Flooding, Habituation and Learned Helplessness in Horses
Posted in :
Flooding Is Not The Same As Training: Why a Horse Stopping Doesn't Always Mean It Learned
What actually happens when a horse stops reacting during overwhelming exposure – and how can we tell learning from shutdown, habituation or simply being unable to escape?
Recently, more and more videos of so-called training came up on my social media feed in which a horse is flooded with a certain trigger until it finally stops reacting to it. That’s called flooding. But between these trainers and towards their audience, it’s explained as a training method in which the horse should learn to be okay with the situation. But does it?
Let’s clear the fog.
What is flooding?
We use the term flooding in animal training from the imagery of a whole flood of triggers and emotions. The emotions that are apparent in this situation are so overwhelming to the animal, as a big wave of water is for a shallow coast line. There is no escape from a flood.
And that is exactly what is happening during flooding in training situations. The animal, in our case the horse, is exposed to a high arousal state triggered by a circumstance, action or object that is causing intense emotions like pain, fear or panic. While doing that, it is also forced to endure it with no option to avoid or escape the initial trigger and therefore the emotions. The goal behind this is to exhaust the behavioral reaction to these emotions until the animal stops reacting altogether.
That is just as cruel as it sounds. I’m not sugar coating this in the name of scientific objectiveness or likeability or societal correctness in not ‘triggering’ anyone reading this.
In modern behavioural science this approach of flooding is heavily discouraged, because it is ethically and morally reprehensible.
However, when we look at horse training this is very common and as it seems to be even popular. In a horse training situation it usually looks like this:
The trainer and the horse are working on the ground. The trainer picks up a flag (or a hose, or a fly spry, or a saddle pad) and the horse reacts to it with avoidance (e.g. stepping aside, raising the head, maybe prancing away). The trainer then holds tight onto the leadrope, letting the horse no space to get away from the object and comes in closer, enduring the reaction of the horse that might even get bigger. The trainer keeps on presenting the item, maybe even increasing the trigger by wiggling and shaking, until the horse finally stops moving “his feet”. At this point, the moment where the horse stops, the trainer either takes away the object of fear, or stays at the same position (e.g. put the saddle pad on, let the flag brush the horse).
The trainer then explains: “Now that the horse stopped reacting, it learned to no longer feat the object and the initial problematic behavior of avoiding that object or movement is resolved.”
It’s the exact same process as I explained above about flooding, where we thought “wow, okay, that sounds cruel”. Sounds different now, since it’s called training, right?
The psychological harm that’s being done by flooding, like the learned helplessness, is all the same. The state of the horse that stops reacting is also called “shut down”. As it describes what the nervous system inside is doing, while we can’t observe any obvious behaviour on the outside anymore.
The nervous system shuts down.
If you have been into a little bit of biology or watched wildlife documentaries before, you might know what shut down means for an organism. Right when that lioness caught the Impala and it knows there is no way of escaping.
It accepted its fate, giving up on life and waiting to die.
Or said differently: the sympathetic nervous system went into freeze mode as an acute stress response, the body no longer can cope with, causing it to slow down all vital functions as much as possible like gut activity, heart rate and mental awareness.
Again, I’m not sugar coating anything anymore, since we have to look the cruelty of some training methods right in the eye.
Is every fear trigger we expose our horse to ‘flooding’? Is it always traumatizing?
No. Luckily, our nervous systems are sturdy and we can deal with (short term) stress pretty well. We, meaning all mammals. Because we all have the same code of life at the basis.
The difference lies first and foremost in the intention a trainer has and the circumstances that are apparent.
Is the horse allowed to avoid, retreat and say no? Do we acknowledge the emotion and not keep pushing above threshold?
Learned helplessness and shut down appear when the horse continuously and repeatedly feels unable to influence the situation, avoid or escape from a trigger that either stays the same or increases in intensity.
Meaning: being tied up, held tight or locked up, while a strong emotion is triggered. That can be on the ground or ridden, by the way. Shut down can also appear from excessive rein pressure or spurs.
How, when and to what extent a horse shuts down depends heavily on the situation, the aggressiveness and force of the trainer, the horse’s personality and the previous experiences of the nervous system to deal with such situations.
“How do we help our horses deal with objects, movements and situations which they get afraid of? Should we always let them avoid it? That doesn't work in the real world.”
