Natural Horse World Articles-Foals

IMPRINTING AND EDUCATING THE FOAL
by Cynthia Cooper

Fortunately, many horse breeders now recognise the pay offs for spending time with the foal in the early days. And many like myself have also realised that socialisation and education is the most important part of human interaction, not the imprinting.
Although imprinting helps initially and forms a much stronger bond between foal and humans, it is not an issue if you aren’t there at the birth and miss that small window of opportunity (true imprinting happens during the first 2 hours of a foal's life only).
In fact studies have shown that the mere presence of the human at birth, either passively or gently rubbing and touching the foal, is enough for acceptance of the human in the horse’s world. Frequency of time spent with the foal after the mare/foal bonding seems to be the vital element.

In those first few days and week, spending short periods with the foal many times a day, just being friendly and finding all their ‘itchy’ spots will encourage their natural curiosity. When the foal is confident with having you around and providing something they enjoy, then education to pressure and de-sensitising can begin. It may only take a few hours on the first day of frequent visits to reach the stage where the foal trusts you enough to allow things like a towel, or plastic bag rubbed all over it. De-sensitising to clippers, tarps and more can be part of your foal’s ongoing education and will be readily accepted if the foal trusts you first.

The quickest way to destroy any trust you have built is by reverting to the “I’m stronger than you” mode where you force the foal to accept anything, or any pressure.

They are a horse first and foremost and have the same reactions and responses of a wild horse. We must treat them with respect and not grab, push or pull them around just because we are stronger. This sort of education will teach the foal to push against pressure and will set up resistances both physically and mentally.

Good horsemanship starts by ‘asking’ the foal/horse with a mental picture of what we would like then to do. You can say it out loud if it helps - “Can we see if you can move backwards?” for example, would precede a light touch on the chest that becomes rhythmic pressure until the foal responds.
“Can we walk over there, back to mum?” - “Can I rub this halter all over you before I put it on?” - “Can you take one step this way?”.
Always ask…. only ever ‘tell’ if it’s a life threatening situation.

When you ask the question and are not in a hurry to get a response, the foal is given a chance to understand what you’re wanting. So often we are tempted to just grab that leg and lift it up because we can use our strength, or pull on that rump rope to move them forward, ….because we can.

Remember that you are not only training the foal to respond to pressure, you are training their attitude as well. Watch your foal’s expression – are they flicking their ears back or switching their tail at lot? If so, they are trying to tell you something – possibly to not be so rude or rapid with your requests. Many ‘imprint trained’ foals get a bad name for being pushy, dull or un-interested in their training because they learned to push back (reflecting your ‘pushiness’) or switch off totally.

By the time they are ridden, they can be so zoned out to their rider’s requests their apparent quietness turns into stubbornness, grumpiness or dullness.
Who wants a horse like that? Quietness yes, but I’d rather have respectfulness and responsiveness in my young horses while retaining the interest and enthusiasm for being with me.

A foal is strongly influenced by the mare, who ideally should trust you and be educated to the basics of being caught and handled herself before she has a foal.
Sadly, some people breed from a mare because she’s not good to handle or ride and this then sets up a pattern with the foal, of negative learned behaviour where humans are concerned. If your mare is worried about you, she will transfer that worry to the foal so it’s very important to develop the relationship with her too. She should also trailer load well and tie up, in order to be helpful when teaching the foal these things.
If the mare becomes over-protective (which is natural), then you will need to have a good yard to work in for the first week or two until she is not in the habit of running off with the foal whenever she sees you. Feed her in the yard and she will realise it’s a friendly place to be.

It is well worth spending time with the mare before she foals and then reinforcing things with her after the foal is born. It will make handling her in case of a
problem such as needing to be milked, veterinary attention and so on, that much easier.

Think carefully about the sort of education you are giving your foal. Look upon training a foal as a privilege and an opportunity to refine your horsemanship skills.
A foal is a blank canvas, brand new and ready to absorb everything we do with them, be that positive or negative. Above all, enjoy the wonder of having a new foal and the process of educating them.

For more information on educating foals and weaning, get Cynthia’s Young Horse Education Double DVD set for just $45 through the Online Shop.

Weaning Foals
Click here to read an excellent article by Linda Kohanov (author of The Tao of Equus and Riding Between the Worlds) detailing the detrimental effects of early weaning and the long term benefits of later and more gradual weaning.

Foal Training – The Positive Way

Since my interest in training using positive reinforcement has been so successful with my older horses, I decided to start with that type of training with my most recent foal.
So first let me explain the difference between positive and negative reinforcement.

Positive reinforcement is simply reinforcing a behaviour that the horse has offered with something they like such as food or scratching their favourite itchy spot.

Positive reinforcement is what clicker trainers use, marking the behaviour with a ‘click’ so the horse knows exactly which behaviour it was being rewarded for once it associates the ‘click’ with a treat being delivered. This is called ‘conditioned reinforcement’ and enables us to reward a very specific action then deliver the treat some time after the action occurred.

