Engaging at risk adolescents with culturally secure programs

5 Life Lessons

• Self-Confidence/Esteem – participants will learn how to train the horses by breaking lessons down into manageable pieces and shaping behaviour. Horses learn patterns very quickly and can be taught simple lessons easily when the handler correctly addresses the horse’s emotional level, enabling students to see an immediate change in behaviour. Understanding that you can change the behaviour of a 600 kg animal, without the use of force or coercion, builds self-confidence and self-esteem.
• Respect (for People, Culture, Country) – program participants must learn to respect the horse’s ethology and cognitive abilities to successfully bond with the animal. This teaches the importance of understanding and respecting the ways of their own people and culture, providing participants with a sense of connected-ness.
• Leadership and Work Ethic – the program will teach participants about leadership through understanding and collaboration. Students must work ‘with’ the horse to persuade the horse to change its behaviour as the horse cannot be ‘forced’ to do so.
• Trauma Recovery, Trust & Empathy – many horses, particularly wild, undomesticated animals, have suffered trauma, as have many young people. Both participants, horse and young person, learn to recover from trauma by building a trusting relationship based on self-awareness, empathy and understanding one another.
• Impulse Control – successful horse handling and behaviour modification requires a consistent and predictable human. Losing one’s temper with a horse will result in immediate behavioural consequences that can be difficult to overcome in a short time. However, horses are also very ‘forgiving’ in this way. Once handlers have recognized their mistakes, through observing the horse’s change in emotional level, the situation can be remedied by using each of the elements above.

The program will provide the tools to build healthy relationships and a positive sense of self. The program will teach children to self-regulate their own emotional level and recognize and regulate the emotional level of the horse. Participants will learn how to identify fear, frustration, conflict and anxiety in the horse, how to alleviate these emotions in the horse and how to instill calmness, relaxation, engagement, attachment and a positive affective state in their equine partner.

Learning Outcomes

1. Remember – recognizing and recalling horse ethology/behaviour
2. Understand – how the horse’s ethology impacts its behaviour and the impact of the handler and how the horse learns
3. Apply – handle the horse in line with its ethology and cognition, choose operant conditioning mode
4. Analyse – break a lesson down into the ‘spot’, ‘direction’, ‘motivator’ and ‘reward’ using combined reinforcement
5. Evaluate – recognize how different operant conditioning modes affect the horse-human interaction and appraise your choice
6. Create – combine all the parts and teach each of the five lessons

Learning through practical application

1. Listen to understand – how is the other party (horse/human) responding to what you are saying? Assess the emotional level of both parties

Horses are flight animals and have individual emotional or arousal levels, with some being naturally quieter than others. It is important to learn to assess the horses’ emotional level and monitor it throughout the interaction. The aim is to slightly increase the horse’s emotional level, say by ten to fifteen percent, to engage it with, and optimize, learning.
Students will learn to recognize the behaviours and postures that indicate changes in the horse’s emotional level and how to use this to enhance learning and promote relaxation.
As one cannot force the horse to relax, students must gather feedback from the horse’s behaviour and adjust their communication strategy accordingly.

2. Decide on the thing to be taught – what exactly do you plan to teach (which foot where?)

As with any journey, the first essential element is the plan of where it will take us - the road-map. By having a clear goal for the interaction before commencing, students will be able to recognize small achievements, thus enabling them to shape the desired behaviour. Clarity on, not only the aim of the lesson but also the necessary steps to achieve it, allows students to recognize small changes in the horse and thus maintain relaxation by avoiding confusing and over-facing the horse.
Horses are great pattern-learners and, as prey animals, require a predictable environment in order to relax. During each lesson in this series, students will learn to use the same predictable pattern to apply combined reinforcement to teach the various movements.

3. How will you motivate and reward the other party (horse)? Four principles of training, choice of operant conditioning, and the use of combined reinforcement

There are many ways to motivate others, horses or humans, to do what we want. However, only some of these methods work well with horses. Students will learn the difference between reinforcement and punishment and why combined reinforcement is a more effective, ethical and sustainable choice for training.
This will help students become proactive, rather than reactive, in difficult situations by teaching them how to guide the horse to the correct answer rather than attempting to coerce the horse there.

4. How will you protect the three A’s (affective state, arousal level and attachment) and use the lesson to enhance the animal’s welfare?

All interactions, be they horse-human or human-human, impact both parties affective state, arousal level and attachment to the other party. A successful interaction cannot be judged on the outcome alone, we must also assess how the interaction has influenced the three A’s. For example, if the horse learns the lesson but the student can no longer catch the horse then the lesson has damaged one or more of the three A’s and can not be considered successful.
All training ‘works’ to a certain extent, in that with enough force/fear/pain the horse will eventually perform the movement, but this is likely to do irreparable damage to the relationship and is thus not sustainable.

5. Reflection – what did you gain from the lesson? What did the horse gain from the lesson? Have you both made improvements?

Horses lack the ability to lie or conceal their emotions, making them excellent providers of intuitive feedback. Students will learn to prioritize interaction outcomes such as: 1) is the horse more relaxed after the interaction than before? 2) is the horse displaying more behaviours indicative of a positive mental state than earlier? 3) did the horse decide, on its own, to follow or stay with me? And finally, 4) did the horse learn the lesson?

Core lessons

Postdoctoral advantages and structure

Advantages:

• A structured postdoctoral project will add clarity to the proposal to secure appropriate funding
• The project is evidence-based
• The program takes a One Welfare approach 

Structure:

Year 1: Review of literature of equine assisted therapy (EAT) and ethical equitation. Describe how this program can fill the gap by addressing therapy for the human using ethical and sustainable training methods for the horse.

Outputs:
1) Literature review – examines the current uses and outcomes of EAT on human and horse. Identifies any gaps in horse welfare with existing EAT programs. Suggests program content and safeguards to optimize learning outcomes for participants and protect horse welfare.
Click here for an example of a similar literature review

2) Identifying community needs – using interview and survey methods to identify the needs and desires of the community.
Click here for an example of community consultation.

Year 2: Develop a program pilot group in the Lockhart River community. Pre- and post-testing for participants and horses, including each of the 5 lessons above and using the Equine Behavior Assessment and Research Questionnaire (E-BARQ) to monitor changes in horse behaviour and welfare.

Outputs:
1) The development of the Lockhart River Indigenous Youth and Horse Program (LRIYHP) – describes how the project was developed, topics, modules and lessons included, participant learning outcomes and horse welfare.
Click here for a development project example.
2) The validation of LRIYHP – describes data collection and outcomes for participants (social and emotional well-being tests) and horse behaviour and welfare (using E-BARQ testing).
Click here for a validation example

Year 3: Development of course materials and staff training to enable the program to spread to other communities throughout Australia.

Outputs:
1) Pilot program results
2) Youth Program course materials for dissemination