@furlong47 @Scribbler You’re both right, kicking would be categorized as positive punishment! My bad, I misspoke. However, negative reinforcement IS the subtraction of negative stimuli, and so to use negative reinforcement, negative stimuli must be present so that it can be taken away. This is why I strive to use positive reinforcement, because I do not want to introduce negative stimuli (i.e. pressure), and use the subtraction of negative stimuli as a motivation for my horse to listen (not that negative reinforcement does not occasionally have its place). The idea that the other three quadrants of operant conditioning are merely tools in a toolbox is an opinion. My opinion is that -R, +P, and -P do cause harm to the relationship between horse and human to some degree, which is what I am trying to avoid. To each their own, of course, but it is not misunderstanding that causes our difference in opinion. It is just individual perspective.
@Bluey A motivated partner is the most important goal, and motivation can be creating through many different means. Training methods are merely different ways to generate motivation.
Are you going to document your progress? Keep a blog or provide updates for us on the forum? I admit that I’m very skeptical that you can accomplish much in the way of producing a well-trained riding horse with only positive reinforcement, but I’m willing to be convinced.
I dispute your contention that “a light touch of my foot/calf, which does not create an uncomfortable situation for the horse” is not negative reinforcement. The touch of your foot/calf is pressure that you remove when your horse responds. It makes absolutely no difference that it “doesn’t create an uncomfortable situation for the horse.”
No you are wrong. “Negative” means only add or remove stimulus…it does not mean pain or discomfort.
A light physical cue can be a request. A tap of toe or heel can be a request. But most leg and rein aids are R-.
We train then to understand that the right response is to move away from the pressure. They don’t do it because its uncomfortable. You cannot possibly watch Olympic dressage riders and think their horses are working at this level because they are uncomfortable.
They learn to understand the relationship between pressure/release the same way a clicker works. The “click” becomes the acknowledgement that they did the correct thing. The release of pressure tells the horse they are correct.
I’m not sure why it matter if you use R+ or R-. Both are effective, both are humane. But if you don’t understand that “negative” does not mean “discomfort” you need to do some reading.
@NoSuchPerson Yes, I will be creating an Instagram account to document my progress! I can post updates on the forum as well. I won’t be “producing” a horse with R+ necessarily, as I won’t be purchasing an unbroken horse. I suppose you could say that I will be transferring the mindset of my horse from one who is motivated with traditional training, to one who is motivated with positive reinforcement training.
The line between a cue and an act of negative reinforcement is fuzzy…the concept of negative reinforcement is centered around the presence of an aversive stimuli that is to be removed. It is assumed that all pressure is an aversive stimuli, but to what degree? A poke in the ribs is uncomfortable, yes, but what about a tap or a touch? If I have taught my horse, using positive reinforcement, to back up when I rest my finger on his chest, is that an aversive stimuli combined with positive reinforcement? Or is it merely a learned cue? If the cue is not recognized as unpleasant, then it cannot be categorized under negative reinforcement…unless ALL cues, physical and/or vocal, are categorized as pressure…I could talk myself into circles with this :lol:
To help clarify…
No.
Negative reinforcememt is the removal of stimuli. Period. Not negative stimuli.
Leg pressure isn’t inherently uncomfortable. It is just a cue. Move on or move away and pressure is removed. If you add R+ by patting or vocal cue also the horse will likely learn faster. R+ and R- work well together.
In walk, trot and canter, my boy goes more forward when I say quick and collects when I say slow. Normal inside leg into outside rein. The rising differs. I do not wear spurs and he does not have a noseband. Where do you put that?
@S1969 I am sorry that we disagree. I verified my knowledge online, and what I have been posting seems to be correct. Simply put, negative reinforcement is the subtraction of something bad, and negative punishment is the subtraction of something good. Negative only means to remove a stimulus, not to add one.
Horses naturally understand pressure. They move away from pressure because it is a stimuli that they do not want. When they move away, the unwanted pressure stops, and therefore they feel relief. The release of pressure tells the horse that they did what you wanted, but the horse initially performed the action to get relief from the pressure. This is the entire concept behind pressure and release training and why it works, and you must understand this when you choose to train this way.
Sounds like a normal combination of R+ and R-…combined with your horse’s own preferences. Voice commands, leg pressure/removal, and probably praise in various forms.
It’s very hard to use only R+ or R-.
People often talk about using only R+ in dog training but leashes are inherently R-. When a dog hits the end of the leash they receive a cue which limits their direction whether the handler planned to use R+ only or not.
