21/01/2026
One of the biggest myths in the horse world (and still surprisingly common in lesser educated dog training circles) is the idea that giving a horse a treat or positive attention when they’re anxious, spooky, or upset will reinforce that emotion and create a horse who continues to be anxious or spooky. But simply put, you cannot reinforce emotions, only behaviors. This is why understanding the emotional state behind a behavior is essential if we want to support the horse effectively. Emotions may influence behavior, but they are not directly reinforced, because reinforcement requires an observable action.
Take this example from my eventing days: I once listened in on a lesson with a talented upper‑level rider whose new horse had begun refusing ditches. The refusals had escalated to spinning and bolting, and the rider believed the solution was to punish the refusal harder: more kicking, more yanking, more smacks with the crop. But the refusal of these ditches was rooted in fear, and so all this punishment did was create more fear. It didn't punish the behavior of refusing, it actually made it more problematic. Every time the horse approached the ditch, the fear of the obstacle was then compounded by the punishment that followed. In her mind, she was correcting the behavior. In reality, she was intensifying the emotional state driving it and justifying the horse's feeling that they needed to stay far away from that pit.
The coach took a different approach: stop punishing the horse when he stops, and reward him instead. Let him pause, and give him comfort. Don't push him to do it if he doesn't want to. Now, if we followed the myth that this would reinforce bad behavior, we would expect this horse to continue refusing and the issue to remain. But instead, within fifteen minutes, the bolting and increasingly dangerous responses stopped. By the end of the lesson, the horse was stepping over small ditches with growing confidence.
This is because the fear causing the refusals was an INTERNAL state. While reinforcement or punishment can modify actions, and while emotions may accompany actions they are NOT what is punished or reinforced in operant conditioning. This is also why when we support a spooky horse, they become more confident rather than more flighty, and in cases like this when we are soft in the face of their fear or anxiety we can soothe them into becoming more confident. In a majority of cases, addressing the emotion rather than the behavior is the true cause behind change: and thanks to classical conditioning, we know we can change negative feelings and memories and slowly turn them into positive ones.
We see this with progress in all types of animals and behavioral issues - you can change emotions (from positive to negative or negative to positive) through changing the association and experiences which will then change problematic behaviors. Or you can reinforce / punish actions which can create mixed results. By definition it is quite impossible to create a situation in which you encourage fear or anxiety by providing comfort or rewards, with even very recent information coming out proving that horses are more relaxed and less fearful given scratches and reassurances versus not getting such support. So the next time you're worried that petting your scared horse is going to do damage or create more anxiety, rest assured that your kindness isn't going to come back to bite you for doing so. Behavior doesn't happen in a vacuum - it happens as a result of a combination of factors including (but not limited to) memory and past experiences, emotional response, and their physical state.