Negative reinforcement is the removal of a stimulus that caused a behaviour. The removal of the cue or stimulus is what reinforces the desired behaviour.
Negative reinforcement has nothing to do with punishment, in fact most people mistakenly refer to the removal of a stimulus (pressure) as a reward, when really, a reward is something a horse finds pleasurable.
It’s actually better to think of negative reinforcement as taking something away (removing pressure).

Many top horse and dog trainers use positive reinforcement paired with negative reinforcement knowingly or not. Each time they ‘reward’ their horse or dog with a ‘good boy’ (the marker) and a pat or a treat (the reinforcer) they are using conditioned reinforcement.

But most horse trainers use negative reinforcement to get what they want and sometimes this involves a lot of pressure in order to teach the horse to ‘give or move’ to pressure. This can cause resistance and reluctance in the horse, unless they get the occasional positive reinforcer (a treat or a pat/scratch or even a rest).

Photo: Aria enjoys an itch being scratched in return for holding up her leg.

There’s nothing wrong with this form of training – it’s just that now I can see the horse is much happier ‘being paid for his job’ than being a slave to our needs and desires.

So, when my Arabian filly, Aria was born, I decided to experiment with her education to see if I could teach her all the necessary things a foal needs to learn in their first year using mostly positive reinforcement. And if I had to use some negative (pressure) to get the message to her, that it would be as light as possible and also rhythmic.

I started by tuning her in to the reward that for her as a foal, was being scratched.
Every time I went to scratch her, I gave a tongue click then delivered the scratch.
Pretty soon, I could ‘click’ her for a specific behaviour, like nuzzling me back rather than nipping.

Then I introduced the tiniest amount of rhythmic pressure to indicate a direction I wanted, followed by a click and a scratch for each thought or step in the right direction.
Pretty soon I had her moving forwards to a press forward at the base of the wither, backwards to a light touch on the chest, moving hindquarter and forequarter to a light touch on the respective parts and stopping when I stopped my feet.

So we achieved ‘leading’ with me walking beside her with just my hand resting on her neck near the wither – no halter or ropes needed at all. Now she evens runs beside me at a trot when my energy lifts, just connected to her with my hand.
I was very proud of her and me – for not having to ‘force’ her to accept too much pressure or get into a ‘fight’ when scared or confused by the pull of a rope.

I realise this type of leading is not practical for outside the paddock so I then started to introduce the rope – just a light string around her neck that replaced the feel of my hand. She did get a bit worried at first, but I just went back to using my hand and resting the string there, gradually incorporating it as she grew more confident.

This took the same amount of time as I’d normally spend on teaching a foal to lead, and was far more pleasant for her – she had choices – if she got scared she could run away without getting a pull on the rope that could then set off more negative reaction.

I taught her to have her hooves trimmed and be wormed in the same way and at liberty, so by the age of 3 months she was ready to teach float loading (this can be done at an earlier age but I just hadn’t gotten around to it).

By this time, I had also taught her about food treats when she started taking an interest in them while I trained her big sister and brother.
So that she didn’t ‘butt in’ looking for treats, she learned to step back and hold her head straight (not nudge the treat bag) to receive her reward. Photo: Fiera and Aria hold their 'no-mugging' position to receive a food reward.

I put a halter on her and pretty soon she was used to the feel of it going on and off. I had previously used the string to get her nose to come round for a treat so she accepted the halter without fuss. With the string around her neck, I ran the ends of it through the halter loops/ring so it gave some direction to her head without pulling on her poll or dragging on the ground if she ran away.

Once she realised she could get paid for the job, she showed up every day for some ‘work’ – quickly offering me the required position to receive her treat!
So I then parked the float in the paddock, with hay stored in it. I fed them from this every day and Aria watched her big brother and sister march straight on at liberty to get at the hay – even when there were piles in the paddock for them.

When she was trying to squeeze in from the side to eat her share of the hay, I removed her brother and asked Aria to step up on the ramp next to her two year old sister.
When she did, she also got a treat – I use sunflower seeds and the horses love them!
The first time, I had to lift her hoof onto the ramp as she had no concept of stepping up, but after that, she worked it out herself.

When she had two feet on, I asked her to back up and rewarded her for that so we got backing off calm and straight. In the second session, we got four feet on and backing off nicely.
By the third session she marched all the way up confidently, standing quietly, munching away at the hay with her big sister alongside who was doing her best ‘look’ to get her share of the treats too.

After 4 sessions of loading, Aria was ready to have the tailgate closed, so I enlisted the help of her mum and a friend.
She handled this without fuss so she was taken for a short drive to a new paddock. As she had not been taught to tie up yet, Aria was loose in the completely enclosed float and had turned around to face the back during the journey.

Now it will be time to repeat the loading without going anywhere to reinforce the float as a comfort zone. Eventually I will do this at liberty to check that she is really happy to be there.
You can read more about teaching trailer loading here.

Read Follow this Foal - a journey from birth to yearling here.

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