Explaining the Aids
Ali Gillard Chew BSc(Hons), MEqS, Dip CABC, BHS IntSM
When we learn to ride a horse, we learn how to make the horse walk, how to make him stop, turn left and right, go faster, go slower and so on. We learn the signals that communicate to the horse what we want him to do; we learn ‘the aids’. But what do the aids really mean to the horse? What do they mean to us and how much attention should we pay to them?
Cues
An aid is a signal which is designed to tell the horse what we want him to do – we tend to talk about the aids in relation to riding but behaviourally they are just cues or commands, very similar to a command we might give a horse to move over when we’re grooming or the cue we might give a dog to sit. We can use voice commands in riding alongside physical cues, such as using the reins or squeezing with the legs, and artificial aids like the whip or spurs.
We all tend to use similar signals, such as squeezing with the legs to ask the horse to go faster or pulling the reins to ask him to stop, so that different riders can ride different horses without too much confusion. However, for the most part, the aids are essentially arbitrary – they don’t really mean anything to the horse until he has been taught what they mean, and horses can be trained to respond to any cue (as long as they can perceive it).
A horse’s obedience to the aids depends on many factors.
Firstly it depends on the effectiveness of training – in other words, has the horse actually learnt exactly what the required response to each cue is. Sometimes we end up training a slightly different response to a cue than the one we really want, and sometimes we end up training a slightly different cue than the one we really want to use for a particular response. For example, you give a light leg aid and get no response, so you give a stronger one and still get no response, so you try an even stronger squeeze or maybe a kick, and this time you get a response. If you keep doing this the horse will learn that the lighter pressure doesn’t really mean anything - it’s the really strong pressure it has to respond to, and this then becomes the aid you have to give to get the response.
Compare a similar situation which commonly occurs with pet dogs – you tell your dog ‘sit’ but it doesn’t, so you try again until the dog finally sits on the fifth attempt. The dog is learning that the sit command, rather than being ‘sit’, is actually ‘sit sit sit sit sit’!
To cure this problem you need to go back a couple of steps and re-train the cue; consistently get the behaviour you want by rewarding it when it happens, then when you can predict when it will occur, slip in the cue you want to use (the light leg aid or the ‘sit’) just before the behaviour.
Obedience also depends on the accuracy of the cue – how similar was the cue given to the cue the horse has learnt to respond to? Some highly trained horses require very consistent, precise cues to perform particular movements and therefore only respond to consistent, precise riders. At the other end of the scale but equally well-trained for their job, a good riding school horse will often guess what their beginner rider wants them to do as they learn to control their limbs and give suitable signals.
Using the Whip
Sometimes when obedience appears to be lacking, we resort to the whip to try to make the horse respond appropriately. The whip can have different meanings to a horse, depending on the situation and the purpose of its use. When a stimulus is repeated over and over and has no effect on the horse, the horse learns to ignore that stimulus (it habituates); if you add a new stimulus alongside the old one, the horse will then start responding to the old stimulus again (it dishabituates). If a horse is not responding well to leg aids because they have been over used and no longer mean anything (it has habituated to the leg aids), the whip can be used (at the same time as the leg) to dishabituate the horse and bring its attention back to the previously ignored aids. Be careful though not to overuse the whip, otherwise the horse may habituate to this too.
The whip can also be used as an aversive stimulus in negative reinforcement. Negative reinforcement is the technical term for trying to increase a desired behaviour by removing an aversive event. For example, flicking a lunge whip towards a horse’s hindquarters will often make him move forwards – if the horse keeps moving forwards (desired behaviour), the lunge whip is kept relatively still (aversive event removed). If the horse does not move forward, the lunge whip may be used as positive punishment by actually touching the horse. Positive punishment is adding an aversive stimulus (touch with whip) to try to decrease an unwanted behaviour (not going forward). This is an occasion when such punishment can work well (if used appropriately) as it is a clear meaningful signal. However, many other occasions when the whip is used to try to decrease unwanted behaviour – i.e as a punisher – are often far from clear and meaningful, and the outcome is unlikely to be satisfactory. Punishment, for many reasons, generally does not work well in training and there is always an alternative.
How much attention should we pay to the aids?
The different uses of the whip really illustrate why it is so important to understand the behavioural principles behind the aids. For all the aids, understanding the meaning of the cues we use helps us understand their significance and helps us learn to use them more effectively. Riding is all about communicating; riding is all about the aids.
