rough 297.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Speaker1:
Behavior changes in you and emotional changes in you will mark behavior.
Speaker2:
Podcasting from a little cabin on a Hill. This is the Stacy Westfall podcast. Stacy's goal is simple to teach you to understand why horses do what they do, as well as the action steps for creating clear, confident communication with your horses.
Speaker1:
Hi, I'm Stacy Westfall and I'm here to help you understand, enjoy and successfully train your own horses. In this episode, I want to talk to you about marking mistakes. This is different than making mistakes. If you'd like to listen to an episode about making mistakes way back in episode ten of this podcast. Back in 2019, I recorded an episode called Making Mistakes in the Right Direction. I cannot believe I'm approaching episode 300 of this podcast, and if you have any ideas on how I should mark that occasion, go ahead and email them to me because I've got a couple, but I'd love to hear yours. So back to the topic at hand marking behavior. Let's first start with just defining that. I think the fastest way to really understand the idea of marking behavior is to look at something like clicker training. And even if you've never personally done clicker training before, it's pretty easy to grasp the concept. So let me give you a couple examples. When I was teaching my puppy now dog Shadow, I was teaching her at one point to put her paws onto a board, but I didn't want to cue her to go to the board. And so I was in a small enclosed area and I was turning my body slightly, and she was wandering around trying to figure out what was going on and when she would step on to the board on accident, I would click and treat her and in a very short amount of time, because she already understood that the clicker was marking something in a very short amount of time.
Speaker1:
She had identified that when she touched the board with her front paw, she would hear the click and get the treat. So in a very short amount of time, she was spontaneously offering this because the click marked the behavior of stepping on the board. So even though stepping on the board was an accident to begin with, the marker of the click followed by the treat gave her the feedback that that was the behavior that earned her the treat. Now let's go to a horse. Example. I taught Presto to associate the clicker with receiving a treat, and that was a simple as click and give him a treat. Click and give him a treat. Click and give him a treat. And then when I wanted to teach him something else, I taught him to ring a set of sleigh bells. And in a very similar way to what I did with the dog, I had the sleigh bells where he could easily reach them, and when he would get close to it or touch it, I would click and give him a treat. And again, in a short amount of time he figured out what area and what specific behavior was leading to the treat. So clicker training is an excellent example of marking behavior. Now let's think about the opposite of marking behavior. The opposite of marking behavior would be ignoring the behavior. And another way that we could broadly look at this would be that behaviors that we mark are behaviors we tend to get more of, and behaviors that we ignore tend to fade.
Speaker1:
Now this is a broad generalization. Basically, I'm trying to use the idea of ignoring certain behaviors to contrast with marking it, not as like a very specific tool right now. Another way that you could look at this would be a feedback loop. So certain behaviors get ignored. And that means there's no feedback and certain behaviors result in certain feedback. And in this discussion I'm going to talk about positive feedback and negative feedback. So in the example with both my dog shadow and presto when I would click the clicker, both the dog and the horse got a treat. So that was positive feedback. This has been a really exciting week around the barn because the foals, Lefty and Stormy, have just been turned out with an adult horse for the first time. If you haven't listened to past episodes of the podcast. My husband's mare died shortly after giving birth to lefty, and that left him an orphan. And we went and adopted stormy from Last Chance Corral. So this spring we've been raising two orphan foals here. And this week was the first time that Lefty and Stormy went out into a pasture with another horse. Up to this point, they have been meeting other horses over the stall walls, where we don't have dividers on the top half of the stalls so the horses can actually hang their heads over. So the foals have been interacting with a stall wall between them or over the fences, but now they are ready to start spending time in the pasture with other horses.
Speaker1:
And what I want to explain is how Gabby used this marking system, or how she gave them feedback, because I think it's a really valuable way for you to look at some potential ways that you could be giving feedback that might not be serving you. If you want to see the body language that I'm about to talk about, I made a five minute video showing five week old foals meeting Gabby, and four and a half month old foals now turned out with Gabby for the first time. So if you go watch that video, what you're going to see is that when Lefty and Stormy were five weeks old and they were meeting Gabby over the stall wall, they were trying to figure out the body language of this other adult horse. And at one point in the video, Gabby is nose to nose with stormy, and Gabby wiggles. The end of her nose, just wiggles the very end of her nose, and Stormi rears up and dramatically jumps out of the video frame. And what's really fascinating about this is Gabby's non-reaction to Stormi jumping. So again, you've got horses meeting each other. You've got Gabby wiggling her nose very slightly. You've got stormy having a very dramatic response to it and Gabby having no reaction at all. And that is still feedback in that same five week old video, you can also see Gabby meeting lefty for the first time.
