Photo courtesy of Alison Hardaway.
As an event rider for the better part of my life, I have always cared about the well-being and training of horses. Recently, I have decided to focus on finishing up school and take a break competing. Currently, I am a graduate student at the University of North Texas working on my Master’s in applied behavior analysis. A quick explanation: applied behavior analysis is the scientific study of interactions between a single person (or animal) and their surroundings to better predict the future behavior of that person (or animal). Applied behavior analysis can be applied to many different situations, and a basic knowledge in the science is very useful when applied to horse training.
Through the lab that I participate in at UNT, ORCA (The Organization for Reinforcement Contingencies with Animals), I teamed up with my advisor Dr. Jesús Rosales-Ruíz to get going on some research with horses. Dr. Rosales-Ruíz is a very distinguished behavior analyst who has had many successes in animal training, including teaching horses that are afraid of loading to get on trailers quietly. I came to him with a few different ideas for research projects, but the one that we picked was teaching horses to be calm during clipping without the use of sedatives.
Clipping is a necessary routine grooming task, yet many horses do not enjoy this procedure. Many times when clipping horses, sedation is imperative to reduce the risk of injury to both the horse and the handler. My research question was: Is it possible to reduce, and possibly eliminate, sedation overall?
I reached out to the Area V Eventing Facebook group in search of a barn that might help me out with some participants for the study. Jennifer Bramlett and her daughter Rhyse were amazing and let me work with their barn full of horses for the study. I cannot thank them enough!
I started by taking a baseline and identified horses that would react and would not be able to be clipped efficiently without doping. I started by writing down a list of steps I would typically follow to clip a horse. As a previous working student, I have clipped many horses and I used this experience as a starting point. Dr. Rosales-Ruíz and I outlined a procedure where I would follow these steps and if a horse reacted, I would hold the clippers to the horse until they exhibited a calm response.
At first, I was trying to get done as quickly as possible and I wasn’t paying enough attention to my learners. I would go past small reactions and they would escalate to bigger ones — like rears and tossing of the head. I would fail to stop when ears were pinned or muscles were tightened thinking, this reaction doesn’t matter, I got it. Through the process I really learned to watch my learner and listen to them — even though I might be able to handle this current reaction (pinning of the ears, etc.) it does not necessarily mean that I can clip through the next (which might be a rear or otherwise dangerous response).
After running several more participants, Dr. Rosales-Ruíz and I created a process that was effective in clipping all of the horses. The process falls under the category of “shaping,” which means teaching through small steps which can help to reduce errors for the learner. In other words, we created a list of steps that a handler could use to teach a horse to be clipped, avoiding any unwanted or dangerous behavior by the horse. The steps start with running your hand over the horse’s body to first identify any spots which might be sensitive later, then running your clippers that are off over the horse’s body, then finally turning on the clippers to run them across the body culminating in the clipping. Since the horse really wants you to go away and let them eat, especially the frustrated ones, you can use this to your advantage to teach them to be calm during clipping by timing it just right.
Practically, this is done by going slowly through the list of steps and as soon as your horse starts to react, you hold your position. You only back away only once the horse is calm again. This works by reinforcing the calmness in the horse, which makes it more likely for the horse to be calm again when being clipped in the future. In contrast, many times horses being clipped are ignored with small reactions (like ear pinning) and you only stop clipping once you cannot clip anymore (i.e. the horse may be rearing, backing away, tossing head, etc.). When this happens, the problematic behavior is reinforced and then that is more likely to happen in the future.
Through our shaping steps, I was able to trim up (legs, muzzle, ears, bridle path) eight horses with the maximum time being 62 minutes. These horses were generally not in full winter work, and so they did not need a full body clip. Most of the eight horses were clipped in only 15 minutes. All the horses I used in the study had no known prior experience with clipping and ranging in breed and age. The horses included mustangs and rescue horses from kill pens. Most of the horses had recently arrived to the property and were not used to much handling in their past, making the clipping a little bit harder. That being said, the results were pretty exciting!
I then applied and got accepted to present a poster of this project for the Applied Behavior Analysis International Conference in San Diego. It was a great experience and I got to meet other people in the horse community who also study applied behavior analysis. I was very excited to get to share with the scientific community, but I also wanted to share these results with my fellow eventers!
I plan on doing more projects with Dr. Rosales-Ruíz in the future, and continuing to apply the science to horse training and vice versa. I am also looking forward to returning to eventing as soon as possible with some exciting young horses coming up. Let me know if you want more information on the science or my project, “Teaching Horses to be Calm During Clipping,” at [email protected].
Growing up riding in Northeast Texas, Alison is an upper-level adult event rider who has competed to the Intermediate/2* level. She has ridden four horses to Preliminary and above, including Clifton Peekachu and Tequesteris. She moved to Area III to attend the University of Florida for college and subsequently moved to her family farm in Georgia. During her time in Florida, she spent time working with both Scott Keach and Joe Meyer. Most recently, she has moved back to Texas to attend graduate school at the University of North Texas.
