In his article,
"Going Beyond Cues and Conditioned Responses to Engage In a Deeper Level of Communication with Your Horse", Clay Wright talks about a deeper less asymmetrical level of communication than cues and conditioned responses. I think I understand what he means, but I wonder if he is including training by positive reinforcement.
Positive reinforcement can give a horse a voice. It's a lot easier to translate, "I want to do what your asking, but it scares me," than it is to try to figure out if they don't understand, they have a bad attitude, or they are scared, which are the range of possibilities with pure pressure/release (negative reinforcement). For sure, animals trained with positive reinforcement go through a period of bad attitude when they resent the humans who won't pay them just because the animal wants the food, they sull up and walk away, but patience on the part of the human and desire on the part of the animal always brings them back, freshly willing to make a deal for the carrot. If you do your job as an animal trainer, you will hear their voice.
Kayce Cover gives her horse an additional tool for communication. She teaches it to target differently for a "yes" answer than a "no" answer. I have seen her videos of communication with her horse, amazingly, she can ask it verbally about what it thinks. Perhaps there is a level of subliminal cueing at play, but I think if I started asking my critters, they have opinions as well.
My equines, all eight of them, love to be invited for training. They struggle to figure out what I am asking for and they want to please me (if only to earn the reward). Most of them only resist when I tell them it is time to go back to the paddock.
I admire Clay and Carolyn. To want to really communicate is the foundation of unity, but I think discounting operant conditioning as a tool for opening dialog is short-sighted.
Yrs,
Patricia
Labels: conditioning, cues, reinforcement, review
