Calming The Anxious Horse

with Dr Kate Fenner

B. Equine Science (Hons). PhD Horse Behaviour and Training

How can I teach my horse to calm down? This is a question Dr Fenner is often asked, and without relaxation, most of us won’t get very far or have much fun. But before Dr Fenner gives us the tools and mindset to deal with the nervous and anxious horse, there are a few things we need to consider.

The first thing to consider is that the horse is a flight animal and is hard-wired to be on the lookout and ready to go at any second. Some are more closely related to their flighty ancestors than others; they are watchful and wary because it is in their nature.

If your horse is nervous and anxious and, as many term, “hot,” first make sure there is no physical reason for that. The horse may be in pain; it may have ill-fitting and uncomfortable or painful tack. This needs to be checked out.
Horses like routine, and if there is none in their life, that can create anxiety, as they don’t know what is going to happen or when.

Then, there is the brain/gut connection. Intestinal distress can cause anxiety, stress or depression, and the brain and the gastrointestinal system are intimately related. Horses are grazing animals designed to constantly eat for about sixteen hours a day. We put them in a stable and give them breakfast and dinner! And to add insult to injury, we isolate them from their friends. They need access and preferably touch with other horses and a feeding regime that better suits their physiology. For horses that must be confined to stables, consider smaller feeds more often and constant access to good quality hay, as it is necessary for gut health. And, importantly, feed according to your horse’s size, workload and temperament.

“We need to work out exactly what we want the horse to do; we can’t force the horse to relax or calm down, so what do we need to do?” begins Dr Fenner. “We need the horse to engage with us, to think about us. A lot of people seem to think that if we teach a horse to put its head down, it is going to calm it down. But I think that is putting the cart before the horse because actually, what happens is, if the horse is calm, it puts its head down. I don’t think getting the horse’s head down calms it; I don’t think it works like that. If you have an overexcited horse, the last thing it wants to do is put its head down, so I’m always trying to find ways to work with the horse, and that starts with discovering what the horse is more likely to want to do.

“The horse that is too emotional is most likely to be moving faster than we want it; its head is higher, everything is higher, its feet and its tail, etc. We can see what the horse is doing that we don’t want. But the energy in a horse is a very precious commodity in horse training; I don’t want to stop or lose the energy; I want to direct the energy. If the horse is already moving, that’s fine; it can move, but I am going to direct that movement. By directing that movement, I start to engage with the horse and it starts to think more about what I am asking and less about what, in the surroundings, it is afraid of. I might ask it to go in a certain direction; it comes back to foundation training. If the horse understands give to pressure, pressure-release-reward sequences, you have somewhere to go with directing the movement. And by that, I don’t mean lunging it for hours. If your horse is running around you in circles, you have lost control of that situation. I’m talking about small, specific movements that I can use pressure to indicate what and where I want the horse to move (and that could just be my voice clucking). I release that when the horse moves that part in the correct direction (this is the pressure-release part). Then, I reward the horse for getting the answer right (and this is the reward part of the combined reinforcement equation).

“I would start with ‘give to the bit,’ standing next to the horse, and I am asking the horse for softness in the bridle, and then I will ask him/her to move their feet, left and right—small movements so the horse can get the right answer (and be rewarded) easily. If you rank the anxiety level from one to one hundred and relaxed is at 50/100, you have to catch it before it goes too high, as if it gets to 80-90 and beyond, you have no hope. If the horse is already rearing and running backwards, you have missed that place to start. If you get to a show and the horse is rearing, etc, that is something you should have known or at least anticipated before you left home. It should have a bridle on, so you have more control and can, from the outset, ask for ‘give to the bit’ and ask it to walk in small circles and to move its shoulders, etc. Small tasks to get it listening and into your communication bubble. Very simple questions that the horse can get right and be rewarded for that. If you feel that you will not be able to control/handle the horse, you need to wait to take it to such events. If your horse is rearing and galloping circles, you are way beyond having recognised the problem early enough; you are well behind the eight ball then.

