Lazybones

By any chance, is there something else you should be doing just now? I only ask because I should be writing a report on the meeting I had earlier, but instead, I’m writing my blog, because it’s far more interesting!

Another question: did you go for a run today? Did you walk anywhere? How fast did you go? Yes, I’m all about the difficult questions in this week’s blog! This week, I’d like to talk about laziness, because by coincidence, I’ve been in three discussions about it in the last few days. The most recent was this morning’s meeting, where I talked to a very interesting man about motivating a workforce. Although he’s now leading a large international engineering company, one of the first leadership jobs he had was with a well known ladies’ underwear manufacturer. It had recently been acquired by a new owner, and he’d been brought in to see how he could improve the performance of the lazy workforce. Apparently, they did everything with minimal effort, and the new owner was in despair. How was it possible that so many lazy people could be collected in one place?

There’s the first thing – they immediately assumed that laziness was a fixed part of these people’s personality. The man I interviewed decided to try a few new things, and hoped that by introducing a new way of working, he could improve both the quality and quantity of knickers produced (there may also have been bras and pantygirdles involved, I didn’t enquire too closely!). He chose a group of 10 of the women identified as the least productive, and brought them together to talk to them. He started off by asking them to say a bit about themselves, and he was astonished when each woman in the group described the creative and productive life they had outside of the factory. There were talented amateur artists, people taking part time degrees, musicians who travelled all over the country for gigs, mothers managing large families and a sportswoman on a national team. He realised he had to question his mental idea of these women as lazy, because what the management described as laziness was something that only happened when they came to work. He’d uncovered a massive lack of motivation and stimulation in their work lives. He allowed this group to choose their own hours, their own targets, their own working partners, and allowed them input into the manufacturing processes and new designs. A short time later, he was called to head office in Italy to explain discrepancies in his production figures: they refused to believe that the “lazy” women were now their most productive group.

Have you ever heard a horse described as lazy? Usually, lazy is used when a horse doesn’t move fast enough when we’re riding, or change gaits promptly enough when we ask. Sometimes, they just drag their hooves and look sleepy. Sometimes, they’re actually asleep when we go to collect them to ride, and we have to expend lots of effort persuading them to their feet, and dragging them in to be groomed and tacked up. Sometimes they trip and stumble, and their vets and farriers say it’s because they’re too lazy to pick up their feet. Sometimes, they’re lazy in the arena, but joggy when riding out, sometimes they crawl along like snails when out but are fine in a school.

Now here’s a cool psychology topics my students love: it’s called the Fundamental Attribution Error. The name is a bit of a mouthful, but the idea itself is simple, and once you’ve heard it, you find yourself applying it to lots of things in life. Let’s suppose you are a student, sharing a flat with a few other students. You come in one afternoon, and one of your flat mates is slumped in front of the TV, but you notice they’ve cooked themselves a meal and left mess and dirty saucepans and dishes all over the kitchen. “Lazy lump”, you think to yourself. A few days later, you have had the day from hell, lectures and labs back to back from 8.30am til after 5pm, and you worked all the previous night finishing off an assignment. You come in, make the easiest possible dinner, and immediately sit down to eat it in front of the TV. And your flat mate comes in and sighs…

The Fundamental Attribution Error says that when we see another person doing something (especially something of which we disapprove), we tend to say they’re doing that because of their personality. When we do the same thing ourselves, we say it’s because of the situation we’re in. There’s definitely an element of this going on when we call our horse lazy!

I asked earlier if you’d been for a run today? and if so, how fast you ran? I run as exercise, but I am first to admit it can be a bit of a chore. I use lots of little tricks to keep myself running on days when it’s raining, or cold, or I’m a bit tired. When we pull our horse out of their field or stable, tack up and head off, we’re doing something we want to do, but are they? In reality, they may be a bit like the women in the knicker factory: they’re quite happy bimbling around their field, and they don’t show any signs of slacking in terms of grazing, socialising, snoozing, grooming themselves. They just suddenly become rather sluggish when we ask them to do something we want.

Ethologists – who study animal behaviour – measure what an animal does during a typical day. They call this a time budget. The time budget reflects the effort an animal needs to put into getting enough food to have energy to get through the day, plus doing all the other things that are essential to life: walking to the water, grooming to remove parasites, relieve itchiness and maintain their skin and coat. Exploring: finding new and better sources of different kinds of forage and minerals. Interacting with other horses, in order to maintain social links. Finally, they spend time resting, either asleep or “loafing”: standing in little social groups swishing flies off or sniffing each other. You might be surprised to hear that there’s a very delicate balance between taking in energy by eating vs the energy we expend in getting the food. So to make sure this balance is achieved, we (and horses) factor in some “doing nothing” time, when we expend minimal energy. Resting is part of the time and energy budget (humans tend to do things like read blogs and watch TV). Some things horses don’t do much of at all is trotting, cantering, jumping things and galloping. Especially in circles…

What we ask of them are sustained periods of trotting, cantering, jumping things and galloping. Plus going backwards and sideways, and around in circles. They put all that effort into structuring their day so they have the right balance of energy vs resting and socialising time, and we come along and ask them to expend lots of energy, plus we ask them to do a whole range of things they wouldn’t choose to do for as long, as well as things they would generally avoid doing completely. Do they sound a little like the women in the underwear factory? If they don’t drag their feet because they have lazy dispositions (and we know they mostly don’t as they spend up to 18 hours a day walking around, rather more than we do!), there must be another reason. It could be we haven’t given them any reason to act differently, or it could be that something is preventing them from acting differently. The days I’m most likely to skip my regular run are the days after I’ve done a very long run and my muscles are sore: I will look quite normal to you if you see me walking around, but if I start to run, I am sure I will get an ears back grumpy expression!

The managing director of the underwear factory gave his workers a reason to be more productive. He gave them things they valued, that made coming to work something they enjoyed. He could have tried motivating them by penalising them, but he was wise enough to know that this approach results in either avoidance or evasion: they would either leave, to be replaced by someone else who started off well but gradually became “lazy”, or they would find creative ways around his penalties – because all animals, including humans, suddenly become much less lazy when they’re motivated to find a way to avoid a penalty or a punishment. Many people who say their horse is lazy will also say they can motivate them really well by carrying a whip – but that they have to carry it all the time to make sure the horse continues to work, plus they find it’s getting less and less effective and now they’ve had to start using spurs…

Start by working out what your horse wants and values: the list is already there in their time budget. They want food. They want companions. They want security so that they can rest and feel refreshed. They often want to explore. When they’re working for us, they want breaks – as they get fitter, the breaks can be further apart. They want to be motivated not by threats, but by rewards. They want us to recognize that they’re horses: their time budgets and priorities might be different from ours. In fact, they want pretty much exactly what we want when we take on a new job, they want to have a reason to come to work. I’ll just go off and write my report now…

Lazy? Or just being helpful – I can groom parts I can’t otherwise reach when 17hh Jackson is lying sunbathing!

