As I wrote the Training Exercises to start DE-sensitizing your horse, I realized that I have not really defined the term or the theory behind the exercises.
Wild horses live life super-sensitive to threats of any kind. They are super-sensitive out of necessity. No one wants to be eaten. However, once our horses are in a safe environment, there is no need for most of the instinctive hyper-vigilant behaviors that protect them in the wild.
It is the unfortunate rider who is atop a horse who is in the throes of unmitigated, panicked flight. Preventing that is what De-Sensitizing is all about.
See: “Fight or Flight”.
It is our job throughout his training to slowly introduce a horse to unfamiliar objects and situations that cause fear, stress, or anxiety and show him how to handle and tolerate those feelings and situations. We call the exercise by which we introduce a horse to stressors “DE-SENSITIZATION” exercises. We want him to be less sensitive.
The goal is for him to be less fearful, less excitable, less reactive. To do this, we introduce him to situations in a controlled environment where he can learn how to clam down, think his way through the problem, recover from the stress and BUILD his tolerance for fearful encounters. It’s like a muscle. The more he exercises his ability to calm down, the more quickly and easily he will calm down the next time.
Entering and exiting natural states of arousal is critical to building his ability to understand and tolerate unexpected events. Experience with MANAGEABLE anxiety can give a horse confidence in the particular situation as well as grow his tolerance of anxiety in general – across all unfamiliar, stress-inducing situations.
De-sensitizing is not the same as taking away his ability to think at all. In fact, we want him to think and reason his way out of anxiety, not react like a robot. We just have to show him how. See DE-sensitizing Exercises
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Animals can also be desensitized to their rational or irrational fears. A race horse who fears the starting gate can be desensitized to the fearful elements (the creak of the gate, the starting bell, the enclosed space) one at a time, in small doses or at a distance. Clay et al. (2009) conducted an experiment whereby he allocated rhesus macaques to either a desensitization group or a control group, finding that those in the desensitization group showed a significant reduction in both the rate and duration of fearful behavior. This supports the use of PRT training. Desensitization is commonly used with simple phobias like insect phobia .
Hi redwap. Thank you for adding your thoughts. Breaking a fear down to its individual parts is important in the baby steps process. While the horse may be afraid of the lariat, he may be afraid of the sound of the lariat whirring over his head instead of the rope itself. First he is de-sensitized to the rope, then the action of the rope without fast spinning, then the sound of it being twirled at speed. I will be adding a video of Scrimshaw being de-sensitized to the whirling lariat after jumping out from under her rider who did not know she was not de-sensitized to it. thanks again.