Feed the Spook

Spooking, or stepping quickly forwards or sideways without being cued to do so, is a natural behaviour in horses that can be very annoying and even frightening to us who handle and ride them. There are many opinions about how to make a horse less spooky, including:

° punishing the horse for spooking

° restraining the horse in the ‘spooky’ area

° lunging the horse in endless circles until it ceases to react

These three conventional responses to spookiness are actually not very effective. Punishment justifies the horse’s original fear, restraint uses the ‘flooding’ desensitization method which may be unethical, and lunging is only a temporary solution, often lasting only as long as the training session. What, then, to do?

In most situations, we cannot definitively say what causes a horse to spook, simply because we cannot ask the horse what scared it. All we can objectively know is what the horse did. For example, maybe the horse stepped suddenly to the right and accelerated. This information is much more useful than what the horse may have been scared of, as it suggests an operant training solution: step the horse to the left, and slow down. Since most spooks involve a turn and a change of speed, making certain that straightness and self-carriage of speed and line are trained thoroughly greatly reduces spookiness in many cases I see.

If the spook is still persistent after checking these basic responses, consider this very counterintuitive approach. Reward your horse when he spooks. Food rewards are incredibly powerful, but if you use food, also use a bridging cue like a clicker or saying ‘yes’ in a particular tone at the time of the spook, because you will not be able to deliver the food until a few seconds later, and would thus reward the wrong thing. Scratches may be useful, particularly around the withers, but with a highly aroused horse, the reward of touch may be significantly less meaningful.

What is the logic behind this approach? A spook is an automatic response, a behaviour that the horse has not thought about. It is a reflex. Therefore, when you reward, the reward is not linked with the spook in the horse’s mind, but rather with whatever he spooked at. In this way, the spooky thing or area is counter-conditioned, and the horse begins to associate that area with receiving food, and the spooks diminish.

The first time I tried this method, I was very tentative, not wanting to make the problem worse, of course. After only one training session where I fed every spook, both horses that I tried it on did not spook at all in the subsequent session, and continued to improve as I consistently applied the research. Learning theory is fascinating, is it not?