Learning and Choices

Our colt follows his foster mother, Jess, into the horse trailer (which is parked with its door tied open for access from her and the colt’s pen) because Mom does so in a matter of fact way - nothing to be alarmed about. Jess stands nonchalantly in the shade inside and snoozes. The colt takes the opportunity to sniff around and explore. Eventually he, too, begins to become tired, and he lays down at Mom’s feet.

Jess later decides to leave the trailer. Since there is nothing alarming about being in the trailer and no urgency to her leaving - maybe she’s thirsty, maybe there’s a bit of hay that she has somehow overlooked - she ambles out without waking her adopted foal. When he wakes up, however, the story is altogether different.

The colt leaps up, whinnying for Jess. He scrambles to the open door, but he stops - he cannot jump down. He has been in the flat pen for the few days of his whole life, and has no experience of such a thing. The colt has never seen his mother do it, he has nothing to compare it to, and at this tender age with so little knowledge in his repertoire, he does not know how to learn to deal with this new experience on his own.

Jess, who has wandered back to see what is wrong, is an experienced mother and doesn’t get upset when she sees there is no danger to the colt. She whickers once to him, then turns away. She cannot teach this foal how to step out of the trailer because she has never taught any of her foals anything before and has no idea how to start now, even if she wanted to. Jess, like any other mare, has only offered her foals the example of her own behavior to learn from. In this case, the example of leaving the trailer is a lesson the colt missed.

The colt is frantic. He runs around inside the trailer whinnying shrilly. His fear escalates to panic - and finally adrenaline propels him out the door to make the bold leap to the ground, 8” below. He runs to Jess and begins to nurse. All is well.

Like humans, horses learn and make choices all the time. They’re born with instinctive behaviors that guide their initial actions as human babies are, but foals are born with more physical facility than human babies. Foals have to learn how to stand, to walk, to recognize their mother, to find the teat, to get milk from nursing and then to be able to follow their mothers wherever necessary. They have to do this within minutes of birth - otherwise, rather than enjoying their first milk from Mom, they may become some predator’s meal.

While horses may have strong instincts that drive behaviors, they still are able to learn and make choices like humans do - but for a horse, learning and choosing occurs within the framework of the herd and of being a prey animal. Still, the actual process of learning is not that different.

As I said in my previous article, learning is about acquiring (accumulating, not being born with) the skills or knowledge to do something. Learning is about pushing the envelope – going past an existing state of knowledge into the unknown. Humans and horses alike do not learn what they already know, they learn something new, but this means going beyond what is known. And that can be a scary thing.

For a foal that may become a predator’s dinner if it screws up, learning quickly what is necessary is an issue of survival, not a luxury. Foals learn by the examples provided by their mothers and, when they are days and weeks old, they start learning from other herd members. In the wild, things are divided into two categories: Known/safe and all else/unsafe. When it comes to survival, the unknown may be just as risky as known dangers.

Thus, when the lead mare goes to water on a certain path, and walks around instead of over a certain clump of grass, it makes survival sense to follow in her footsteps. The lead mare is in that position because she is a survivor and, more, she uses her knowledge to thrive. Any mistakes she has made were lessons she learned from, and with the excellent memory horses are blessed with, she wouldn’t be repeating. Herd animals have evolved to follow the leader because it is a short-cut to learning crucial lessons of survival. No need for the foal to get bitten by a rattlesnake in order to learn to not step in certain grass clumps – just do what the lead mare does and rattlers aren’t an issue. (I’ll be discussing what it is that makes a mare the leader in another article). Foals are not really choosing anything in this process, but rather acquiring knowledge that contributes to the building of an internal map of its world.

Learning within the herd is a fairly risk-free thing. If they follow the leader - whether it is Mom or other horses in the herd – they likely will not get hurt. Although foals are learning (taking in new information where no information was before) they are not pushing much of an envelope. They rarely trigger the unpleasant cascade of chain reactions in brain and body brought about by stress - this in itself is a reward for following the leader. There is little in the normal process of learning for a foal to become alarmed about or to develop negative emotions about. Even when a fearful incident occurs, such as with our colt and the trailer, the calmness of the mother throughout and afterwards, allows the fear to fade into the background.

Next: Avoiding the reptile mind