Thoughts On Banning Jumps Racing

(Photo by Mike Hewitt/Getty Images)

A training technique that horses respond very well to is "pressure and release".  This means that some stimuli is applied ("pressure"), and when the horse responds to this in a desirable way, the stimuli is discontinued ("release").

For example, suppose a horse and trainer are together in an enclosed circular corral of about 50 feet in diameter.  If the trainer waves a plastic bag at the horse, then the predictable equine response is that the horse will be frightened and will run away (he can only run a short distance because of the enclosed space, but his instinct is telling him to run a long way, and unable to overcome this instinct he will gallop around in circles at the perimeter of the yard).

If the trainer just waved the bag once, then the horse would be unlikely to learn anything except that it was smart to run away from a frightening new object.  If the experiment were repeated again a few times, the horse might develop a life-long fear of plastic bags!

But if instead the trainer continues to wave the plastic bag even after the horse has run off, then the horse will come to notice that running away has had no effect on getting him away from the frightening object (since he can only go in circles and remains exactly the same distance away from the object at all times) and he will notice that the object has thus far not hurt him, even though in the horse's mind it is "following" him.

At this point the horse's curiosity starts to kick in, and the urge to investigate will start to get the better of it.  It will also be getting a bit tired from running around in circles, and since it is by nature a very lazy creature, it will want to stop.  And so as soon as the fearful tension in the horse dissipates (evident by a change in the horse's posture, from a high head carriage to a low one, often mistaken for "submission" by ever-so-haughty humans), the trainer stops waving the bag.

Each time the experiment is repeated, it will take fewer laps for the horse to relax.  The reward for the horse is that the pressure is released (bag stops being waved) and the horse eventually gets to the point where it is so accustomed to the bag that it does not run from it all unless the bag is waved with exceptional vigor (in which case he is not running from the stimulus at all, but the energy behind the stimulus, which the horse interprets as a message in horse-language from the alpha member of the herd (of two) that it should get out of the human's personal space). 

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