Okay in this next lecture we're just going to kind of cover some of the basics of learning and how these, these animals learn. Now, I will say this. It's, it's almost impossible. It is impossible to go over. Training a, a horse, or a donkey or a mule in 15 minutes, you know, the average time, you know, of these lectures. So, I, I definitely highly recommend if you really want to jump into more into training, there is, you know, obviously, a wealth of information in books and training manuals, and a lot of popular press articles, and certain horse magazines. It's always focused on training. There's a lot of training workshops held. You know, so you can maybe look in your areas of the world and see if people are having any horse training workshops. You know, this is a, such a deep, deep topic. But what we're going to cover is just some of the very, very basics, you know, that are used in pretty much any training method around the world. Now [COUGH] I start this off with again the visual communication is so important. And, I know I've all ready kind of, you know, hammered that a little bit in the you know, in the senses in other lectures. But especially in training you have to read this animal, you have to see how they react to cues so you know. You know, if they're understanding what you're doing. And then it's safe for you to move onto the next steps. So definitely you, you know, make sure you, you, you have that down. Now this is still one of the oldest arguments in, in biology. And it's called nature versus nurture and talking about behavior. So the, the nature of an animal is pretty much its genetic disposition and, and it's pre- and, you know, determined before they're born. And we kind of say it's their innate behavior, you know, which is, affects us, too. So, you know? The nature is, you know? When you're born, you know, it's believed you have some sort of a personality. You're going to have a certain amount of intelligence. And then athletic ability, especially with horses. Because we're going to ask them to do certain things, and if they don't have the athletic ability to do certain things, you know, they're not going to be able to keep responding well in training because they can't do it and you can't push them past a certain point. So you have to understand that and then the nurture part is pretty much the environment or the learned behavior, things that have affected that animal. So if they had any previous training experience, if it was a very negative experience, they're going to be more, more difficult to train. If it was a very positive experience, they may be a little bit easier to train. So different things can affect the nurture of, of an animal. So, now jumping into like how horses learn. Well, one of the very first important ones is social learning or really learning from mom, or the mare in, in the instance of horses. You know, a lot of that behavior that they're going to learn, the, the what makes them a horse. Really comes from, from mom. So, these foals are going to watch mom quite a bit. How she interacts and then they're going to, kind of, mimic what she does. So, we see this a lot, especially, you know, here in the, the Somali wild ass videos, you'll notice that foal behind his mother, he's grazing. And, I'll be honest with you, these young foals still get the majority of their nutrition from mom's milk. So, why is a foal grazing? Well, they're kind of mimicking mom. And they start early on, you know, just grazing a little bit. Keeping their nose on the ground, kind of investigative. Maybe take some bites and eat it. And then, as they get older, they'll, they'll actually graze more and more until almost weaning time, when they're not getting very much nutrition from mom and, and you can cut them off from the milk supply. So, and other things they watch, you know, obviously, is, is play and other social interactions are very, very important which we've covered. Now, the other type of learning is just kind of this what's called latent or latent learning where it's just, it's kind of natural learning. So, you know, the best way I've, I've, I've heard this described is like, in your hometown, you kind of know how to get home. Right? And you learned your directions as you go, through experience. And it's just, kind of, passive, and you just kind of, after awhile you, you kind of, have the whole map laid out. And that's, kind of this type of learning. And for horses, especially out in the wild, you know, they'll, they'll remember where a food source is. They'll remember where a water source is, and they'll be able to, to go back to those areas. And we see this with, with all sorts of different animals. Now, the other type of, of how horses learn is habituation. And we, we kind of, say this is a desensiti, desensitization to stimuli. So, there's a term you'll, you'll hear often called sacking out. And that's because we use sacks, or they used to use a lot of sacks, and today we use plastic sacks or whatever you can to desensitize the animal to a lot of movement, loud noises, things that they're not quite sure about, and we'll get them habituated to that stimulus so that eventually they'll just learn to ignore it. And, I've had some experience with this