“Let’s start with anticipating the problem. Most of us know when our horse will be anxious and too emotional, so let’s get in there before the horse gets out of our bubble of communication and try to keep it within the bubble where the horse feels safe and is having a conversation with us. We use combined reinforcement (pressure-release-reward) to keep the horse engaged with us, and it helps the horse ignore the rest of their surroundings. And that is the bubble we develop at home, where we are the safest. Work the horse in different areas at home and then take the horse away from home to somewhere quiet and work there. Then, the next level might be a small event where there are some other horses, and you can go on in that way, building confidence layer by layer. If you take your horse from riding at home alone to a busy Ag Show that is just not fair on the horse because you have not taken it through those stages of habituation to increase the horse’s confidence in different situations. And it is during those stages of habituation that you develop those signals that help the horse to relax. For me, my calm-down signal is ‘Give To The Bit.’ The horse gives to pressure and goes into a soft frame. If you teach that, it is also very useful because it is the same posture you want from the horse when you are riding. It is a useful exercise because it is great groundwork and also beneficial when I am riding. It teaches the horse about combined reinforcement and pressure-release-reward sequences. It is simple, and my go-to calm down cue. I have not found a horse it does not work on nor a situation in which it does not work. Of course, we don’t always want the horse to be deciding when to move off and next time we’re going to talk about self-carriage and how to bookend your signals, such as halt, to optimise self-carriage.

“We need to be better at assessing our horse’s emotional level before it gets to the stage where it is running around in a frenzy because it is much harder to bring a horse back from an emotional level of 90 than it is from an emotional level of 75/100. We want the horse’s emotional level to be about 60, engaged and relaxed. We learn to teach the horse to relax by actually increasing the emotional level because we can’t force the horse to relax. Every time we train the horse, we increase the emotional level a bit and then give the horse the opportunity to relax. If I am teaching ‘Give to The Bit,’ I will pick up the contact and ask the horse to move forward, increasing the emotional level and then when the horse gives to the bit, I release the pressure and reward the horse, and the horse relaxes. So, what I am doing is, pushing the emotional level up, albeit just a very small amount, and then bringing it down. I am teaching the horse that I can bring its emotional level down. But I can’t bring it down without slightly increasing it.

“The more aware we are of our horse’s emotional level, and I always assess it out of 100, the better we will be able to manage it. Standing in the paddock and not bothered by anything, your horse should be at 50, and I want the horse to be 10%-15% above that when I am training, so 60-65. If the horse is 70, that is too high for me, and I can’t pull it down to a 65, but I can push it up to a 72 and say, ‘now, would you like to relax?’ I push it up to 72 by perhaps asking the horse to trot a little faster. Make the task a little bit more challenging to increase the emotion. I am asking more of the horse, which takes its attention from what it was spooking at, perhaps, and when it gives me more of its attention, I reward it, and we get down to 68 and so on until I get to the 65 I want. But we are inclined to get worried about raising the horse’s emotional level, which is why I stress you only need to raise it a tiny bit. Once you have the horse at 60-65, you can start asking new questions, but you can’t teach it something new when it is at 75. We need simple questions to ask the horse, questions to which we know the horse knows the answer.

“I like the idea that the horse considers standing still as a calm/happy place, but you can’t start with standing still because you can’t stop the horse from moving. It’s a win-win situation if your horse’s happy place is standing still. To teach your horse to stand still, you need to reward it when it stands still. You don’t force it not to move or punish/correct it for moving. Ask the horse to stand still, and when it does, reward it, give it a pat or a scratch and a ‘good boy.’ When your horse wants to move, let it, but control the direction where it goes, and it is up to you to teach it other things whilst it is moving. Then, ask it to stop again using a cue like WHOA or STAND. The horse stops, and you reward it. When it wants to move again, you can take control of where it goes. I’ll then ask the horse to stop and again reward it when it does. When my horse decides to move off, I will direct its energy and directing the energy increases its emotional level by about 2%. The horse will learn that if it doesn’t move after it has stopped, it can actually just stop. Do not pull the horse back to where you want it to stop because that’s correcting it, and correcting is the same as punishment, so we are in the wrong operant conditioning quadrant (the punishment instead of the reinforcement quadrant). I don’t want to punish behaviour, especially if it is forward movement; I want to reward the behaviour I do want.

“Take the time you have to put the time in. You don’t have to be an expert horse trainer, but you do have to control your own emotions. If you don’t, it takes you straight down the punishment path. Taking the time does not take longer; you’ll find you get to where you want to go much more quickly when you work with your horse and use reinforcement over corrective methods. If you do it well, you have a willing horse that has confidence in you. Force and exhausting your horse, working against the horse, does not produce confidence or willingness. You must develop your own stress-reducing cues; mine is ‘Give to The Bit.’ The cue is a signal. You have to work out the behaviour you want and then teach your horse a cue for that. Horses aren’t born with responses to signals; they must learn responses to the signals you decide to teach them.”

“You can’t train without relaxation. I think what goes wrong most of the time with training is that the horse is too emotional. Getting the horse to relax is always your first priority.

Article: Anna Sharpley.