Space: the final frontier?

I love beaches, especially when they’re deserted. There’s something about how they’re neither land nor sea, neither sky nor sand, neither water nor air, more a fusion of all of these things, a borderland between what we are and what we’re about to become. Nothing compares to finding a new beach, washed clean of footprints, full of lovely shells and buried treasure and new paths to make. Redpoint and Oldshoremore in the Scottish Highlands, Kilinallen on the Isle of Islay, Killiney beach near Dublin, Koekohe Beach in New Zealand – all of these have been my beach at some point – a beach all to myself, a clean sheet, a new beginning.

So it’s irritating when someone else arrives on my beach. All that pleasure I felt, thinking it was my beach and nobody else’s! An empty beach is a real rarity, I recognise how lucky I am to find it, and it’s the arrival of someone else that makes me realise how valuable a deserted beach all to myself can be.

We don’t have a conscious awareness of scarcity or rarity. How we act tells us how we feel. We each have our own mental bank vault, where we store and count up the things that matter to us, and where we keep a tally of how much of each is out there, how much other people are getting and whether we’ve ever found it hard to come by that precious thing in the past. Not just beaches! We value all kinds of things: people who grew up during a time of rationing value certain foods. People in towns value open space, and green places. People in the country value good neighbours. People in the desert treasure water, people – like me – in Scotland value a well drained field.

We also do strange things when we detect that something is in short supply. In times of recession, when jobs are hard to come by and our livelihood is threatened, people become much more likely to dislike strangers, people who don’t seem to be part of “their” group. In times of plenty, they’re much more likely to welcome newcomers, as interesting additions to the community. We become more territorial when space is in short supply: people can be grumpy commuters when they travel at rush hour. Suddenly, a seat is worth arguing over while on an off peak train, nobody comes up and chases you off your seat just for the sake of it. Everybody gets to choose the seat they’d prefer.

Aggression is something we tend to see most often in situations where something is scarce: it’s predicted that 21st century wars may be caused by disputes over access to water, an increasingly threatened resource.  It’s not just food and water that can cause us to behave aggressively: in 1983, riots broke out at toy stores when a new doll called a Cabbage Patch Kid became the most demanded Christmas present, but available only in limited numbers.

Horses also have things they value, and they are also able to judge how plentiful it is. In the same way that humans, we can work this out by watching them.  Like humans, each horse is both a member of a group and an individual, with individual preferences.  Not every horse places the same value on the same resource.  My gelding has a very relaxed personal space concept – even strange horses are allowed to stand and graze very near him from soon after introduction.  Other horses have a very strong concept of personal space, and it takes them a long time to allow even familiar group members to approach. These preferences are partly innate, and partly formed by experience. The horse I know who most strongly protects his personal space was born in a foaling box and didn’t experience a group environment or a field for some time after birth… from day one, space was a resource to be defended.

A horse like this may appear quite aggressive to other horses passing his stable in a barn situation, because his personal space bubble extends outside the walls of his box.  In making an aggressive approach to a passing horse, he’s not trying to take space from them, but to try to ensure that the limited space he has is still available to him. Horses are not territorial: a stallion defends his group against others, not a particular space. However, they do start to defend space when it’s restricted for some reason: a particular group of feral horses living on a small island are unusual in that they try to maintain a preferred territory.

We call this behaviour of defending a scarce resource “dominant behaviour”. Dominance is the behaviour we see in relation to that resource, not a quantifiable part of the animal. Labelling a horse as dominant is quite misleading: a horse can be dominant over food, but not dominant over space (my horse would be an example). The behaviour may less frequent in summer when grass is abundant than in winter when all the horses are hungrier. You might label my horse as dominant if you watched him defending food, but not if you watched him defending space.

Another example: mares who don’t make much of a fuss over access to shade, water or preferred companions can change behaviour abruptly when they’re feeding a foal.  In particular, they can become very determined to gain access to water supplies, especially during warm spells of weather and they will fend off other mares where previously they wouldn’t have confronted them.

The way we manage horses domestically means that we place lots of resources in short supply that feral horses wouldn’t worry about.  In a feral group, there is a constant magnetic pull inwards to the group: it provides the horse with safety in numbers, with family bonds and with access to mates.  At the same time, there’s a constant pull away from the group: other group members may compete for the shady spot, the chance to stand next to a preferred companion (and skilled fly swatter), or access to mum and dad.  The tension this causes is very neatly balanced by a range of behaviours designed to minimise conflict. A feral group is very peaceful and harmonious to watch: aggressive behaviours are limited, because they are not in the interest of individual horses.  You don’t want to jeopardise your safety, so you compromise.  Humans do this too: the study of Proxemics looks at how people move together in groups.  We maintain a delicate balance between moving in the direction we want to go with collaboration to ensure we don’t bump in to each other. This works really well until the crowd becomes too big – then we are annoyed by being jostled, having to weave in and out and slow our speed to avoid collisions.  This in turn can lead to loss of tempers.

Everything we do with domestic horses places them in a resource conflict.  We overcrowd them:  in a standard sized field, there are more horses than would choose to be near each other, and they’re not family members but transient acquaintances, so they require even more social distance.  Similarly, in the barn, the stables are often not as big as personal space bubbles.  When aggression occurs, instead of giving the whole group more space, we isolate the “troublemaker”, meaning that they now identify horse companionship as a scarce resource, leading to attachment problems and separation anxiety.  We feed individual feeds and haynets, making the one resource freely available to feral horses (forage) into a valuable item.  And again, when aggression happens, we isolate the troublemaker rather than changing how we feed and giving more space.  We parcel water out in individual bowls.  We give a single companion (of our choice) rather than a mixed group and plenty of space.

When we do these things in human society, we empathetically understand that food shortage leads to disputes, that overcrowding leads to friction: and, when we’re smart enough, we work to resolve these issues rather than choosing to label and isolate each “troublemaker”.  We know that because someone starts a revolution due to shortage of feed that they won’t, next week, start another revolution just for the hell of it.  People act to defend what they value, not just because they can cause trouble.  Horses are the same.  When you’re next on that deserted beach, remember the value you place on the wind in your hair: when you give your horse space to be a horse, the joy that comes from that is your payment.

Fair Play

When I was growing up, I had a friend called Marie.  She was a little older than me and she had lots of ideas for great games we could play.  One day she decided she was going to teach me to play chess.

It took a while for me to work out that I wasn’t ever winning and, in fact, I wasn’t even coming close to winning.  It took a while longer for me to begin to suspect that all was not as it should be. It took even longer again for me to work out that she’d made up the rules she taught me.  I’m still a bit suspicious of chess! I learned the real rules and I play chess occasionally, but at the back of my mind I still have an idea that it’s not a fair game.