with police horses with the Houston Police Department. Where we would actually, you know, throw firecrackers around the horses, run them through obstacle courses. All sorts of things during training because these are animals that are going to have to, you know, say there's a riot on, on your hands. You have to have that animal, you know, be calm in that environment. So you have to really, you know, have some extreme training that, you know, doesn't hurt the animal at all, just that they're, they're habituated to that stimulus. Now, the other type of learning is sensitization and so this is where horses learn to respond to cues. And, I think some of the most beautiful riders on Earth, I mean just amazing riders are dressage riders. And, I highly recommend you just Google a dressage riding and, and watch one of these videos. And the things that these riders do with these horses and you try to see the cues, and they're so subtle. It's a, it just amazes me how well trained these horses are. And how good these riders are. That the, the cue, so the horses are really sensitized to cues. But just for someone like me who just rides Western and, and, you know, using the reins quite a bit to kind of turn a horse, you know, with other, other stimuli, but let's just use reins as an example. You know, if you pull on a rein, that pulls in their mouth, and they, they'll learn, through training, to turn their head, and then they're going to turn their body. Or if you pull back on both reins, that pulls their head back and they're going to learn to, to stop. So that's sensitization. And then, associative learning is, is the most common that we talk about, and we're going to jump more into this right now. The classical and operant conditioning. Now, classical conditioning is, you know, if anybody understands Pavlov's dogs and what he discovered was, he would ring a bell and he would get no stimulus from the dogs in the beginning. Then, he would introduce food and ring the bell and so the dog would eat and it started to associate the ringing of the bell with food. So, then he removed the food and any time he rang the bell the dogs would salivate in response to food. Thinking it was going to get food. So that was classical conditioning. It was you know, getting used to ringing of the bell. So we typically you know, can use some of this in, in, in horse training. You know, typically it's operant conditioning, which we're going to jump in to next. Is, is what we see but you will, you will see this in some, you know, in, in horses because classical conditioning is, is not voluntary, so it's, it's, it's a response to something. So we see this with horses responding to electric fencing or, you know, any time you open up the feed bag or you pull up in your tractor because that's what you feed out of. Horses will start to associate that with, with feeding. Now operant conditioning is really the one that we use quite a bit in training or a lot of people use quite a bit in training. And this is where you're using positive versus negative reinforcement. And you use this reinforcement to get your desired behavior. So in, in horse training, typically what you would do is present a cue or stimulus and then if the horse responded to what you wanted you, you give them, you know, positive reinforcement. A pet on the neck or some people use treats, you know, other things. Or the wrong choice is negative reinforcement so, you know, things like spurs are used to negative reinforce. So if a horse, you know, is hard to move in the beginning, you spur them a little bit. They'll jump and move and then after time, they, they'll respond more and more to just very subtle touching of your foot there because they, they've learned through operant conditioning that's what you wanted. Now I'm going to show you a series of videos that we did on a research project here at the University of Florida. Now we've fed mares diets, you know, through gestation and then following parturition. And what we were interested in in these treatment diets were, was the cognitive learning of these foals to see if it had an effect. And this is my graduate student Angie Atkins, this was her, her master's work. And what she's doing in phase one is kind of an, you know, habituation phase, where she's getting the foals used to her presence and then starting to do some operant conditioning. That she's, you know, presenting food and scratching with her rewards. You know, anytime the foal interacted with her, she gave it a reward. So that was phase one of this training. Now, in phase two, she introduced a clicker. And, she's going to do some clicker training. And she would click this clicker. And it's kind of loud. You'd click and then she would scratch the foal. So, positive reinforcement with the clicker. Interact with me. I click, and I give you some positive reinforcement. And so she did this until she, she wouldn't go on to each phase until they reached a certain milestone in the training. Now, in phase three, she introduces what we call a target. And this is target training. And what she's doing, so again she's building up to, to the final phase which is next, is she's, what she really wants to do, her ultimate goal is to get these foals to