Fair point. We live in the real world and a lot of the things we do and have around horses might cause fear, sooner or later. We are responsible to make our horse confident around them, too.
When it comes to modern behavioural science, we have some solutions at hand that are ethically sound, validated and effective. Most people, and unfortunately trainers, just don’t know about them because they never went looking for them.
These methods are very different to the conservative horse training methods. They look less effective on the first glance because we are heavily biased toward visible outcomes. True habituation looks rather boring and takes place in small, unspectacular steps.
Ultimately, we all want to habituate our horses to stimuli that are initially or instinctively frightening, or we want to desensitize stimuli that have been sensitized before, either through the wrong intervention from other humans or through environmental circumstances.
One must understand the nervous system first, to be able to do that without causing harm, even unwillingly.
Habituation means exposing a stimuli to an organism in a repeated and non-threatening way until the organism recognizes this stimuli as irrelevant.
Producing reduced activity through flooding is not the same.
What would good exposure training look like instead?
Basically, we can sum up good exposure training with horses into these 8 points:
- work below or around threshold
- allow information gathering
- break the stimulus into smaller pieces
- observe recovery
- give the horse some agency
- reinforce desirable responses where appropriate
- increase difficulty progressively
- distinguish tolerating from understanding
These cornerstones of fair training will already debunk most training approaches you see in the media by famous and non-famous trainers.
Let’s get into a practical example of using these 8 points.
Honesty first, while I have brought back my fearful gelding from trauma to trust, there is one thing I haven’t managed to desensitize him to yet: the fly spray.
Sol is genuinely afraid of being sprayed. I know that for quite some time and my approach until now was avoiding spray all together, because I haven’t found the time and necessity to change that. Now, with increasing heat and dry summers, we might need to tackle it, so I can help him stay comfortable for at least a while.
If i wanted my horse to get used to fly spray again I would approach it like this:
First, I get a spay bottle with water in it, to not add the strange smell as stimuli on top of the visual and auditive trigger – that’s already enough in the beginning.
With the spray bottle in hand, without any intention to use it, just the visual cue of the object itself, I observe my horse to what extent he reacts to it. How close can I come with the bottle? With that I will notice where his threshold is – the line I don’t want to cross. He can be wary of the bottle, focus on it but he should stay curious about it and not try to flee. That’s the line. Maybe that’s 1 meter in front of him, maybe it’s 2. That’s where we start. I also call this the green to yellow area.
I now want him to habituate to the sight of the spray bottle, recover from the first triggered emotional response when it appeared. I may move the bottle around him, putting it into different places where he can see it without feeling threatened by it. I will probably use positive reinforcement together with that.
When I feel like he’s fine with the bottle existing around him, being moved by me, I will ask him to engage with the bottle out of curiosity. Maybe he wants to touch it when I put it on the ground instead of holding it (holding it could be strongly associated with using it in his brain and therefore above threshold). When he does engage with the bottle I reinforce positively.
And so it goes, increasing the difficulty step by step until I can hold the bottle near him, while he is still relaxed and trusting.
At any point, in these obviously many sessions, where he wants to disengage or feels overwhelmed, I retreat with my approach and restart in another setting when he’s relaxed again. I will observe his body language to make sure he’s still engaging and fully aware instead of internally retreating and just tolerating.
Sometimes it goes quicker than expected, sometimes it takes more time.
Not having a fixed deadline on behaviour helps to stay fair and structured. And that is something we humans can always choose.
Whatever you choose to go through with your horse, whichever method you relate to, here’s a quick checklist to make sure you are still advocating for the horse while training:
- Can the horse move freely (e.g. no constant pressure on the leadrope)?
- Does the horse voluntarily investigate (is curiosity still apparent, thus ‘seeking’ and the ability to actually learn)?
- How quickly does the horse recover (what is the actual nervous system state)?
- Are tension signals decreasing across repetitions (or increasing)?
- Does the response generalise to another environment (how does the horse experience the same trigger in another situation)?
- What happens when restraint is removed (the ultimate test of letting the horse engage freely)?
- Does the horse willingly re-engage?
When you want to learn more about how horses communicate their nervous system state and what real learning in them looks like, Understanding Equus spends a large part of its learning and psychology chapters explaining why what we see on the outside only makes sense when we understand how horses perceive, learn and respond to their environment.
Learn how horses actually perceive, learn and communicate before choosing a training technique.
