Balance Point Learning Center

I’ve been thinking a lot about how the lessons we inherit shape what we call care.

When you grow up in the horse world, certain lessons aren’t shared as opinions, they’re handed down as truth.

In the horse world, many of us weren’t truly educated. We were indoctrinated. We were handed “rules,” not reasons. We learned what to do long before we were ever encouraged to ask why.

And the hardest part? Indoctrination often comes from a place of LOVE. Most people in this industry are deeply devoted to their horses and love them unconditionally. That’s what makes it so hard. They’re doing what they were told was right, never realizing those lessons might be the very ones holding welfare back.

The culture around us reinforces that. When the people at the top, the professionals, competitors, and clinicians we look up to, repeat the same language, it becomes a script. Their words carry weight, and it’s easy to take them as gospel. But somewhere along the way, we stopped asking why. We started valuing authority over understanding.

Education is the antidote to blind repetition. It invites us to look closer, to test, to question, and to pause before accepting what we’re told. To trace those words back to where they came from, and to ask whose truth they serve. It’s not about throwing everything away. It’s about holding our beliefs up to the light and asking whether they still make sense in a world that keeps learning more about horses.

Breaking out of indoctrination takes courage. It means being willing to sit with discomfort, to accept that maybe we were taught wrong, and to ask hard questions about the way horses are treated.

That doesn’t mean dismissing tradition entirely. It means separating tradition from truth. Our horses don’t need us to repeat the same stories. They need us to keep learning, questioning, and choosing welfare over old myths.

I find it interesting what becomes normalised in the equestrian industry. It’s also interesting that those who push to normalise these things are trainers who create this behaviour in their own horses.

Horses looking away, avoiding, giving calming signals, dry licking and chewing, yawning seems to have become the norm. This is not normal!! This is indicative of how they feel about you and about the time you spend together.

I’m a Positive Reinforcement (R+) trainer. I train with food, with choice and control where possible, I don’t train with pressure and release (Negative Reinforcement), therefore I don’t cause the horse physical, mental or emotional discomfort in training.

My equines all come running when I call or they wander up as soon as they hear my vehicle, my voice or spy me coming.

I have visitors who always comment on how “chatty” my horse and donkeys are and I realised that had become my norm. I had forgotten that not all horses and donkeys are this happy to see their person or this vocal and communicative.

Therefore if I see calming and appeasement behaviours, I consider it an error on my part and I’ll change my behaviour and training approach. But I don’t really see them in my equines, who are all experienced R+ trained animals.

I also don’t often see these behaviours when they are just hanging out in their space. This is because the way I train causes them to like me and I’m someone of value to them. I also generally don’t see them act this way towards each other, because I train them and keep them in a way that they don’t need to be adversarial with each other.

Equines (especially my donkeys) are generally friendly, sociable and cooperative and performing agonistic/ aggressive behaviours is usually about management of resources and the environment. It’s not fun or relaxing for the horse or donkey to be constantly guarding and aggressing at other animals.

Next time you see a trainer or anyone suggesting that the look away or licking and chewing, yawning, etc is good, really question it, because it’s not actually good at all, it’s kind of sad.

Worse, after the horse has given a signal they want distance, the trainer ignores that communication and catches them anyway.

I look at these types of behaviours as something I want to avoid, NOT something I use in training.

There is always an emotional association with all behaviour, therefore a horse sending out this message is pleading for space and non confrontation. This is not something I want to trigger in any animal I am training.

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“The fact that the new study highlights two behaviours – snorting and non-nutritive chewing – however, can now be eye-openers. “A main finding of this study is that non-nutritive chewing is actually not a behaviour indicating a relaxed state, as a lot of people believe, but rather indicates that the horse is trying to relax himself because he’s in a stressed/aroused state,” Baragli explained. “This is actually the opposite of many schools of thought, especially among horsemanship trainers. And the distinction is critical.” "

You can read the article here:

https://horsesandpeople.com.au/calming-behaviours-support-the-concept-of-resilience-in-horses/?utm_source=Horses+and+People+Newsletter&utm_campaign=52dd4cb2a5-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_04_30_01_50_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0f7220ee8f-52dd4cb2a5-63109965&mc_cid=52dd4cb2a5&mc_eid=52d8d1f178&fbclid=IwY2xjawNKpAlleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFDaTdBM1VkR0dRVkNENzJoAR5HYp4d4v_jkaOPxiN7omBY5QQbrLuJn108VSL9qhA0aSGAQjtrzaS2rtP9Iw_aem_puWf5NVTJdofZXaUc4TyBA

A catalog of equine behaviour indicating discomfort and pain was developed by Sue McDonnell Ph.D. and Catherine Torcivia, VMD after studying 35 years worth of footage and observations.

** Notice the first behaviour in the picture, the frustrated head flick is something you see a lot when people are training with negative reinforcement and then adding food and/or trying to do fake “liberty training”. The low rate of reinforcement (food) and high value “treats” combined with aversive tools like whips, causes frustration and conflict and these types of head flicks, as well as more overt behaviour. 

“What sorts of things do horses do when they’re uncomfortable?” she said. “That’s what we aimed to define in a more or less complete inventory list, to make sure people really understand these discomfort behaviors.”

“One of our main goals with this ethogram was to get a collection of these (discomfort) behaviors and provide very specific descriptions, with images and videos, which I think are key for people to see what we’re talking about,” Torcivia said. “And hopefully this can kind of bring everyone together as far as what they’re looking at and how they’re interpreting things, just to help them use the same language and get them on the same page when they’re discussing equine discomfort.”