We know from a very early age about games and play.  It seems to be hardwired, both the desire to play and the built in understanding that there are rules.  There are different types of play – there’s object play, where we play with things. We share this with other species as anybody knows who’s watched a small child play happily with the box and packaging of a new toy – and then watched their cat happily play with the same thing.  There’s also what’s called locomotor play – we share this with other species too: the sheer joy of running, jumping on things, jumping over things, running under things, and just running for the sake of running.

Then there’s social play.  We share this with other species too: we’re drawn towards other young humans, we want to interact with them and play games, and the games have rules.  One of the rules that was violated in my early chess matches was that the odds shouldn’t be stacked in one person’s favour.  It seems that one of the functions of play is to help us learn about unexpected physical and emotional situations, and in order to learn this, we do something called self-handicapping.  We make a physical challenge more difficult: if we’ve learned to walk heel-to-toe without falling over, we’re then driven to do it along a plank.  And then along a five foot high garden wall!  We also self-handicap in social games: my friend should have explained the rules of chess fairly to me, and then given me the occasional chance to win by making the odd duff move.

Watching horses play, we see this too.  My horse is a hulking 17hh gelding, but as a youngster, he loved playing with his 14hh Connemara friend.  Realistically, he could have flattened his friend, but he didn’t: there was a dance of “now I’m winning, now you’re winning” as they nipped at each other’s throats and chin hairs.  Jackson had a constant line of lumpy love bites along the underside of his neck from his smaller friend who clearly treated self handicapping with the same contempt as Marie did.

Young horses and humans have a strong desire to play.  It builds strength, coordination, stamina, and it teaches about social rules and social roles. It teaches about what we are able to do, and it teaches about what to do if things don’t go as expected. Playing actually changes our brains: it helps develop the important part of our brains that allow us to make good judgements, have control over our impulses, and over our emotions. It’s an essential part of our development. Humans AND horses!

One thing that doesn’t happen very often is interspecies play.  I had a puppy when I was a child, and so I learned, eventually, what a dog’s invitation to play looks like.  I didn’t know instinctively though, and he didn’t know mine.  We also preferred different games.  When we did play, though, the one factor that got us through was the knowledge that play is reciprocal.  When it’s not fun for one party any longer, it ends.  Both sides have to be made roughly equal, so nobody gets pushed around. And it has to be fun! The whole point of play is that it engages the reward and pleasure centres of our brain, making us want to do it again (and again, and again, and again if you’re a very small child playing peek a boo).  Playing with our horses can be very rewarding, but both species need to learn the rules.  Horse play is called horse play for a reason: humans don’t manage very well in games that involve lots of nipping and biting, nor do we come out well in games that involve charging at full speed, while leaping in the air and kicking out.  Horses don’t know this! Over time (and with gentle hints from us) they can slow down the charging and still enjoy a run around with their humans.

Jackson and I have learned a few of the rules of interspecies play.

Elements of horse training that get named as “games” or described by us as “play” often aren’t play at all from the point of view of our horses.  The rules are broken: they can’t leave at any time if they don’t like it, as they’re attached to us by a rope. There’s no self-handicapping: we set these games up like Marie’s chess, so that we always come out on top and the horse has no chance of winning. They’re not games our horses would request to play, in the first place, and once played, they’re rarely requested again.  There’s nothing wrong with training our horse, but there are issues with labelling the training as “play” or a “game” – creating beliefs on our part about how willing the horse is to engage with us and how much they’re enjoying what we’re doing to them.

That’s one horse/human play challenge: can we play games with them that both parties recognize as an enjoyable game with appropriate rules, and that both want to play again without needing (even gentle) coercion?

How we keep our horses leads to another play dilemma.  Each type of play: object, locomotor and social, is essential to different parts of development.  “Rough and tumble” play, or horse play, has been shown to be vital to the development of social and coping skills in other animals. When the animals don’t get a chance to do this, they still develop the full range of normal behaviours so that to us, they look normal. But in “novel, unexpected, or otherwise disturbing situations, [they are] less able to cope, and this is reflected by them not using the appropriate behaviour patterns”.

How do we raise our young horses?  Many horses are born and raised with only their dams. Sometimes, there’s also one or two older steady horses.  They don’t have the chance to play rough and tumble games with a group of similarly aged horses.  They don’t have the chance to learn the emotional control and the impulse control that they would if they were raised with other young horses, at the time when they need this. We actually stunt their brain development without realising, and then we wonder why we have horses who find it hard to deal with stressful situations, to live in a herd and to pay attention to us in distracting situations.

At the same time, they’re like only children (I’m speaking from experience as a lone child plus puppy here!).  When we don’t have the appropriate same species playmate, we still have that desire to play (to develop our brains) that’s like a strong itch, so we try to get adults, small dogs, and other likely candidates to play with us.  I am sure I was a nuisance as a child.  Many owners find their young horses a nuisance (and many even become afraid of them).  They’re always bouncing around, wanting to play nip the human, play tug with zips, play chase the human: and all the things we do to discourage them just encourage them further.  Swatting at the head of a young horse who’s just nipped you looks to them exactly like the way another young horse accepting the play invitation.  Chasing off a young horse who’s just invited you to play “chase and charge” to them looks like you just joined the game.

What should we do?  We should recognize that they, like us, have an urge to play that can’t be overridden, because without the different types of play, they can’t grow and develop as they should.  We should recognize that our young horse may not have had opportunities to play when they needed to, so they may want to play with us.  We should try to provide young horses (especially young male horses) with an group of similarly aged playmates so that they don’t need to direct their impulses at us.  We should understand how to say “no thanks, I can’t play like that” politely, and we should learn and help them learn how humans and horses can interact playfully, but safely. Domestic horses, like humans, continue to enjoy the occasional game even in adulthood. So let’s remember the rules: reciprocity, fairness, taking turns, both parties must have fun, either party can end the game.  We knew that already, of course, because our early friendships should have taught us the rules of fair play!

Snow makes everybody want to play (some chase and charge between adult mare and gelding).

Just in time…

Time for a snooze…

Have you ever been on a long haul flight? My longest trip was from Scotland to New Zealand (and back!). A plane from Glasgow to London, then London to Singapore, and finally Singapore to Auckland. It’s an hour from Glasgow to London. It’s a bit boring, but if you have a good book, you can manage not to notice the time passing. You get a chance to wander around Heathrow airport and stretch your legs, before you get loaded into the plane to Singapore, they close the doors and the plane takes to the air. Suddenly, you have the awful realisation that you are stuck in this metal box in the sky for the next 13 hours.

