Memories of Positive and Negative Experiences in Horses

Latest scientific studies have shown that, even in a brief timeframe encounter, horses can in any case remember a place where it once had a positive or negative experience. Horses will subsequently exhibit different emotions at whenever they get to move around where they once had an experience.

At whatever point you see that your horse is looking worried, with a sort of flips out, stop constraining him to that place you are heading towards without thinking about the fact that your horse may have connected that one particular place with a bad event and negative feelings.

The emotional state created by your horses experience will assume a noteworthy part in the training of your horses, experience is a main issue that must be considered when training horses. When you're training your horse, you can't simply accept that where you're preparing your horses have no impact on your horses. horses has no effect on the horses. Infact, the impact of the effect could be significant.

Note that what a horse experienced in a specific place leaves traces that last much longer than you might think that when next you work the horses in that place you will see the impact on the way he learns. On the off chance that in that place, he encountered more positive event, he'll have a more adaptable and shapeable conduct that better adjusts to what you are asking of him. In any case, then again, on the off chance that he had a bad or even stressful experience in that place, he could be more rigid in his training and less capable of adapting to the task.

Researchers tested the cognitive flexibility—the ability to adapt learning to new and changing situations by allowing 35 mares to experience negative, positive, and neutral events in specific box stalls that were easy to distinguish from other stalls (by the sights or sounds in each stall). The negative experience was water abruptly shooting into the stall, a ball all of a sudden tossed into the stall, sound was played suddenly, a tarp being shaken out just before the stall.The positive experience was food distribution.The neutral experience would be nothing specifically occurring at all.Then, they separated the horses into three groups, negative experience, positive experience, and neutral experience. They had each group of horses return to the stall associated with that experience, where they would undergo a new learning session. But this time, the horses waited in the stall without any positive or negative experiences happening. In the new learning session, they taught each mare to find hidden food under the traffic cone that a handler pointed to, In the “extinction” phase of the learning, they then removed the hidden food and observed how many times the mare would keep touching the right cone even when the food was gone.

In any case, they found that the horses in the positive experience group stopped picking cones significantly speedier than alternate groups when the feed finished. They were speedier to acknowledge that the circumstance had changed, and that there was no motivation to continue picking cones if there was nothing to pick up from it.

By contrast, the horses that were trained in a stall where they’d had a negative experience kept picking the cone.

The horses that learned in an environment where they’d had previous positive experiences were more flexible, meaning they were more capable of adapting their behavior to the situation.

Horse owners should keep in mind that for better welfare and training results, it’s better to train their horses in places where they associate with positive experiences.