A summary of the findings:-

https://thehorse.com/197801/new-ethogram-describes-70-discomfort-behaviors-in-horses/?utm_medium=Behavior%20enews&utm_source=Newsletter&fbclid=IwAR19ZFnISWoQL3PSLyuCvwfaJpV6S287XLofIbOtruXDOeFs07h8oGZqvuM

The full paper:-

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/11/2/580

Hi everybody !! Some of y’all already know me, but I’m Lillian- I’m the new face of the Balance Point page, and I’m a trainer, barn manager, bodyworker, and R+ enthusiast currently running a boutique program in Colorado with a focus on biomechanics, ethical training, and helping horses and their humans enjoy each other more ! I love R+ training with an emphasis on correct movement and fitness for everybody involved, although I also offer R- training to the “traditional” equestrian community with an emphasis on harm reduction and gentle introduction of R+ training methods for the uninitiated 🥰 I currently have 2 personal horses, Dreamer (2006 Morgan who many of yall may also know) and Maverick (2019 Buffalo Hills Mustang), and a few project ponies, along with a very high energy Brittany named Rio. I’ve devoted my life and career to helping horses and their humans, and I’m excited and honored to continue operating under the Balance Point Equestrian name !! I can’t wait to see what the future holds for the equine world, and I love our little corner of it more than I can accurately express. I hope to use this page as a resource for R+ support, behavior modification, biomechanics, and more, and I also have an instagram page for fun updates and additional resources ! Please shoot me a DM or contact me however you can reach me with questions, ideas, and pony tech support requests💗

Very special thanks to Rachel Steen for entrusting this special name and community to me- I started taking lessons with her when I was 9 years old, and I wouldn’t be the person I am today (personally or professionally) without her influence, and I hope to continue to carry the torch that she does for equines and other animals💗

Too cute!!

Upepo is demonstrating the appropriate amount of excitement everyone should be feeling about World Okapi Day. These unique forest giraffes are worth celebrating 24/7 and can be found in the dense forest ecosystems of central Africa (or along the African Loop trail at the Safari Park).

Always feed the spook! Feeding the spook, shrinks the spook. This seems counter intuitive, we know that we get more of what we reinforce, so why should we reinforce "bad" behavior like spooking?

Remember my last few graphics, respondent vs operant behaviors, classical vs operant conditioning, counter conditioning, stimulus stacks... this all adds up to explain exactly why we want to feed the spook.

Spooking is a respondent, reflexive, involuntary reaction to a stimulus triggered by high level emotions. We aren't going to operantly change a respondent behavior. We need to CLASSICALLY change the emotional response to the trigger. By pairing the trigger with good things we change the emotions that trigger elicits, and with it, the behavior will change too.

We don't want to just feed, but also redirect to small, simple behaviors that have a high rate of reinforcement, to help soothe the horse and help those fear hormones settle back down to baseline. So this initial trigger doesn't become as big of a part of a stimulus stack, resulting in a bigger spook. So feed the spook, then work on something easy until the horse has swung back to being truly comfortable and relaxed.

You can't reinforce fear with R+, you are only providing comfort. Also, what behavior do we want our horse to do when they are scared? We want them to check in with us, allow us to reassure them and help them calm. So, like any good mother, when our child is upset, we comfort them by filling their belly... ok maybe that's just my Italian family

There is always a lot of controversy in the groups about "purely positive" trainers, they say this like it's some sort of elitest group who look down on anyone who's not perfect. There sure are some positive trainers who make it sound like that too! But let's be clear, there is a whole lot of gray area.

We have intentional, prepared training plans - these we try to keep as R+ as possible. We set our scene to prepare our horses as best as possible to find the goal behavior, then we mark, and positively reinforce when they make the choices we were hoping for. Over time we stretch their boundaries with distance, duration, and distractions in their environment. We establish stimulus control on their behaviors and prepare them for conflict in their environment.

But sometimes life happens faster than training. Sometimes we think our horse can handle a distraction they aren't actually ready for yet (maybe that booboo hurts more than they can handle standing for treatment). Sometimes something comes up we didn't expect (like a neighbor's dog popping out of the woods). There are times we need to use clumsy, inappropriate R+, or an aversive intervention to deal with a situation when we were overfaced. There are times I stuff my horse's face and block their view and hold their head still while we quickly get a job done. There are times our riders jump off and grab the lead rope, to handle a situation from the ground. There are times we quickly and firmly drag a horse away from a situation they weren't ready for.

What's important in these situations is that we LEARN from them and don't RELY on the aversive as our go-to option. If every time I enter this situation I need to use aversives, I know I need to break this down and address the problem with positive reinforcement training. So, while I might use aversives to handle addressing an emergency, I'll want to go back back and train the skills I'd need to deal with it in the future.

The other day Chiquita had a runny eye, I couldn't do anything about it, there aren't strong enough aversives in hand to hold her head when she doesn't want to be held and she would hurt herself (she's blind) trying to get away. I was able to give her oral meds and the problem self resolved. But we would have had to use something very serious, like a twitch or sedation to have dealt with that if it were a real emergency! So what are we going to do about it? TRAIN IT! We're working on being able to touch and hold her head, her allowing us to rub her face and over her eyes, eventually with a cloth and eventually being able to use eye drops or anything else we might need.

We are a purely positive program, because we NEVER use punishment or aversives as part of our training plan. They happen sometimes by accident, they are necessary sometimes, but we know these instances damage our relationship and our training, so we need to learn from these experiences and prepare for them in the future, so the aversives aren't necessary next time.