We don’t normally notice 13 hours passing – we get up in the morning, get dressed, have breakfast, visit and maybe ride our horses, have showers, baths, lunches, dinners, commutes, work, housework, meet friends, talk to people, move around, see things, do things… Half seven in the morning to half eight in the evening we are quite occupied and time mostly passes without our being aware of it. Sometimes, we get a bit impatient, because something takes longer than it should: I will tap my feet impatiently and check my watch a lot if my regular train is delayed for 5 minutes. If the internet at work is a bit slow, I will whinge a bit while I wait for pages to load.

We have ways to deal with this. What we suddenly realise we don’t have, once we’re trapped inside a plane on the way to Singapore, is ways to deal with being stuck in the same place, with the same people, mostly in the same seat for 13 hours. None of the usual things are there to tell us the time is passing. The first few hours aren’t too bad – we do our “on a plane” routine – read a book, have something to drink, do a few Sudoku. Then we enter a sort of limbo. We’re tired of our book. We’re annoyed by the people in the row behind. The airline food is uninteresting. You can’t see anything out the window. It’s starting to be rather horrible: and there’s still 10 hours to go.

My research area, back 10 years ago when I was doing research, was about how the information that gets to our brain from our eyes helps us be accurate and coordinated when we move around. It was inspired by a group of psychologists who included a Swedish gentleman called Gunnar Johannsen. Gunnar was responsible for what I think is the nicest opening sentences of any PhD thesis:

Outside stands a weeping birch with its scanty foliage; its pliant branches moving rapidly backwards and forwards in the strong wind; each branch keeping its own peculiar rhythm. This is an example of unceasing motion, unceasing change. Motion is perhaps the most essential form of continual change that our perception gives us.”

Gunnar was interested in movement. Both the movement of things around us, as well as our own movement in the world, allow us to work out where we are, how fast we’re moving and how long things take. He said “there is no perception of time, only events”. He believed that we understand time passing through our constant awareness of things happening in the world around us. We know how many steps from bedroom to bathroom, we know we can get up, shower, brush our teeth, dry our hair, get dressed, eat breakfast and still be in time for the train. We use predictable events in the world to know how time passes. On a long haul flight, we are disconnected from these things, so the time we don’t notice passing at home seems to last forever.

Horses are creatures of motion. They spend most of their lives walking, nibbling, chewing, walking, nibbling, chewing. They create their own little clock that helps them measure time, and that clock depends to a huge extent on movement. Brain research into the perception of time shows that the parts of the brain that help us judge how soon something will happen are controlled by the parts of the brain that control movement. Horses’ brains are smaller than humans, but there’s a specific part of the brain, called the cerebellum, that’s larger in horses than in humans. Movement is one of its roles, but it also seems to be very important in judging time: these two things are closely linked.

Imagine then, a horse who spends 12 hours a day in a 12 x 12 foot box – yet only needs two or three hours sleep out of 24 hours. Compare her to another horse, who spends his life outside in a herd. The first horse sees nothing but the walls, and occasional but unpredictable passers by. Like us on the aircraft, food is provided. Like us on the aircraft, it does little to relieve the frustration of being stuck, not being able to walk, nibble, chew, walk, nibble, chew while observing the environment we’re passing through. There’s very little way for a stabled horse to judge the passing of time. Nevertheless there are big noticeable events that predict the end of being trapped! When we hear the announcement “ladies and gentlemen, please fasten your seatbelts as we are about to commence our descent into Singapore Changi Airport” we feel elated and relieved our ordeal is over (until we get on the 12 hour flight to Auckland next morning). Similarly, the horse hears the first car of the day arrive – and may greet it with a loud whinny. And like us getting on the plane to New Zealand, they’ll do the whole thing again next day (but also the day after, and the day after). It’s even worse for horses who are stabled all the time – winter time turnout rules, or competition horses.

Here’s an interesting thought. Place humans in conditions of sensory deprivation (this can simply be conditions of very low stimulation such as just sitting in a room with no external noise and low unchanging light levels) for any length of time and there will be a variety of rebound effects when they get out. They report increased anxiety, sensory illusions or hallucinations. One of the most frequently reported after effects of periods of even quite mild sensory deprivation is a temporary increase in the sensitivity of our vision, hearing, taste, and sense of smell and touch. Yet we leave our horses in stables for many hours, then take them out and expect them to be calm and obedient.

Horses need to eat on the move, interact with other horses, walk around and interact with the world while moving not just because they need exercise, or they need grazing. They need it in order to have an understanding of their place in the world, of time passing: they need it in order to be horses. Not many of us would willingly take a 12 hour plane flight every single day (no matter how good the airline food), yet we are happy to spend 12 hours working, walking, playing and eating – interacting with the world – without even thinking about the same length of time passing. Our horses would like the same option, we need to be more creative in working out ways of offering it to them.

Pleased to meet you.

At the moment, I am meeting a lot of new people as a result of my work.  I’m going along to their offices, introducing myself, and then asking them lots of questions about their business.  It’s very interesting to learn all about the clever and innovative things that businesses around me are doing.  All the meetings start in the same way: I make eye contact with the person I’m there to meet, and I walk towards them, stretching out my right hand.  I am usually smiling, and they smile in response and stretch out their right hand to me, and we shake hands. I know they’d not like it if I offered them a hand covered in a woolly glove, so despite it being rather cold at the moment, I take my glove off before offering my hand.

The handshake isn’t the only greeting ritual – in different parts of the world, people bow, or kiss each other, or even touch noses together.

All of these rituals are our way of saying “I would like to know you better, and so I will trust you by offering something important to me – my hand. At the same time, I don’t know you yet, so I’m making sure you stay a safe distance away from me – at arm’s length.”

Psychologists, anthropologists and ethologists love these greeting rituals.  They offer such an insight into what a person or an animal thinks is important.  Firstly, they really want to meet new people.  We are all drawn to meet and find out more about someone new – we’re social animals, and new people can mean new opportunities, new information, even the chance of meeting a potential mate.  At the same time, we know we have to stay safe.  The handshake is thought to be a way of demonstrating that your hand is empty, that you’re not carrying a weapon, and that’s why we offer the right hand, the hand that around three quarters of the human race favour for using weapons (like swords… and pens!).

Other animals have greeting rituals too.  Horses also like meeting new horses – they find it both scary and exciting, and like us, they’re drawn towards new horses.  Like us, they don’t like to get too close, and they don’t like new horses getting too close to them, so they offer their greeting at “neck length” by stretching out their nose towards the other horse.  Like us, they’re also showing trust (horses often nip each other’s noses in play and can occasionally draw blood with over enthusiastic nips, so offering a nose is a demonstration of trust).

It takes a while before we become comfortable enough with a new acquaintance to allow them to touch any other part of us apart from that offered hand.  Imagine how you would feel if, after shaking hands, your new business acquaintance stepped boldly forward and started rubbing you between the eyes!  A horse would be equally affronted if another horse did this, and would likely respond with a squeal and by shooting out a foreleg, to show the appropriate distance that they wanted to be maintained.