Speaker1:
And lefty is really interesting because he walks up and he noses around her face, and then he walks away, and then he comes up and he does it again, and then he comes up and he does it again. But you can actually see if you watch the video that he pins his ears more after he's walked up to her several times, and he actually pins them enough that you'll hear Gabby give a low squeal and swirls her head, which is marking the behavior. And I would go as far as saying negatively marking the behavior that lefty exhibited. That is the feedback loop. Gabby chose not to ignore it. She chose to give him feedback on his behavior. And now when I jump ahead to these foals, which are almost five months old now, and they get turned out with Gabby for the first time again, there are nuggets of wisdom from the horses inside of this video, because if you watch, you can really see that Gabby is very aware of how her presence is impacting the foals. But when I say that, you'll also notice that she doesn't sneak around them. So an example of something that happened on the video is that when Gabby walks up to meet lefty, lefty is actually not really fully afraid. So he's walking away from her, but he's almost leaning back into her and that leaning back into her versus running out of fear is a feedback loop for Gabby, and Gabby is walking up and wrapping herself around him and sniffing him, and he's kind of leaning while walking away, so there's almost a contradiction.
Speaker1:
He's walking away, but he's not running. He's not afraid. And so there's all this body language where you can actually see lefty on the edge of what he's comfortable with, and Gaby on the edge of lefties comfort zone. And then you can actually see where Gaby lets them walk away, lets them walk around her. And one of the main things that stands out to me is how often Gaby is doing nothing. So, for example, there's a moment in the video when Gaby is swatting flies with their tail. And at one point, stormy's near her rear end. And so when Gabby swats the fly, Stormi jumps. But Gabby doesn't apologize. Gabby doesn't react. Gabby does nothing in response to Stormi jumping. And what that does is it actually gives Stormi feedback, even though the feedback is nothing. But the nothing means that when stormy jumps away from this adult horse swatting a fly because she makes it mean something about herself, but then when she looks back over her shoulder and realizes that she misread the situation, there's nothing else in Gabby's body language that's aimed at Stormi. When Stormi has that situation available, it makes Stormi able to see that she misread the adult horse. So when Gabby is walking around, you can see in the video that she's walking, not sneaking. You can see that Lefty's response to Gaby walking is different than Stormy's response to Gaby walking, but you can also see their response developing as she has these moments where she doesn't react to their over reacting.
Speaker1:
And one of the reasons I think this is such a valuable thing to see when you watch horses interacting with other horses is because the odds are you have something like this happening when you are interacting with your horse. So I first got thinking about this idea a few weeks ago when I was brushing Ember. And for those of you who may not know, Ember is a two year old that I bought in the fall, and so she's still kind of new to me, and she's young to begin with. And I was brushing her and I was moving kind of fast. And at one point, because she's so much smaller than my other horses, when I went to brush under her belly, my hand went a little bit further out of muscle memory of brushing these bigger horses. It went a little bit further and it bumped into her back leg or her stifle area, and Ember jumped. And this is a great example of something accidentally happening where I, in an instant, have a moment where I have to choose how I'm going to respond, and a very typical response from a human in that situation where they accidentally bump and it causes the horse to jump. Or maybe you're using a stick and string and you're swinging it around and you accidentally touch the horse when you didn't mean to.
Speaker1:
A very typical first reaction is oh, sorry, sorry, sorry. And what I want you to see in that moment is that when I'm brushing Ember kind of fast and my energy is up and I accidentally bump her and she jumps if If I pause and say sorry, sorry, sorry, I am marking the behavior to contrast that what I did was I'm brushing Ember kind of fast. My hand slips. I go a little bit further than I should have on her. It bumps into her back leg, she jumps and I continue brushing like nothing happened. And in that moment, Ember now has that same opportunity that Stormi had when she saw Gabby swishing her tail. She has the opportunity to realize that that bump, even if it was a little bit uncomfortable, that bump didn't mean anything because I didn't make it mean anything. So another way you could look at this is there is a behavior change that could have happened. When I was brushing Amber and I bumped her. I could have broken my rhythm of brushing and stopped to apologize or try to make things better. And there's also the energetic switch from the energy I was in when I was brushing to the energy that I would switch into if I say, oh, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to, and I slow myself down. And this example of brushing Ember and accidentally bumping into her is not to tell you how you should handle your particular horse.
Speaker1:
It is meant to explain to you that behavior changes in you and emotional changes in you will mark behavior. And sometimes people mark things that they don't want to have repeated. So if I'm brushing Ember quickly and I accidentally bump in and she jumps and I mark it with a behavior change and an emotional change, or a behavioral change or an emotional change, if I mark it, she's more likely to repeat the getting jumpy. Neutral is an amazing tool. Having no response is a version of feedback. Pay attention this week when you're with your horse, and look for the hidden ways that you might be marking behavior, especially examples of you marking behavior with your emotional response. Maybe you'll be like me and maybe you'll slip while you're brushing. Just notice your response. If something like that happens. Or maybe you'll be riding and something challenging will happen. And if it does, pay attention to what you do physically with your response and emotionally with your response, do you continue on largely undisturbed, or do you mark it with a response? That's what I have for you this week. Remember to check out the video of Lefty and Stormy meeting Gaby over on my website. Look for episode 297 of the podcast. It's so cute to see the size difference between the foals when they were five weeks old versus almost five months old, and the body language lessons that Gaby is teaching. That is priceless. Thanks for listening and I'll talk to you again in the next episode.
Speaker2:
If you enjoy listening to Stacy's podcast, please visit Stacy Westfall. Com for articles, videos and tips to help you and your horse succeed.
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