But that’s a good thing. There is no reason not to use multiple forms of conditioning.
@SuzieQNutter Your horse knows vocal cues! That’s all I can decipher from what you’ve told me. I can’t tell how the horse was trained to respond to vocal cues, it could have been negative reinforcement, positive reinforcement, positive punishment.
I am pretty sure I just said the same thing, but thanks for the confirmation. Negative reinforcement is the removal of stimuli. “Negative” refers to removal, not necessarily the idea that the stimuli is unpleasant.
A horse that is trained does not move away from pressure because it uncomfortable. It is because it has learned how to interpret that cue. It never has to be “uncomfortable” but can be unpleasant…like being forced to listen to rap music.
Just like a dog learns that a click is “like” a treat. Even when it is not a treat. Because we don’t give a treat for every right response, forever, right?
So I guess I am still not sure why R+ is desirable when we know that horses naturally respond to pressure? Their brains are different from ours. That is neither bad nor good. It just is what it is.
Until you have seriously and under proper initial instruction tried clicker training, you don’t know what depth of motivation is there to be found in your subject.
You may think you have a motivated student before that.
When you use operant conditioning properly, you realize quickly you have to teach static behaviors right away, or your student runs away with over the top motivation.
It found such a great game that empowers it.
I don’t think OP is quite yet on the same wavelength others that have been there, done that are.
I say, OP, get on your way, read some more, go give it a try and then come tell us what you found.
@S1969 The point I was trying to make was just that negative reinforcement is the removal of bad stimuli, not all stimuli, like you stated. You are correct that “negative” means the removal of a stimulus, but negative REINFORCEMENT is the removal of bad stimulus, whereas negative PUNISHMENT is the removal of good stimulus. Look it up if you wish.
You stated that pressure is unpleasant, and that is exactly why I try to avoid pressure and release. Unpleasant, uncomfortable, either one. I do not wish to introduce anything unpleasant or uncomfortable to my horse as a motivation for them to do something.
It appears that you and I have a great difference in opinion, and that is okay! Perhaps one day I will try to train using your methods, and one day you might try to train using mine.
@Bluey I will definitely continue to update! I’ll be back :yes: and around on other threads, of course.
positive = to add
negative = to remove
Reinforcement = behavior you want to strengthen
Punishment = behavior you want to diminish
There is no good v. bad…kind v. cruel
I use “your” training methods all the time. But I never pretend that they are the only “humane” or “kind” methods.
The “average” horse would rather spend it’s time eating grass and hanging around with other horses.
“Average” horses don’t pursue relationships with people. It’s the people that pursue relationships with horses.
“Average” horses won’t do everything people want them to do, just because the people are “nice” to them.
In my experience horses tend to respect leaders who are kind to them and treat them fairly. A well treated horse with a trusted leader will go into a literal battlefield at the request of their rider.
In my experience, the most badly behaved horses were the ones who had owners who tried to be their horse’s “friend”. Treat the horse like it was another human being, and never laid down behavioral rules and enforced a set of healthy boundaries for what behaviors were acceptable from the horse, and the behaviors that weren’t.
If anyone claims they have exclusively trained their horse to be a safe and reliable mount without ever reprimanding the horse for unwanted behavior. I’d want to see proof that "niceness"was the only technique used from the time the horse was a yearling.
Even Mare Mom’s set down firm “rules” for their foals.
@alterhorse I think that people tend to perceive positive reinforcement training as spoiling a toddler. Eat all the treats you want, do whatever you want. But positive reinforcement uses active training methods that DO set boundaries, it just does it differently. Instead of telling the horse, “No, don’t do this” or “No, don’t do that”, you tell the horse “Yes, you can do this” and “Yes, you can do that”. Positive reinforcement training does encourage and discourage behaviors, but without force or punishment. Good behavior is encouraged by a reward, and bad behavior is discouraged with the absence of a reward. If you had a choice to do two things, and one resulted in something good and the other didn’t, which one would you choose to do?
Adele from The Willing Equine has raised her filly with positive reinforcement only and has had wonderful results, if you want to look into her and her program.
Your horse can pursue a relationship with you. You just have to make yourself, and what you do, rewarding for the horse. 
It depends on what “the good things” are, and whether the choice that results in not receiving “the good things” allows me the freedom to seek “good things” from some other different unrelated source.