Jackson and I maintain a polite distance, while still showing our interest in each other. We’re long standing friends now, and he will politely allow me to touch his face, and will occasionally suggest a mutual grooming session.

Yet every day, humans march right up to horses, into their personal space, and start rubbing their faces.  We seem oblivious to the polite messages from the horse – the way they move their head away from us, the increase in blinks, the tightness in their mouth and lower jaw.  They will also often point their ears backwards (not flat back, just away from your hand). Even very sensitive and experienced horse people can’t seem to help themselves, even to the extent of sometimes saying that you should reward your horse with “a nice forehead rub”.  I’m guessing that’s nice for us, the one doing the rubbing, since the horse usually looks just as uncomfortable as we would if a new acquaintance did this to us.

Let’s think about touch between humans.  How soon in a new friendship would you feel comfortable if your friend touched your back?  That’s not too bad, is it?  Even the first time you met, if the person seemed nice and you liked them, you’d be happy with that. The shoulder is another fairly neutral spot, and your upper arm would probably be fine too.  How long before you’re happy to be touched on the leg?  The answer here will, of course, depend on your culture, your sex and your personality (it’s the same in horses – mares tend to have slightly different “OK to touch here” zones than male horses).  How about the front of your body? How about your face?

Touch is an interesting thing.  It has a very strong effect on our emotions.  Some recent research has shown that observing a friendly handshake activates part of the “reward system” in our brain.  We are tuned to find friendly greetings rewarding, it’s so important to our survival as a species.  Sometimes we respond more positively to a gentle touch on the shoulder than we do to a handshake.  Men touched (on a neutral part of the body: shoulder or upper arm) by a woman they’ve just met are more likely to feel confident about taking a risk than men who’ve just met the same woman but not been touched by her. A friendly touch has a strong emotional impact.

But there are clear rules about how well you have to know someone before you can touch them: handholding is a great example.  It’s usually only someone with whom you feel very comfortable, with whom you’ve had lots of very positive experiences, that you’ll allow to take your hand and hold on to it.  We tend to feel very uncomfortable when we meet one of those people who step right into your space, take your hand and then shake it for a long time without letting it go!  We experience a lot of conflict, wanting to snatch it back but bound by a strong social convention that says we need to allow it.

How well do you need to know your horse before you can expect that they will offer you a hoof for cleaning, and allow you to hold on to it?  We have an expectation that our horses will allow this, and it doesn’t occur to us that sometimes, in some situations and in some horses, this probably feels just as worrying as the over-familiar handshaker.

Trust needs to be built – both between ourselves and our fellow humans as well as between us and our horses.  Trust is built up of a lot of repeated, pleasant, predictable and unthreatening interactions: it rarely happens on day one.  Your relationship with your horse is just like a new relationship with a person. The difference is that we can force touch on a horse by restraining them, where social conventions would be outraged if we did that to a fellow human.  As an experiment, try offering the same respect to a horse you’ve just met as you would to a new human friend, and you may find that you move to a position of trust with them much faster. No matter how velvety and inviting their nose might appear, offer them your hand to sniff instead. Stay out of their space until they seem happy to have you in it, and build up touch gradually based on respect of how they feel, rather than just hoping they get used it because they don’t have the option of a “thanks, but no thanks”. If you watch their body language, they will make it quite clear when they’re not comfortable being touched, and when they’d actually appreciate some help with their itchy face! Getting to know a new horse this way means that like your new human friend, your horse will soon be pleased to meet you.

Family are allowed privileges : father and two sons- feral Pottoka ponies in Spain – have a nice interaction. Left hand son is grooming his dad’s shoulder, and right hand son is “snapping” – a gesture foals use to adult horses.

The big freeze.

What are you like in an emergency? Are you all business, able to make an instant plan of action? Or are you the kind of person who runs for safety at the first sign of a crisis? These are examples of the fight or flight response, already well known to most of us.

There’s another less well known response to emergency situations, yet many of us will have experienced it. It’s the freeze. A sudden inability to act, or even think straight. The awareness of impending doom, and the sudden feeling that there’s nothing we can do about it. Time seems to slow, and we can feel that we’re watching what’s happening to us without actually being in our own body.  It’s the kind of thing that happens in traffic accidents, dog attacks, and surprisingly often to soldiers in combat situations.

Sometimes, we’re not even aware of it. We just find that we’ve been holding our breath, or that we haven’t been blinking, and that we’ve been so fixated on what’s happening (or about to happen) that we’ve had tunnel vision. Psychologists know that it’s quite easy to get people to act like this in a laboratory. Give them a simple task: “when you see an X on the screen to the right of the central picture, press the space bar”, and, at the same time, show them a series of pictures. Fluffy kittens and ponies with long flowing manes have no effect on people’s ability to respond to the cue. But flash up a picture of Hannibal Lecter, or an angry, drooling dog with bared teeth, and our ability to spot the cue letter disappears.

Many animals share with us a common response to a threat. The difference between horses and people is simply what each species thinks of as threatening. Our shared response goes like this: your eyes or your ears detect danger (e.g. a 10 ton truck hurtling towards you, or the sound of an explosion), and nerves start to pass the information to your brain. The message gets to the non-thinking, reflex part of your brain long before the thinking part knows you’ve seen or heard anything, and you react with a “startle”, where  your body automatically moves your head and neck backwards away from the danger. This takes about a 100th of a second! Then you “orient” to the thing you’ve detected – you turn quickly to face it and stare at it until you’ve worked out what it is. Sometimes, if it’s a bit far away, you move closer, to see better… and then you either say “hey, no problem”, or you make a fight, flight or freeze response. If you can run, you run. If you can’t run, you think about fighting… and if you feel in some way trapped, you freeze in the hopes that the danger will pass you by.

Have you ever seen a horse freeze? It’s very noticeable! You may be leading them when they startle (a spook), then fix their eyes and ears on something in the distance.   Horses  have much better long distance vision than we do, especially movement. Their head goes up, their neck becomes rigid, their mouth and nostrils tense and they’re as difficult to distract from it as the human volunteer helping out with the Psych 101 lab experiment with the picture of Hannibal Lecter leering at them! Like us, they’ve frozen in the face of a potential threat.

Here, Jackson and his friend have seen something moving. They’ve both oriented towards it, and Jackson is showing the head and neck up, ears and eyes fixated posture. His friend is peering at it, and might be about to take a step or two towards it to get a closer look (she’s quite brave).

