, I think we should not expect that with horses to be doing that. So keep it really simple and just remember you’re talking to the horse. When the horse is young, you have to keep the aids really separated. It’s like speaking very slowly to someone who’s now learning English, but as they learn it and as the horse learns all of his equitation, the words can come closer together.

So you can say it in a sequence. You can go rain, leg, rain. There’s no problem with that. It’s not rain leg at the same time because none of those legs will be in swing of stands at the same time in the war. Yeah, it’s very interesting.

And isn’t there something to like when you apply rain pressure, you can disengage the hind of the horse. So keeping the contact with the leg is important so that they continue coming. But you’re not just applying all that pressure at the same time, which I understand can be very confusing to the horses. So when you’re studying the classical texts of riding and you have your sort of PhD brain on, are you ever shocked at how right they got things without all the science and everything to back it up? Or are you just, yeah, it’s a feeling sport?

Or do they get a lot of things wrong? How do you interpret that as a scientist and a writer? Yeah, look, I’m utterly surprised when I read all those things. I also read Grazoni’s work and I happened to meet Elizabeth Toby, who was the first person to properly translate Rizzoni’s work from Italian, Old Italian into English. And as she pointed out that we have to be very careful of any texts that are actually translated into English if the translator’s not properly skilled in English literature and translation because there are so many ways of interpreting things.

For example, we use the term science and science to us means a rigorous application of scientific methodology, but that simply means knowing an art. We say dressage is an art and dressage is not an art. It’s artistic to look at, but it’s definitely not an art. It’s a science. And in the old days when they talked about dressage being an art, that’s when the word art meant the work of an artism.

The work, the word and the art in those days was not like modern art where he’d just throw a bucket of painted them was really precise. And that was the work of the artisan. It was a very scripted and and of. Thoughtful. Yeah.

Yes, I was really very amazed when I read this how much they knew. And it just shows how far you can come. And and that’s true with probably all our human endeavours, how far we’ve got with so many things through just trial and error. All the native people who learned that you can eat this mushroom but not that mushroom and you can and that and something’s only non-toxic when you boil it or cook it. All of that knowledge through trial and error and the making of cheeses and wines and all of that, it’s brilliant.

And I think it’s rather the same. It’s through trial and error. They learn things, but the problem was when they learned it through trial and error and then they began to explain it, although it they explained what they do. When they gave the reason from the horse’s perspective, it was as if the horse was a human. They use it very anthropomorphic way of explaining how the what the horse is thinking about this, what they do is really very interest.

And it’s constantly amazing to me that we can do that. And the great trainers now across the world are very much the same. They’re very gifted to what they do. And that’s how people become great trainers because they learn very early to sit in a good place and fly and release pressures at the right moments and all of that. And then they went all the way up the ranks, winning the competitions.

And then they get to the world’s best trainers because they’re really very good. And the world’s best trainers continue with them. And they learn this through this sort of opaque system. But it’s through this part of memory called non declarative learning, implicit learning. And the subset of that is procedural learnings, learning of skills.

You can learn this implicitly without knowing. It’s like playing a sport, basketball or whatever. You can do it without consciously knowing a body to let us do it, like it rides a bicycle or a snow ski or something. But to me, the explicit learning part is really helpful of knowing why. Because when you begin to see principal, you can then apply it elsewhere and realize the importance of its application.

And you begin to build a picture of what the horse’s mind is really like because these same principles shine through. So for example, I’ve known many top trainers who can train a horse and do Piaf massage so well they have trouble loading a horse into a trailer. And yet it’s ridiculous. It’s the same principles of associative learning to teach a horse to load into a trailer. And so there’s a lot of roadblocks because people don’t know enough explicitly.

And that’s why I focus on education, so people know what they’re doing. And then there’s people who are really good natural trainers, like implicit trainers, and continue on even better knowing what they’re doing and applying these basic principles elsewhere in the hood. And that will also make the horse’s life better and free of confusion. Yeah, I always find it interesting chatting with people because sometimes you really notice that things do translate. The skill that you’ve learned here is also a similar skill that you’ve learned here.

I always say in the States, like a lot of us professionals have training businesses in order to support our own competition horses and whatnot. And I always say if the skills you’ve learned to run your horse business can’t go and apply to another business, you’re not running a very good business. It’s a similar location. Yes, absolutely. It’s any correlation there?

How do the listeners follow along with what you do and find you and all of that good stuff? Actually left my name Andrew McLean comes up very quickly on Google, but also my business is called Equitation Science International, which is education.com is our website. They can find out what we do. We run courses. Purdue University are also running our course and they’re offering Purdue University certificates of attainment and this has just begun this year.

So they can either do it through Purdue University or they can if they’re interested in doing a course or do a diploma, which is an Australian recognized diploma, government recognized one in Australia through contacting our office. And we have a lot of resources. I actually think someone said to me that I might have written more books on horse train than anybody ever has. I’ve written 12. I haven’t written them all by myself.

I’ve been co-author of two of them, three of them. But I’ve written a lot of books over the years because being a scientist, I get really excited about moving on and learning and through watching other people and say that’s a really interesting technique. But because I know the mechanics, this is how you would do it and this is where it fits in all of my every time I learn a big bunch of more recent knowledge that’s helpful for trainers. I have set out to write another book, but I don’t think I’m writing another one. I was 71 next month.

I really want to enjoy my grandchildren and my horse and my life. And I still will work. I still do a lot of scientific work. I’ve got 2 PhD students that I’m excited about and I’ll have more, I’m sure. And I still do a lot of work with the FBI and with Racing Victoria and Racing Hong Kong to try and make those horses lives better.

And then the other side of my life is this charity with the elephants called the Human Elephant Learning Programs, which is H Hyphen elp.org. That charity is going big now. And so we’re now set. We’ve had a conference in Thailand last year where we invited trainers from 7 different countries, 2 trainers and one stakeholder from these countries to all join together, which was a world first because normally they don’t talk to each other much or know it. And it was just the most wonderful experience of sharing knowledge.

And then I could say, now listen, that’s good, but all of the things you’re telling me, it will fit into these principles of elephant training. And then I teach them the principles and how they might do it better. That’s pretty fun. But that actually is the other half of my life, so I spent time doing that too. That’s awesome.

Great lot of people behind me in that organization as well. Thank you so much for joining me. This was a great conversation. Very much enjoyed it. Awesome.