THE FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES OF ANIMAL TRAINING

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Here I compile all the things it has taken me twenty years to find, put together and make sense of. 

These are the principles that allow you to make sense of any method of training, and enable you to train any animal regardless of species.

1: Know your species. Specifically learn how they display emotion. Critical emotions for training are fear, which we hope never to get near, and the seesaw that leads to fear. From a loss of confidence, all the way to confidence and into aggression. If you can read all those things in your species, from the tiniest hint of a loss of confidence, to the tiniest hint of being ready to move you, you should be able to train safely and keep everyone below dangerous or unfair thresholds.

Note: This is particularly important for animals humans are used to being around and have learned to ignore emotional signals - horses and dogs specifically. A tight mouth is easily missed, but a curled under tail in the dog or a raised head in the horse ought to be red flags, but we see them so often, we have become blind to them as communication that needs to be addressed.

2) Learn what is of value to your chosen species. This will give you huge clues as to what will motivate your species at any point in the day or during training sessions. For example, safety is important to all species, but to achieve safety, environmental monitoring is vital, especially to prey animals, including horses. What can your horse see from where he has to put his head in order to eat his hay? If he doesn’t feel able to put his head there, he won’t eat. Some may not care, some really might.

3) Compromise more for yourself than for the animal you have in training. 

If the things you’re doing with your animal are for your own convenience and are detrimental to your animal, ask is it really necessary? 

A hot button topic on this subject is shoeing of horses. This works both ways - I have often seen people who choose to keep their horses barefoot, become so evangelistic about the subject that the horse lives a life of pain - this becomes a welfare issue and the compromise if the horse is to be ridden, should be for the horse to be shod, or otherwise made comfortable by a protective casing on the hoof.

The tight noseband on a horse to prevent the gaping mouth or conceal any resistance. Personally, I prefer to receive feedback from the horse if I push him beyond either our level of communication, or his understanding of what I’m asking, or his physical ability. My training isn’t up to much if I’m asking for something he can’t do, or silencing any possible avenue for feedback.

4) Ensure your knowledge of animal training is enough to make sure your animal enjoys what he or she is doing.

Anything is possible. Once you reach beyond habituation and communication, you can strive for a humorous conversation with any animal, which everyone can enjoy and look forward to participating in - interspecies play. This is my optimal goal with any animal I work/play with. I want them show up to play with me and pester me for a game. When I see a queue of horses waiting their turn to come  into the menage and be ridden, or my dogs waiting patiently for their turn and leaping up when it's their go, that gives me the biggest buzz beyond teaching any fancy trick. It also gives me vital feedback if someone I’m working with doesn’t volunteer to join in - I have to consider what I may have done to cause that and ensure whatever it was is made palatable and enjoyable so we can progress happily again together. 

5) Ensure you include enough consistency and variety.

This is a really fine line to balance. You need to balance the progress you want and what your animal needs to become successful, with what he or she (and you) needs to retain confidence. An over faced horse has too much variety. A dull, robotic horse, not enough. Under socialised dogs are easily overwhelmed. Know what that looks like in both species. Equally, the flip side of this is just as damaging, when the person is too dull or slow in progression for their animal.

6) Get to the absolute nub of everything that motivates your chosen species. This may be different at different times of the day, month, year, lifestage, but it’s your responsibility to know.

And whilst we’re talking about motivation, we must discuss the absolute heartwood of all animal training - 

7) Fundamentally understand the concept and application of pressure and release.

The application of pressure motivates a change in behaviour and the release of the pressure informs the animal which behaviour made the pressure go away.

This is how all animals learn and are taught, whether we know what we are doing, or not.

It doesn’t matter which training camp you live in, what training method you use, none of it - at its heart, this is what you will be doing. If you are having training issues of any kind, the pressure will have been either inappropriately applied, or will have been removed at a point that highlighted an undesirable behaviour.

This even applies to training methods that claim to be 100% positively rewarding. It’s not possible for any training method to be 100% positively rewarding (ie only use the addition of a pleasant stimulus), for the simple fact that expectation from a human is pressure and can be perceived as negative. Its removal at the point before the click or the treat, is what a very sensitive animal will be looking for. 

Pressure and release is the golden knowledge that if we study diligently enough and know enough of our chosen species, will allow us to converse with our animal. We can allow opinion, see desire and converse with our animal friends. I promise. It’s not a given talent, you can absolutely learn how. I promise. But you’ve got to really REALLY want it! and learn to apply it to every single situation whether it’s at an accidental, flat out gallop over a massive trakehner, or teaching a dog not to pitch in during a fight. It’s all in here.

