Interspecies Training

"Horses aren't dogs, you can't train them like one!"

Did you know all species learn in the same ways? With slight variations of technique and motivators, we can also train in the same way.

All species are born with basic instinctive coding that gives them a basic set of knowledge for survival. What type of things they inherently find aversive and appetitive, what type of things trigger fear reactions, play emotions, care, lust, rage and so on... We are born knowing how we feel about these things and have instinctive behavioral responses associated. We are triggered to respond by fight/flight (and so on) or maternal care of our offspring. We don't need to be taught, we just know our individual species way of doing things.

Then of course there is classical conditioning. For stimuli that we aren't born knowing how we feel about, we watch and see what it comes paired with. If the stimulus evokes good feelings, is paired with things we instinctively like, the stimulus is conditioned as a good thing (an appetitive). Or reverse for aversives.

Operant conditioning is a species basic ability to pick up on cause an effect. Which behavior results in which consequences. Good consequences mean the behavior will happen more, bad consequences the behavior happens less. Simple as that. This is where most of our functional training happens, but not all learning exists here.

We also have social learning, which is horses learning from the reactions of their peers. I find horses don't always learn behaviors easily from their peers, though it can happen, but they often learn how they feel about things from their peers. If their friend is enjoying something, they are likely to check it out and enjoy it too, even if they were scared at first.

Latent learning is the learning thay happens as the brain processes information after the fact. So an operant learning event happened, then they process this later and seem to have a jump in understanding. This is why we keep training short and sweet.

And of course, habituation. Habituation is learning that a stimulus has little to no meaning. The individual adapts to it without having to respond behaviorally or emotionally.