Phasing out food in Force Free Horsemanship

Food is not a bad thing!

Despite what the persistent attitude of the equestrian community says, there is absolutely nothing wrong with using food to motivate your horse(s)

I don’t know where this idea comes from that somehow food-based motivation is a lesser form of motivation than using pressure-based motivation.

When a trainer applies leg pressure to get a horse motivated to move forward, no one bats an eye, but yet, if another trainer feeds the horse food after their horse moved forward, the trainer is told that they are “bribing” the horse, “coddling” the horse, they are viewed as “lesser” trainers that only train “fun back yard pony tricks”

What a strange phenomenon.

Maybe it’s because it’s a more visible tool. It takes away some of the perceived ‘magic’? Though when a trainer uses a whip still we don’t see that same reaction…Maybe we’re conditioned by society? The food we consume is judged harshly by others around us, and eating simply for enjoyment isn’t looked at positively. Or perhaps our ideas about work ethics make us frown upon rewards in general?

I honestly don’t know for sure. But it’s conditioning that runs deeply.

I even see trainers who call themselves clicker trainers, R+ trainers, and Force Free trainers, that share positive reinforcement tips, suggesting to phase out food completely once a behaviour is learned! No!!

If you don’t want to train with food, then don’t use it. If your goal is to never have to use food in the end, then why use food in the first place?

So again, food is not a bad thing! Phasing out food reinforcement should not be the goal in force-free or Positive reinforcement-based training.

Food is the motivation for your horse to do what you ask them to. Just like how in traditional horsemanship, the relief of pressure is the motivation for your horse to do what you ask them to. You wouldn’t attempt to go completely get rid of pressure in traditional horsemanship right? So we also wouldn’t attempt to go without food in force-free horsemanship.

Now, having said that, I understand lots of people get worried about the logistics of using food long term.

While we don’t want to get completely free of food in our training, we don’t wish to rely on having to feed every second. Just like how in traditional horsemanship, we want to minimize the level of pressure used to ask our horse to do things and not always rely on needing to escalate the pressure.

When we teach new behaviours in force-free horsemanship, we use a really high rate of reinforcement and a very small criteria.

Basically, lots of feedings, for very little.

This is to avoid feelings of frustration, coercion, and errors in the behaviour we’re trying to teach.

For someone new to this type of training or someone watching, it can feel as though we’re just shovelling food into the horse without a break.

At some point, I will hear the question:

“Will I always have to stop and feed this much food ?”

And my response is always:

“We’ll always have to reinforce the behaviour, yes.

BUT, we will not be reinforcing every small step of the behaviour once the horse learns the behaviour.”

Which usually then follows with the question of “So we can use less food one day?”

And to that, my response is this: Instead of thinking “I want to use less food” or “I want to phase out food” try thinking of increasing your expectations/criteria.

This means that although we, at first, reinforce every small step of our horses' behaviour, we will start asking increasingly more of our horses (within reason) before marking and feeding them food reinforcers.

To use a couple of examples:

When we first teach our horse to walk forward under saddle, we may only ask for a step or two, but we then start building on that. we’ll ask for 3 steps, then 5, then 7, then 10, then a minute, 1.5 minutes, 2 minutes etc. Before long you can take your horse for longer rides and only have to reinforce a few times down the road.

Example two: say, we’re trying to work towards jumping a course. At first, you may feed a horse after just one jump, but then you add another before feeding, and then a 3rd. We increase our horses' confidence until they can successfully jump a whole course.

Last example: We’re working on tying our horse to a post or cross ties. At first, we’ll feed them every few seconds of standing still, but then we’ll increase the duration to 20 seconds. Once successful, we move to 40 seconds, then 1 minute, 2 minutes etc. until we can leave our horses tied for a longer period before needing to reinforce them for it.

Please note: it’s important to build either Duration, distance or Distractions, when improving a behaviour, not all at once (read more about this here)

So, instead of saying “I will only reward my horse every 5 times out of 10 if he does the correct behaviour” (which is going to increase the likelihood of frustration, anxiety, unwanted behaviours, and a chance for extinction to occur) start thinking “I’m going to increase the difficulty/ length of time/how often I ask for the behaviour, before rewarding them”

Now this may seem like an irrelevant mindshift. But it’s a very important one.

Force-free and coercion-free positive reinforcement training is supposed to be generous, it’s about giving freely, and to not coerce our horses. It's a completely different way of working with horses than traditional horsemanship and it all starts with a change in how we view horses and our horsemanship. That change in perspective is vital. It’s important to avoid the mindset of wanting to withhold food from our horses. By shifting the goal from ‘we'll be able to give less food one day’ to ‘we’ll be able to achieve more before reinforcing’ you can achieve this.