Commonly misunderstood ’trained expressions of flight’ used in the corrective approach to overwhelming, or overshadowing fear responses that result undesirable behaviours in horses can include:
🐎 Disengagement of the hind quarters in response to spooking, rushing, baulking, bolting, bucking, napping.
🐎 Long line, lunge line or repetitive hind quarter yielding.
🐎 Flagging out to illicit a desirable movement response with or without the initial presence of a freeze response, that is sometimes followed by a continuation of of limb movement to the stimulus to drive the horse through or past the buck.
🐎 Round penning, or at liberty driving the horses limbs to result in a perception of 'submission' responses.
Training expressions of flight, in the presence of a fear stimulus (with a fear response occurring from the horse, or being encouraged) unfortunately provides a secondary reinforcer to the fear.
We MUST train the responses in the horse that shut down the flight response (stop, slow, direct rein turn), prior to fear entering the training environment to allow us to rely on previously trained responses, and confirm them when they are under challenge.
We cannot use, what we have not trained and we must not train what we do not want.
Don't train future problems. The flight response to fear, is the horses learning superpower.
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