8) Fear has absolutely no place in training or learning.

To make use of the above sentence you have to possess a knowledge of what a loss of confidence looks like in the species you’re working with. 

It’s also essential to know what happiness, contentment, enjoyment and relaxation look like in your chosen species, but the onus is placed on fear indicators as they are absolutely fundamentally linked to the safety of people.

Applied correctly and with enough knowledge of your chosen species, this principle should take care of your safety - if you back off whatever has caused your individual animal to lose confidence at the moment the loss of confidence appeared, preserving confidence. 

Giving the animal the choice to turn up for an interaction with you will always be your best gauge of your training. Their feedback is beyond reproach and will always be honest. Until you relationship is such that your animal can ‘take the piss out of you’ in a humorous way. Something which they’re all capable of if you honour their confidence at all times.

9) Become ACUTELY aware of your field of focus and your intention.

Where and how and with how much intensity and what intention, your field of focus is pointing at. Eyes, belly button, supporting tools etc.

When you become good at this and your animal knows you know, it will become possible to communicate with them via your thoughts. I promise. I have had tiny moments of this feeling and there is nothing like it on earth. Whether they read our infinitesimally small changes in fine motor control, or whether our thoughts truly are our actions, or whether we somehow manifest and emanate thoughts when they are clear, who knows! What I do know if that your picture has to be of something you have set them up to achieve ahead of time. If this sounds like utter bunkum, that’s ok! dig around the subject, find the Woo, add to it your experiences and play with it like its a possibility. If you dismiss and drop it, it will certainly not work.

10) Honour the return to relaxation for learning to occur in your animal like it’s a golden, glowing shining egg, with the thinnest of shells in a tiny spiders silken purse interwoven with threads of spun gold. Incredibly, pricelessly valuable and yet, intensely fragile and easy to damage. Allow the process, wait, pause, look for the signs, the lick, the chew, the sigh (especially the sigh), the nose raspberry. Read the body, the twitches, the tremors, peer at the hairs around the muzzle, feel within yourself if they’re not there. Are you emanating tension? Are your thoughts too focussed on your animal? Are you holding them in a state of tension with your own tension and focus? Scan through yourself and release pockets of tension, or if thats not where you’re at, make a cake in your head. Your favourite recipe. Really feel the ingredients going in, folding it all together. Repeat the exercise enough and eventually your animal will only let you get the ingredients out of the cupboard before relaxing. 

The relaxation is the gold. It’s where the learning happens. :)

Than you Warwick Schiller and Barbra Shulte.

11) Switch on all your senses and feel everything softly and without judgement. Mark Rashid says we put brace in ourselves and our animals all day every day. How much force do you really need to put your shoes on, to type, to life a cup. How much softness can you do everything with and still be effective? When was the last time you smelled a rose? Can you hear the shrews in the hedgerows? This is true presence and something we, I think, try too hard to achieve. It’s all right there, in still, awareness.

12) Interact with your animal in the spirit of a mentor if they live within human society, and as an interested conversationalist if they do not. Producing yourself in front of an animal that has not choice but to interact with you (ie in captivity) must be done with humility, giving the animal the power of veto at every available opportunity. We must not blame the tiger that eats us for eating us (if we put ourselves in front of him and say something rude or stupid). Or the horse for bucking us off if we put ourselves on them in the spirit of human dominance and control. We can learn their language and psychology and then ensure we adhere to societal rules of interaction and then ride them, that’s a very different feel.

13) Look for understanding. This is where confidence in a relationship lives. If your animal is confident you will communicate to the point of understanding, and there will always be an answer they can provide within the realms of possibility, you will have an animal that trusts you and wants to hang around you. You are the equivalent of the only other english speaker in Russia and can be trusted not to put you in an awkward or dangerous position. Imagine!

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14) If an animal, particularly dog or horse, stays behind a person, (follows along willingly, stops when they stop, go when they go, doesn’t overtake, and seems compliant in all ways), this is because they want to keep an eye on that person. 

They are likely to receive an instruction at any point, and need to keep their focus on the person. This enables them to relax in safety knowing they can keep doing what they’re doing until further notice. Usually it’s animals that receive fair warning and clear instructions that exhibit this behaviour. If their instructions are unclear or unfairly delivered, they tend to be anxious and jumpy and/or follow/drag along far behind at what they hope is a distance that will give them more warning of impending focus from said person.

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We owe it to the animals we have chosen to bring into our lives, to make how they live with us at least palatable, and far better yet, enjoyable.