They’re like us in another way in danger situations. In a natural, group setting, horses spot danger and react to it by startling, then orienting to it, and then by approaching to investigate and then running, or by simply wheeling en masse and galloping full pelt in the opposite direction. Their preference is for flight. We can change that preference by adding a headcollar and lead rope. We train young horses that pulling away from a lead rope results in pressure on their head, and that the only way to release this pressure is to submit to the direction of the rope. This training makes them easier for us to control, but at the same time, they learn that they’re restrained which means that instead of running off we get a horse who freezes.

Despite the fact that we (inadvertently) trained it, we get really frustrated by this! We have a human concept of what fear looks like, and it involves a horse leaping around, snorting, with rolling eyes, covered in sweat and trying to flee. A horse who’s stuck, rooted to the ground, tuning you out completely while staring at something in the distance that you can’t see is very very annoying! There’s nothing worse than being ignored, is there? So we tug and we pull and we wiggle lead ropes, we tickle and flick with schooling whips, we shout and hiss and generally get very annoyed, but the horse is still stuck as firmly as if their hooves have stuck in quick set cement. With every tug and flick, we increase the threat level from the horse’s point of view, sticking them in a loop of “detect threat, freeze, scan for danger, feel pain and discomfort, can’t escape… detect threat, freeze, scan…”. At the same time, their learned response to the lead rope and headcollar has ruled out flight, making the freeze last even longer.

There’s another similarity between horses and humans. Member of both species who are already a bit stressed are more likely to get stuck in this state (called hypervigilance). If you already have a high level of stress going on from something else, be it from work, housing or social stress, a freeze response is more likely to happen. In humans, this has been linked to the development of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. In horses, we just say they’re extra spooky, reactive, balky, stubborn or scared of their own shadow. They’re the horse who repeatedly spooks at the corner of the indoor arena and then naps. Or the horse who freezes half way across the yard from their stable and can’t be moved, the horse who stands at the bottom of the trailer ramp for 40 minutes without moving. In more extreme cases, the horse will even lie down, and may be difficult to get up again. You also see a kind of freeze in horses who are being trained to lie down by having one leg tied up: the trainers often say “they stayed down for 20 minutes after we took the ropes off, so they must have been relaxed about the process”. In fact, what’s happened is a specific sort of freeze a bit like when humans faint as a result of a shock.

There’s a way of dealing with freezing in humans. Let’s see if it might work with horses too. When humans freeze in response to danger, it’s often in situations where they feel there’s nothing else they can do. Freezing is a passive coping mechanism: “just endure it, it will end eventually”. But this coping method isn’t good for our mental or physical health: it leads to ulcers, lowers our immunity, and can lead to mental health problems. It’s better to help the person to find an active way of coping: doing something, rather than nothing, might just resolve the situation, but even the belief that we’re trying helps us to feel more in control of what’s happening to us.

Horses can also choose the passive coping approach.  But there are things we can to help.  On idea would be to teach them a well learned, automatic set of “things to do in an emergency”. Something they know really well, a set of movements that have pleasant associations but that are so well learned, they’re an automatic response to our cue. Then, when we think a freeze situation is about to happen, we cue them: touching or following a target, where that’s been associated strongly with reward, is one idea, but finding things that your individual horse likes to do would be a good place to start. Let’s all be prepared with warm ideas to thaw the big freeze!

Things that go bump in the night.

I love going to the cinema, and I usually go about once a week with a close friend. She and I have explored all kinds of films, from fantasy to art house, via the occasional action adventure and including the occasional horror movie. She knows I’m not a great fan of horror movies, so when Saw V is on, she goes with someone else. We have seen a few scary movies together – I can distinctly remember having a few watch between the fingers moments during The Descent, and The Others has left me a bit wary of things that go bump in the night (as well as of small children singing nursery rhymes…).

I occasionally buy a DVD to watch at home, and last year I bought a copy of The Orphanage. I told my friend – and she immediately said “don’t watch it on your own!”: it seems she knows me well. But it’s interesting that, in saying that, she also highlighted something that we share with our horses.

Take three situations involving scary movies. First, there’s me and my friend having a nice evening at the cinema together. We watch the movie and then head home, walking from the cinema through town to the station. The next situation is me, sitting at home, watching The Orphanage on my own – and the last situation is myself and my friend watching the scary movie at the cinema together, then splitting up and walking to our respective stations on our own.

Three different situations, and three different levels of the fight or flight hormone, adrenaline (also called epinephrine). In the first situation, she and I watch the film, and we are both a bit scared in a pleasant way – humans, and our horses, quite enjoy being “thrilled” in a situation where we feel secure. Humans choose to watch scary movies, and horses will sometimes approach, run off, approach and run off with their friends when they see something new and interesting in their familiar field. Both species quite like a little excitement – psychologists call this increasing our “level of arousal”, and when we control the situation, we find it quite stimulating.

When my friend and I leave the cinema, we’re both still feeling a bit spooked, in a fun way. We walk through the quiet dark streets together, chatting about the good and bad parts of the film: we might be a little more vigilant than usual, but we’re feeling good.

There’s a slightly different situation when I watch the scary movie at home on my own. I’m in my familiar environment, but my partner isn’t there… Humans, like horses, are gregarious and social. We don’t have herds, but we have evolved to like having others of our species around, and this makes us feel more secure: the burden of making sure we stay safe is shared. The scary movie raises my adrenaline, and although I know my home is safe, once the film is over and I’m getting ready for bed the funny creaky noises that my house always makes seem louder. In fact, they seem oddly like someone (or something!) walking quietly around the upper part of the house. It takes me a while to get to sleep, and my hearing seems much better than usual – I can hear the owl hooting outside, and the tap dripping in the bathroom.

Finally, the situation where my friend and I go our separate ways after the movie, and walk through the dark streets of town on our own. We’re not in our familiar home, and we’re not with a friend. Our adrenaline levels are up because of the movie, and suddenly, we develop eyes in the back of our heads. We look carefully down dark laneways for movement, we jump when we bump into someone coming the other way around a corner – and all the time, we’re prepared to break into a run if the thing that made that wheely bin rattle turns out to be a mugger, not a cat foraging! Things that are boringly normal in daylight and in company take on a air of threat – and we walk a lot faster than usual.

People often comment on how silly their horse is, spooking at a robin sitting in a hedge when out hacking – don’t they see robins all the time in their field? And cows, surely they live next door to cows? Wheely bins! Umbrellas! We can spend ages “desensitising” our horses to these things in an arena, only to find them spooking and trembling at the same things while out. Similarly, horses often walk reluctantly outwards, but then jog anxiously home – and horses hop happily into their trailer on the way out to the show, but won’t go near it when it’s time to load to come home.