target. And remember, these are, these are, these foals are three to four months old, so they're really young foals. It's just so amazing about this project that she did. So in this phase, she's putting the target right in front of his face so he's inquisitive, he's going to reach out. Touch it with his nose. She clicks with her clicker. And he touched the, the target, and she positively reinforced them. So this is day one of phase three. So something totally new. And then it led to this final phase of training where she was asking this foal to target. And as you can see the foal ignores mom, he's engaged with, with Angie. And she says target. He turned. He touched the target. She clicked, and then she, she gave him his reward. Which was scratches along the neck and withers. And so, she, it just was amazing. I was so amazed at how, how well these animals learned. So you can see, you know, here she gets really advanced. Way far away from mama. The foal voluntarily goes to her reaches out, and touches the target with his nose. And he gets some scratches. So that was a really cool project that we, we did down here. So that was kind of a shaping too, what we call shaping. And, you know, it's where you, you build up to more of these advanced maneuvers with a horse. You can't go out and ask a horse to jump a. You know, a three or four-foot fence on its first day. You've gotta start off small and build up to these, these major obstacles and jumping or, or any types of activities that you're, you're going to work with these animals. So, with, with shaping is, is exactly what Angie was kind of doing with operant conditioning. She would build up and, and recognize small efforts. And then build up to the advanced targeting phase with those foals. Now, it's always re, you know, important to remember that we need to reinforce these behaviors. So your primary reinforcement is either removal of a negative stimulus, or could be food or, or, or other things. You know, positive reinforcement. And then secondary reinforcement comes over time, so this is the words that we associate with a desired behavior. So, going back to my reining example, during training anytime I would pull back on the reins I would say whoa. Whoa. You know, and do that during training. So after a while, any time I, I would say whoa and maybe just pull back on the reins slightly, the horse would know to slow down. So again, but, they, they don't know the word whoa. They just know the way I say it. If I went and said hey. Woo! [LAUGH] Sorry, a little loud. But if I went at a totally different pitch, that horse would turn around and go, what the heck is on my back? Get out of here, buddy. It wouldn't recognize the, the words so or the pitch, or the amplitude. Now, it's also important to remember that anyways, this is always fun, is positive reinforcement is always better than punishment. And there's different opinions on horse training. There's a lot of different ways to train these animals, but the, you know, the general rule is a positive experience is generally always better for the animal and you, so punishment is not something that, that we really try to aim for with these animals. Now there are some things you gotta remember with reinforcing these behaviors, so we call it a reinforcement schedule. So continuous is really the training phase. So this is where you're, you're giving them reinforcement during the training that you're reinforcing that desired behavior. So you don't want to, you know, once they've learned that behavior you, you, you want to give them some time off, you know, so they don't get bored or you over stimulate them. So when you do that, to keep those behaviors learned, there's the inner, intermittent phase where you will go out and reinforce those behaviors in and, you know, can be regular intervals every few days or irregular, you know, twice a week or three times a week or every other day. However you do it and it's just reinforcing those behaviors. That, that they've learned so they maintain them. Now if you stop doing that. If you stop reinforcing those behaviors. There's, they enter this thing called an extinction phase. And this is where there is no reinforcement. And so over time they're just going to be like oh yeah I don't remember that, I don't remember that. That, [NOISE] yeah, I don't need that anymore. And they really become almost feral again. Or, they'll, they'll, they'll get back to the wild state. Anybody that's been around horses long enough knows if you keep horses in pastures, especially your brood mares and you don't handle them a lot and then you go out to pasture and try to catch them, and it's 30 minutes later, you're still chasing them around this five-acre pasture. It's happened to me more times than I like to count. Because, they're a little bit feral, natural behaviors. Like, hey, I don't want to be caught, I want to stay out here with my buddies and do that. So, you know, that's why you need to, to reinforce catching them and, and working them, you know, regularly so they don't extinguish those. So, that kind of concludes the behavior stuff. But next we're going to jump into movement and how these, these animals move. And I look forward to seeing you in the gaits lecture.