OP I don’t know where you are doing your research on these terms, but if you are getting your definitions from the R+ community, parts of which are quite single-minded, you are not getting accurate definitions. You are getting definitions slanted to support their point of view. It’s not that you have a different opinion. It’s that you have a wrong definition.
I would also add that most people don’t really know when they are using Reinforcement + or -
I taught my mare to play fetch entirely R+ Thats the kind of trick you really can’t do R-
But in order to get my mare to the fall fair where she will entertain the kids, she needs to be excellent at giving to pressure so that I can easily lead her, load her in the trailer, and handwalk her past the Highland cow and the Johnny Cash cover band without incident.
If I tried to get her to the fall fair entirely R+, with no physical constraints like halters and lead ropes, we’d never get out of the stall.
But more significantly, if I lead her into the trailer and give a treat, that isn’t really R+ like playing fetch. She leads because way back at the start she was given a good grounding in giving to pressure. Leading her now is residual understanding that R- is at work when I handle her, and that it will come into play if she gets silly.
I tried to load a friend’s horse once that didn’t give to pressure. Gong show, gave up.
In that situation R+ was never going to be enough because honestly a treat is not enough bribe to get a horse to do something they really don’t want to do. R+ works best with things they love to do, like throw towels around, or do naturally like “smile,” or are neutral about like targeting a cone. Or are really proud of doing like standing on a box. But when they have doubts about somethung you better hope that they understand R- and that they have developed trust to follow your pressure.
Even my mare will stop playing the R+ game if she is worried or excited. When I got my new trailer I played with getting her to walk up the ramp playing fetch with a towel. But at a certain point halfway in she stopped the game and backed out. It wasn’t enough to overcome even mild doubts. So when we started loading her for trips we used pressure (very mild pressure in her case) and she adapted very quickly to enjoying the new trailer. But for me it was a good example of the limits of R+ with this horse. If she is a little worried she will follow my R- pressure and trust it but she won’t have the heart to play the clicker game.
Here is another ambiguity. If I ask my mare to dance a bit, back up, sidestep, I put pressure on her by a hand gesture. If she didn’t move, I’d poke her. But we rrefine it to a hand gesture and she gets a treat. So there is R- built into the R+ procedure. My cues even my subtle ones are still built on pressure.
I’d say the pure R+ tricks in our repertoire are fetch a glove, bring me the ball, smile, and go stand on a target mat or circus box. Everything that is about movement has a reference to R- at its core. Making her back up by wagging a finger at her is a refinement of R- pressure reinforced with R+ clicker.
That’s why I think it is perfectly silly to say you are going to be 100% R+. Because a lot of what you think is R+ is actually adding a treat reward to an R- foundation. Also because all the good manners you will need for your trick training are based on R-.
You can certainly make a commitment to be a fair and kind trainer. That’s a different thing altogether.
This has actually been an interesting discussion for me because it’s helped clarify why R+ isn’t the be-all and end-all of training. It isn’t just because feeding treats from the saddle teaches a horse to stop constantly. It’s that half the time, even when you think you’re doing R+, you are really also doing R-, or building on an R - foundation.
It is a misunderstanding to say that everything that happens after the clicker comes out is therefore R+ because treats are on offer.
Also you need to get to a place where your groundwork and your riding cues are very very subtle before you fully understand the continuum in R- pressure between shanking that lead rope to send a pushy mare backwards in your first ground work clinic, and sending her backwards at liberty by shaking a finger at her 5 years later
I’m not really sure I believe that. There is a post on her blog about the 4 Quadrants of Operant Conditioning that is pretty good and generally correct. But mostly about how other people over use P+. She briefly talks about R- but says this:
If you’ve been reading this blog and following me on Instagram you know that I use primarily positive reinforcement (+R aka applying a reward following the performance of a desired behavior) in all my training. Through +R I also teach -R (negative reinforcement/pressure & release), which… basically looks like using positive reinforcement to shape correct responses to what are common negative reinforcement cues (like moving forward off the leg), but let’s talk about that more in-depth later. For now I want to talk about corrections… and the big question…
You can’t really turn R- into R+. But I guess you can make it “look like” positive reinforcement to people if you praise the horse for responding to R-. Or if you smile when you’re doing it. Because then it looks “kind” instead of “cruel?”
Maybe she has more about this in a later blog. I only clicked on this article because it had a graphic of the 4 Quadrants at the top of the page so I was curious to see if they were correct.
https://www.thewillingequine.com/single-post/2017/02/28/Corrections-In-Horse-Training