Like us, horses find situations where they are outside of their normal environment, and situations where they are away from other horses, arousing and stimulating. Like us, they often quite enjoy a little mild stimulation, but again like us, it pushes them towards the threshold that separates “diverting and entertaining” from “worried and a bit scared”. Things that would be harmless in the “diverting and entertaining” state can take on threatening properties once you flip into the “worried and a bit scared” state. And when you push adrenaline levels up into the “worried and a bit scared” state, it takes quite a while (hours, not minutes) after the scary situation is resolved before they return to their normal levels. This means that after a scare, we (and our horsey pals) stay a bit more reactive than usual for quite a while, and so more likely to flip back into the “worried and a bit scared” state than we normally are, even in non-scary situations.

Densensitisation is often held out as the answer and we’re told to do lots with our horses: but although I am perfectly well desensitised to wheely bins normally (I spend what seems like an inordinate amount of time wheeling them in and out of my driveway), when it’s dark and I’ve just left my friend (and I’m still thinking about that creepy child singing in the movie) I’m quite likely to jump out of my skin if I pass a wheely bin in the street that seems to move of its own accord.

Does that mean it’s not worth while desensitising? Not at all – but it’s worth adding something to your desensitising: don’t just make the things you work with “neutral”: make your horse think they represent good things. Let’s say they’re very familiar with wheely bins, and they’re aware that touching a wheely bin with their nose gains a reward. This means they will find wheely bins less worrying, even in a situation that might otherwise be worrying. I’ll just finish off by admitting that there is a down side to this approach. Riding out on bin day, when your horse asks to touch every bin you pass, can be a slow process (especially when you have an over achiever, who feels that not only should he touch the bin with his nose, but that flipping it open and checking the inside for tasty banana skins is always worthwhile). On the plus side, though, we can walk past the recycling lorry as bins full of bottles are tipped in to it with no more than a “I saw that in a film once and nothing bad happened” air of bravado 🙂

Absence – makes the heart grow fonder?

In my first job after school, I worked for a very clever, but very precise man. His desk, unlike mine, was a model of pristine organisation with everything in its place. The stapler was just a little to the left of the silver pen holder, the blotter (yes it was that long ago!) was lined up squarely with the centre of the desk, the silver letter opener was to the right. And we noticed that he would meticulously realign everything any time he used or moved things.

I am slightly ashamed to admit that we used to sometimes nip in when he was out and move the pen holder about two inches to the left, or shift the blotter slightly so that it didn’t line up with the edge of the desk. We’d watch through the glass divider when he came back in, and we could see that he knew immediately that something was not right – we could see the irritation as he realigned not just the thing that was out of place, but everything else on the desk.

If you didn’t know him, though, you’d just see a cross and unsettled man (who, by the way was generally a nice and easy going person) sitting at a perfectly clean and organised desk.

We have a very precise sort of memory for the world around us – in humans, this memory tends to use mostly (but not exclusively) visual information. We need to know where things are in order to find our way to different places, we use landmarks to navigate. And we get a bit cross and unsettled if things that should be in a certain place have somehow got themselves out of place.

Despite this, we often fail to understand when our horses respond to similar situations. Many people report their horses being spooky or unsettled “for no good reason” – and when we can’t find a reason that makes sense to us, we say they’re just being silly.

But horses, like us, are very sensitive to changes in their world. There is a way, though, that they differ from us, and that’s in terms of the importance and relevance of this information to a horse. From an early age, humans are, quite literally, movers and shakers. We’re like the mole and the beaver – if something about our surroundings doesn’t appeal to us, we change it. We are active agents of change in our environment – like my old boss, we can just pick things up and put them back into the place where we’d like them, and if something in our environment suddenly goes missing, we have the ability to reason: we know that people can lift, shove, push, bury and otherwise sculpt the environment.

A horse doesn’t have that kind of understanding of the world. Horses sculpt their world in a much slower and more organic way. They nibble long grass down to form lawns, their hooves slowly wear preferred pathways that get them from rolling spots to grazing spots to drinking spots, by going around obstacles. They don’t pick things up and carry them to a new place (or, at least, they don’t often do that – my horse has stolen my car keys a few times…). They use a special form of memory – sometimes called eidetic memory or a memory “picture” made up of information from their senses – to form a map of their world. They don’t understand sudden changes the way we do, because as a species, they don’t cause sudden changes.

If a fallen tree, a large rock, a hedge is there on Monday, but completely absent when you pass that way on Tuesday, many times we humans don’t notice its absence. It’s not relevant to us, and even if we do notice, we just rationalise that another human must have moved it.

To a horse, though, it’s a whole different story. Change or movement of landmarks implies danger – why did they move? Landslip? Flood? Predator movement? Is it safe to go that way now? The ground may be unstable, the trees may be more liable to fall, escape from predators is more difficult when your familiar escape route no longer looks familiar.

When a horse is suddenly spooky or unsettled “for no good reason”, we need to think of the times when we’re also unsettled, and think of how we look to an outsider looking in. A year or two ago, I went to the station to get my usual train, which leaves from the usual platform at the usual time. The train was sitting there waiting… but it was the wrong train! It wasn’t the normal model of train. A whole platform full of regular commuters was acting like a herd of spooked horses. You could see the whites of their rolling eyes, and almost hear the alarmed snorting. Normally confident individuals were standing beside the train, refusing to get on. They were all watching other commuters, and when someone was brave enough to get on, they followed, but everybody stood just inside the door, ready to run at the first sign that this strange train was going to take them to an unknown and terrifying destination. Nobody was able to sit down, nobody was able to read their newspaper.

Yet the noticeboard beside the train quite clearly stated where it was going, so someone who didn’t normally get that train would have been baffled by the herd of people “just acting silly”! There was a sense of palpable panic as the train doors closed, trapping us all inside! Nobody settled until the driver announced the destination over the intercom, and even then there was a residual feeling of anxiety for the entire trip.

What should we do when our horses respond to “invisible spook monsters”? Firstly, we need not to act like superior beings: the same thing can happen to us, and we’d not appreciate being dismissed for what we felt were justifiable fears. It is easy to put ourselves in the position of one of the commuters on the wrong train – how would you feel if, regardless of your concerns, your friend took you by the sleeve and started dragging you towards the train? That’s unlikely to deal with your concerns, and it’s also likely to cause you to resist! In these kinds of situations, we need to direct our horse’s attention to the routine and the familiar, we need to reassure rather than increase adrenalin by correcting or rushing them, and we need to listen to them and allow them to tell us that something’s different, something to them seems wrong. If we do that, maybe one day our horse’s ability to detect changes will help keep us and them out of a situation that we can’t see: rather than assuming we’re right and they’re wrong, we should remember that one plus one can sometimes equal more than two. We’re better together!

The chocolate dentist…

I’m not saying my dentist is made of chocolate – that just wouldn’t be practical, would it? But I do wonder as I sit there, my mouth wedged open, blinded by a very bright light, and deafened by drills, whether I’d have a different view of the dentist’s surgery if it was a tastefully appointed chocolatier? Especially if I only encountered the drills every 5th or 6th visit!

