Training our horses to be smarter.

I have just been thinking about how training our horse can increase their body awareness and their understanding of and interaction with their environment.

First lets think about a horse that is not trained and lives in a herd situation. Such as a horse that is owned and maybe given hay supplementation but other than that has no interaction with human.

These horses would mostly be interacting with each other and instinctively reacting to their environment. This would not require the kinds of decision making processes required by a highly trained dressage horse or stock horse, or any horse involved with a training with humans.

It has been shown with mice that those in stimulating environments that have to make more decisions and remember their outcomes, so as to have to best most desirable situation for the horse.
Horses, like most animals have a few basic needs, food, water, sex, safety, comfort, and a herd for safety in numbers.

So any behaviour that results in the horse having an increased supply of the above needs, is a behaviour that will be more frequently be repeated by the horse.

Whereas the behaviors and situations that do not result in any of these things will not be repeated as often by the horse.

So the more of the good things that the horse gets as a result of a behaviour, the more frequently the horse will repeat a behaviour.

So when we are training a horse we should keep that in mind. When the horse produces a behaviour that we want we should immideately reward the horse meeting as many of the horses needs as we can,
i.e food, safety and comfort.

The more food, safety and comfort we provide will increase the frequency of the behaviour occuring.