Habituation, Conditioning, Shaping and Pressure Release

Habituation means becoming used to something. When we use a training technique to habituate a horse to something he/she finds scary, we call these ’destisation techniques’. There are six ways of desensitising the horse to something scary: systematic desensitization, counter conditioning, overshadowing, approach conditioning, stimulus blending and response prevention. Dr McLean goes through all of these in the video. 

The important thing to remember is that habituation must be done gradually and progressively. When the horse is forced to do something, with extremely high levels of inescapable arousal, it is called Flooding, and it can make the horse even more scared. 

Classical conditioning means learning to predict what will happen. For example if you have trained the horse to stop by applying pressure on the lead rope, you can also add a voice cue just prior to the lead rope signal, which then, once learned, can be used alone.

Shaping means gradually building behaviours over time, taking it in small steps and rewarding improvement.