Last week, I was thinking about how we learn positive associations with places – and those associations are about how we feel when we’re there as well as how we feel when we think about the place. So many of the actions we take are ones we don’t think about but which are driven by our feelings and associations: my steps are drawn magnetically towards the cosy café in last week’s post, but I’m also repelled from the dentist’s surgery.

The way we feel about places is built up from our experience. Most places, we feel pretty neutral about: I don’t linger in the station on the way to work, but I don’t avoid it either. Our brains store up information about each experience we have with a place, and over time we form mental maps of good and bad places to be. We’re like the ball in a pinball machine – drawn to some places, but pinged away from others! And when our brain forms those mental maps, it prepares itself to learn new things. Not only that, but our brains are biased – once we have even a slight negative association with a place, it’s negatives we seem to see when we’re next there.

Places can feel really good, and they can feel terrifying – but they can also feel just slightly wrong. It’s those places I’m thinking about today. Usually, we don’t remember any specific event. There’s the cosy café, and then there’s the one across the road I don’t visit much. It’s draughty! Nothing too bad, just that a few times I’ve been there, I’ve felt a bit cold.

Have you ever noticed your horse speed up or slow down on a hack at specific places? Are there places you ride past, and you suddenly notice your horse has been tense, but has now relaxed… they might sigh, or just slow down. They might have been a bit spookier, but now their head drops and they look around in an interested, rather than riveted way?

Like us, horses have associations with places, and these places evoke the same emotion every time. With horses – and with us – there’s also something called “preparedness”. Each species has things they learn much more quickly – the things that it’s really useful for them to know to survive. These things mean that some places, by their very nature, are set up to be scary! I run a few times a week along a track I also ride along… and there’s a place my horse doesn’t like. The track is narrow, and goes between high, wooded banks. It’s darker, and there’s a bend in the track so you can’t see the way out until you’re more than half way in. Horses are “prepared” to dislike places where a predator could lie in wait and jump on their backs. Have you ever seen a horse at liberty run through a narrow gap or through a tunnel? They often speed up just as they exit, and then buck: of course! They are making sure that anything that’s jumped on their back is dislodged immediately. Their eyes also adapt more slowly than ours to changes in ambient light levels – so emerging from a shady “tunnel” of trees to bright sunshine means they’re more likely to assume a predator they can’t see is waiting!

We’re prepared to dislike places too: we experience claustrophobia (a dislike of very small spaces), and we also often run when we’re just escaping confinement: think of small children going into the playground at break time!

I think there’s a similarity between how my horse feels about trailers and how I feel about dentists. Nothing awful has ever happened to either of us in these places, but we’ve built up a negative history from small annoyances and discomforts – and we were already prepared not to like small dark boxes or situations where we lie our backs with our mouths open. Horses whose early experiences of trailers are as places where a trail of tasty carrots lead to a delicious bucket tend to be the ones with the least problems later – and I am sure I would visit the dentist more often if my early experiences had been at a ratio of five chocolate purchases to one scale and polish! We can become more sensitive to how our horses feel about different places by putting ourselves in their place – and we can make sure that their early experiences with places we will want to visit a lot in the future are positive ones, and not “trips to the dentist”.

The cosy café…

Every morning on the way to work, I have a cup of coffee.  Since coffee on its own is lonely, I make sure it has some cake to keep it company. And since drinking a cup of coffee (and eating some cake) is something I do sitting down in a café, I bring an interesting book along, and read it for 15 minutes.  Then I continue on my journey from station to office, my slight caffeine addiction dealt with for the day.

What does this have to do with horses?  It’s the cosy café syndrome.  It has a strong draw – it’s rather difficult for me to walk past, and it’s associated, in my mind, with something enjoyable.  It’s something that happens at a specific time of day, and if it doesn’t happen, I miss it.  It’s a bit like bringing a horse in to a stable where, every day at the same time, a bucket and a hay net waits for them.

Are there any parallels between their behaviour and mine?  The first thing that springs to mind is how I would feel about my cosy café if it suddenly stopped serving coffee and cake.  How much of what I feel about the café is linked to what I get there?  We form associations in our mind between places and what happens at those places. Psychologists love experiments where clever rats find their way around mazes: in some early research with rats, the researchers noticed that the rats spent a lot of time hanging about a place in a maze where they’d got food before.  They kept coming back to that place, even when there wasn’t food there any more.  We find it very easy to add a mental map of places where good things happen to our map of the world, and we even have a specific part of the brain that it excellent at registering this kind of information.  It’s called the hippocampus – the Latin name for the seahorse – because of its shape.

So I might well still have a very positive feeling about the café for a while, even if it stopped serving food, although my visits might begin to be a little less frequent – and I might find an alternative location where even better coffee and cake could be found.  Or I might form a new pattern of behaviour – learning that I no longer get what I am looking for using my old mental map will start me off exploring, to find an alternative.

Horses do this too.  At the moment, my horse waits for me every morning at the top of the field. He’s pretty punctual – if I’m very early, he might not be there.  If I’m a bit late, he’ll be there but asleep!  Every morning, my visit predicts the arrival of a tasty bucket of feed.  This week, there’s been snow, and my little car doesn’t make it to the top of the hill, so I’ve been parking at a different gate.  In the distance, I can see the horses at the top of hill, expecting the horsey equivalent of coffee and cake.  But that cafe’s closed! It’s only taken two days for them to realise that the food now appears at the bottom of the hill – they were waiting for me this morning, having learned a new good association with a new place.  Food is a really good way that both we and our horses learn – and learn fast – about where’s a good place.  So stables are good – and horses will continue to follow us into stables even after all the food has been removed, because they have a good feeling about the place.  Horses who’ve been fed on trailers (provided trailers have no previous bad associations)  learn that trailers are good places to be. Horses know which fields have the best grass (and they’ll try to take us there…). And they know when the cafe’s closed – have you ever seen a horse drag their human from field to stable, or from stable to field?  Winter grass does not compare to the instant hit of best espresso (aka ad lib haylage and a bucket of feed).  And last year’s haylage does not compare to the green spring grass being served in the field up the road – our horses change their behaviour according to where they’ve found the best feed.  Other things make horses learn about places too: today I saw a picture of a horse at a “cleaning station” – a feral Criollo horse in Venezuela who will travel to the spot where helpful birds are waiting to pick small parasites from the horse’s coat.

We can use this information to understand why our horses are keen to be in specific places, and why they sometimes change their minds.  We can also use it to help them learn to like a new place, and finally we can learn ourselves that sometimes, we may need to think ahead to make sure the draw of the cosy café does not lead to detours to fields and neighbours’ stables en route to where we intended to go!

Next week, I’m going to the dentist.  Expect an update on horses and dental surgeries… but in the meantime, here’s a pleasant association being formed: