Tips for Spooky Horses

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By: Jody Harstone and Nicolette Barrett

If your horse routinely spooks and shies at novel objects or ones it has seen a hundred times before you are not alone! Spooking or shying is a constant battle for many riders, both professional and amateur worldwide.As a flight animal, the horse is hard-wired to run from danger and to be aware of changes in his environment. 

Put simply, shying is a loss of stimulus control over the legs of the horse when the environment, instead of the rider, cues a turn of the front feet, It can easily become a habit.

Horses only form habits that are rewarded – so the question we need to ask ourselves is: what’s the inherent reward in shying away from an object?

Well, there are several possible rewards, each highly gratifying from a horse’s point of view: Averting of vision, creating distance, moving at speed, and release of pressure.

What the eye doesn’t see...

One aspect inherent to shying is averting of vision. For a horse, out of sight is, quite literally, out of mind.

Horses have a remarkable ‘photographic’ memory that is uncorrupted by the abstract thoughts and recollections that tamper with human memories. Once he is no longer looking at an object, it vanishes from the horse’s mind until it appears in his line of vision again.

A horse finds it difficult to hold a thought or picture in his mind, so once he has looked away from an object, for him it no longer exists – this is highly rewarding!

Averting of vision is on a continuum of behaviour that goes in this order: First, look away, then turn away, and finally run away.

Run away fast

The anatomy of the horse’s brain tells us that the horse is really wired for flight. It has the biggest amygdala of any domestic animal. The amygdala is the part of the brain responsible for fear and flight. It has served the horse well, helping it survive and thrive for millions of years.

Riders and horse owners should be well aware of this characteristic and know that in horses, fear itself (the fear response) is highly rewarded by distance and speed, and a fear response is very resistant to extinction.

A horse judges how frightening a stimulus is by how much distance he can put between himself and the stimulus, and how fast he can get away. Even a small increase in distance (e.g. moving his head away from your hand) can be highly rewarding to the horse and therefore lead to habit-formation.

Letting go

A horse that is battling to gain release of pressure from a rider who is maintaining constant rein or leg contact (i.e. holding the horse together between hand and leg) may resort to shying randomly as a way to get the rider to temporarily release the aids. The shying behaviour is therefore reinforced and is likely to be repeated.

Why do some horses shy more than others?

Horses that are already tense because they are in conflict tend to shy far more readily than calm, obedient horses.

Think of how you feel when you are watching a scary movie and the music puts you on edge – any sudden movement will make you jump. If the same happened in the middle of a relaxing, fun movie, you wouldn’t even notice! We have observed when breaking in horses that they are not normally spooky; it is only when people have started training them with leg and rein aids applied together, unrelenting pressures and/or bad timing of releases that the horses begin to get tense and spook.

Of course, some horses are genetically more predisposed to flight, and these seem to habituate more slowly to their environment as they are more inclined to run from danger. Generally the more a horse has been habituated to various stimuli in the environment, the less reactive he will become.

The traditional approach

Traditional training systems leave riders with very few tools to cope with the shying horse. Dressage riders are often told to bend the horse’s head away from whatever he is scared of and send him forward past it with the driving aids of the whip and leg. Other riders are told to hit the horse whenever he shies in an attempt to punish him for his behaviour; and almost every rider will use leg aids to send the horse forward and past the object as quickly as possible. Unfortunately all of these methods are fatally flawed.

Turning his head away is inherently rewarding. Pushing him past the scary object or place allows the horse to speed away, which strongly reinforces the fear response. Worse of all none of these techniques train the horse not to shy; they merely apply a band aid over the issue.

Hitting a horse that is already tense and scared is definitely not a good idea; it will make him even more nervous, and also fearful of the rider and whip as he is randomly inflicted with pain (remember the equine brain has no prefrontal cortex and therefore an inability to reason, and that fear responses are very resistant to extinction, so punishment is not a useful training aid with horses).

Because shying is about the horse running and turning away from something he is scared of, it makes far more sense to decelerate him and turn him towards the object with the reins; gaining control of his front legs, instead of attempting to accelerate him with leg and/or whip aids.

It is all about the turn response

In order to diminish his flight response it is critical that the rider has correctly installed or trained the TURN aids (both from a direct rein and an indirect rein) so that the horse’s front legs can be put accurately back on to the line they were on wheneve he attempts to deviate from that line.

Many riders have been taught to believe that turns and steering comes from the use of leg, not rein signals, but remember one of the golden rules of good animal training is that each signal must only have one response. If you use your legs to motivate the horse to accelerate, you can’t also use the leg to get the horse to decelerate, which is what the inside front foot needs to do in a turn.

Riders use the reins to decelerate the front feet i.e. slow, shorten, step back and stop. In the same way, when you apply pressure on one rein more than the other, you cue the deceleration of only one leg, and it is the different speed of the legs that makes the turn happen.

The devil is in the detail

Try this simple exercise: From the halt, check that you have the ability to pressure one rein (direct turn aid) and get the leg on that side to open (abduct) and step to the side lightly and obediently. You should be able to do this without getting any neck bend or forward movement.

Signs that your turns are not installed well enough to prevent shying are: getting only neck bend; heaviness or a slow response to the rein cue; the horse turns his hind quarters in response to the rein signal; the horse adducts first from a direct rein i.e. starts the turn closing the opposite front leg.

If you get any one of these responses, your horse is not clear on ‘turn’ and you will have little ability to reduce the shying. The behaviour will continue to be rewarded and therefore repeated.

It is also useful to train the indirect turn aid, because later it will help you to straighten the horse if he bulges on one side.

Once again these indirect turns can first be practiced from halt. Simply place the right rein against the neck to motivate the horse to step across or adduct the right front leg to the left, and vice versa. Once again you should be able to cue single turn steps with a straight neck and no forward steps.

Ready to move on

Once both direct and indirect turn are installed (the horse responds immediately to a light rein aid), you will be ready to train your horse not to shy.

Start on the outside track of the arena, attempting to walk the horse past all the things he may be scared of along each side. You need to be ultra critical of where he puts his front feet.

Front to back

Despite the widespread belief that “everything starts with the hind legs of the horse” and that he must be ridden “from the back to the front”, the horse’s brain is not wired to his back legs. Horses are acutely aware of where their front feet are because the wiring of the brain goes almost exclusively to the front legs of the horse. The hind legs are actually told what to do via their diagonally linked front foot; i.e. if you slow the right front, the left hind slows too.

Another clue as to why you should focus on the front legs is that horses never shy with their hind legs, it is always the front feet that cue the turn away that push his shoulders away from whatever he is scared of, so it is only the front feet that the rider needs to be concerned about.

Walking past scary objects

Every time you feel the horse push off your line, stop and slow the offending front foot with a turn aid. This will place his front foot closer to whatever was motivating the shy. You have to be very particular about exactly where you want the horse to place the front feet.

When you have done that, reapply a `go’ aid with your legs and continue down the arena. Be sure to get him closer than he would like to be to any object he is scared of. After a couple of laps past each scary place the horse will no longer feel the need to shy. Controlling the horse’s leg through training is like hobbling his legs with invisible hobbles – a horse that cannot flee soon calms down and accepts things that normally would make him flee.

You can then train him to walk past and even over all manner of objects that may cause him to shy. Whenever you are hacking for instance and the horse decides he “doesn’t do puddles” or rubbish bins, take it as an opportunity to train him to not be scared. Simply keep placing the offending front leg closer to the object than the horse would like as you walk a straight line past it.

Walking through scary places

If the horse shies approaching something you want him to jump or go through, such as a ditch or water puddle, the technique is slightly different. Again here you should not punish the horse with the whip or use it randomly, instead the whip may be used as a tool of negative reinforcement to get the horse to move closer to the object.

In order to do this, as well as training ‘turn’, it is important to have first trained ‘go’ from the whip tap in a neutral area. You do this by tap-tap-tapping until he goes and stop tapping the instant he does. This way the horse already knows that the way to get rid of a constant whip tap is to go forward.

If the horse stops dead and backs away from the object, don’t panic – just aim to keep him straight. Backing away from something scary is not nearly as rewarding for the horse as being able to look away, then spin and run away. In the wild a horse does not use backing up as a form of escape; he may reverse a couple of strides but will then spin and run away, which is much more effective!

Once the horse stands calmly facing the object, it is time to reapply the `go’ aid and ask him to step closer. As soon as he knows looking and turning away are not an option, you can normally coax him over all manner of scary objects.

Always keep at the top of your mind that the horse is a blameless participant in the training process. Look to improve your training skills before resorting to blaming him. It doesn’t matter whether you think he should be scared of an object or not, as a flight animal he has every right to prepare himself for survival.

This article first appeared in Show Circuit Magazine 

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