BE SURE TO REWARD THE RIGHT BEHAVIOR
Your first instinct when
your horse impatiently paws
in the cross ties may be to
yell “Quit it!” but researchers
at St. Lawrence University
in Canton, New York,
recommend a more positive
approach---specifically, a
technique called differential
reinforcement of other
behavior (DRO).
Often used in the in-
struction of developmentally
disabled people, DRO calls
for rewarding an individ-
ual for refraining from a
particular behavior for a des-
ignated period of time.
To test whether this tech-
nique can be used to change
equine behavior, the St.
Lawrence researchers se-
lected three privately owned
horses kept at stables near
the university campus. The
horses shared one particu-
lar behavior, says Adam Fox,
PhD: “All three pawed on the
cross ties enough that the
owners expressed a desire
for the behavior to decrease.”
The study was designed Researchers report that a form of positive reinforcement commonly used to teach developmentally disabled people proved effective in training horses.
to work around each horse’s
regular schedule, incorporat-
ing one to three training ses-
sions per day, approximately
three days a week. Before
the training began, a base-
line measurement of how
long each horse would stand
quietly without pawing was
recorded. “Initially, there
Reference:
Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis,
was quite a bit of variabil-
ity [in pawing frequency]
among the horses,” says
Fox. “One horse pawed a
lot---hundreds of times in a
20-minute session. Another
pawed less---20 to 40 times
in a 20-minute session.”
Once training began, the
researchers gave the horses
food rewards whenever they
did not paw for the duration
of their baseline intervals.
As the trials progressed, the
researchers customized their
approaches to each of the
horses, altering the interval
of time required to earn a
treat. “For one horse, that in-
terval was gradually extend-
ed, so he had to go longer
and longer to be rewarded,”
says Fox. “For another horse
we maintained the interval
we started with, and it was
effective [at reducing the be-
havior]. For the third horse
we actually decreased the
interval to increase the
effectiveness of the interven-
tion. So there were some id-
iosyncrasies between horses
in terms of initial sensitiv-
ity to the intervention, but
we were able to modify the
intervention to each horse’s
behavior in order to maxi-
mize effectiveness.”
At the end of the study
period---approximately 30
training sessions---each of
the three horses was paw-
ing significantly less. In the