The Flight Response, Herd Mentality and The Trainers Toolkit

In this second video Dr Andrew McLean describes the flight response, which has been a very important part of horse’s survival. The flight response is responsible for bucking, leaping, bolting, shying, tension, taking off, quickening, rushing jumps etc.

The more the horse practices the flight response, the better he gets at it. The further and faster a horse runs, the more rewarding it is to the horse. For us as riders or handlers, this means we should strive to have a good stop button. The faster we can stop the flight response, the less prominent it becomes.

Everything we want a horse to do is a result of a few foundation responses: stopping, going forwards, turning shoulders right, turning shoulders left, turning hindquarters right and turning hindquarters left. These are trained by operant conditioning - more on this in Video 3 in this series: Operant conditioning.