RATS, REWARDS & RESULTS – Part 1

Today is another very special day in my life. This morning a truly beautiful filly foal arrived, a daughter for Nuff Kisses, who is the full sister of Mandiba who went to the Olympics last year with Karen O’Connor in the USA team, and High Kingdom, who is just so talented and is with Zara Phillips. I live in hope that both these horses will meet again at the 2012 Olympics. The sire of our new treasure is Puissance, who is currently the leading combined Show Jumping and Horse Trials stallion in Ireland. We have named her High Caress.

Apart from their physical ability what makes all this family so special is their extraordinary temperament. They are responsive yet gentle, courageous yet sensible, and above all great partners. Although their success has to be attributed to good training it is their good temperament that makes it possible for them to fulfil their physical potential. This brings into focus the core of my training philosophy…..horses must be treated as horses, not machines, and as individuals with individual brains. This is fundamental to a best practice model for equestrian training.

PARTNERSHIPS NOT MACHINES

It is an interesting that many trainers complement a good horse by saying ‘that horse is a real machine’, without realising how inappropriate the phrase is. I don’t want machines ridden by mechanics, I want partnerships with two educated minds, and I want recognition of individual strengths and weaknesses…..and at the end of the day I want smiles on the faces of both riders and horses. Let’s look at my five Constants again with this in mind.

As you will remember I call them CONSTANTS because they are constantly required for all activities and at all levels. They are ACCEPTANCE, CALMNESS, FORWARDNESS, STRAIGHTNESS and PURITY.


ACCEPTANCE


This refers to the mental acceptance by the horse of the rider’s presence, weight, and leg, seat and rein contacts, including basic language. Acceptance opens the door to partnership, trust and AGREEMENT.

One would never need acceptance from a machine. End of story! I look at it as metaphorically shaking hands between horse and rider. A shaking of hands that eventually leads to agreement. This cannot be achieved instantly, because to truly accept something the horse must also understand what response is required. They must understand their part of the bargain. Anything less than this is not acceptance but submission. Sadly submission is what is so often achieved by the use of strength or nerve lines, or by a general lack of sensitivity. The difference between acceptance and submission is the difference between a horse that knows they could react differently but they choose not to do so, and a horse that knows there is no other option. It is the difference between a mutual agreement and a mandatory order. This may initially appear to be a fine point, too subtle to be important, but the more a rider thinks like this and trains like this the more their horse will give … and give … and give.


CALMNESS


This refers to the need for the horse to be mentally calm, in order to avoid the paralysing effect of mental tension, and allow an unconstrained basis for all the work. Calmness opens the door to the horse working with CONFIDENCE.

Like acceptance this is a mental quality - something definitely not required by machines. Some horses are obviously more naturally accepting and calm than others, therefore I give a score to all my young horses and breeding stock for their temperament and personality, which in turn relates to their trainability. By having a high score in this area our chances of success are hugely improved and I believe this has been a major factor in our good results. I do this with my own system of key traits, but we all need to find ways to measure temperament and personality more objectively, as well as place more importance on this area. However there is a conundrum in the horse breeding world that I believe leads us astray with regard to temperament. Because of our understandable wish to breed ‘calm’ horses with good temperaments some stud books are misunderstanding cause and effect and as a result are instead producing too many unresponsive ‘dim’ horses.

MISUNDERSTANDING THE EVIDENCE

There is a fascinating related example of misunderstanding cause and effect in one of the earliest experiments in the nature versus nurture debate. The study was carried out in 1940 by a psychologist called Tryon. He was interested in the genetics of intelligence and he tested laboratory rats in a maze, counting the number of errors that the rates made in finding their way to a food source over several sessions or trials. He then took the ones that made very few errors (the maze - bright rats) and mated them. The rats who made many errors (maze - dull) were also mated. The intermediate rats were disgarded from further study. The offspring of both groups or lines were then tested in the maze when they reach adulthood. The brightest of the maze-bright offspring were again bred to each other, as were the dullest of the maze-dull offspring. Thus, two distinct lines were created.

The offspring of every generation for 18 generations were tested, with the brightest of the maze-bright and the dullest of the maze-dull selected for breeding. By the seventh generation of selective breeding, Tryon was able to show statistically significant differences between the lines in their maze learning performance. Because he housed and tested both lines under identical environmental conditions throughout the study, the logical conclusion is that the behavioural differences between the lines are attributable to genetic differences.

But a subsequent study by Searle nine years later showed that Tryon had not selected simply for learning ability or intelligence. Searle repeated Tyron’s work but then compared the maze-bright and maze-dull rats on a variety of other behavioural tasks. Maze-bright rats did not always outperform maze-dull rats. In fact, maze-dull rats were found to be equal to or superior to maze-bright rats on three different learning tasks. Searle concluded that motivation (maze-bright rats were more food motivated) and emotion (maze-dull rats were more timid of mechanical apparatus) better explained the differences in performance between the two selected lines than differences in intelligence.

THE WAY AHEAD

We need to look at horses with the same objective and scientific precision as Searle to avoid breeding horses, no matter how beautiful and athletic, that have insufficient brain or the wrong personality to be willing partners and have that all important 'fifth leg.' For example it would be fascinating to have more scientific comparison within each breed and between native ponies, thoroughbreds and warm bloods on different learning tasks. My experience tells me that the result could well be proof for both making more use of certain thoroughbred lines and more use of our native pony breeds and the established ‘sensitive’ non-thoroughbred breeds like the Irish Draught and Arab. The value in these cases is for their brain power as well as their physical power.

Anyway I hope that our new foal proves to have inherited the outstanding brain of her family, and is also naturally forward thinking, straight and with good paces. I don’t want much do I! More about these final Constants and an update on the progress of High Caress next week. Happy Days. William. www.WilliamMicklem.com