 many different training methods and different ways of working with horses. And I believe that training is really about our communication with the horse. When we can understand better how the horse learns, some of maybe how the horse thinks, what influences their behavior, how they interpret what we're trying to communicate, I feel that we can be so much better at our training, at any of our interactions with horses, and of course in our riding as well. The other main type of learning that's applicable for our work with horses is associative learning. And associative learning has two pieces to it. The first one is classical conditioning. Classical conditioning is when the horse learns to associate something with something else. So one of the classic examples that's always used to explain this is Pavlov's dogs. So Pavlov kind of discovered this theory of classical conditioning by working with dogs and showing that he could teach the dogs to make an association between the sound of a ringing bell with the fact that the dogs were gonna get fed. So he would ring the bell and the dogs would start to salivate anticipating food. A idea in training that is really important to understand. It's something that happens with any new thing that we teach our horse, but it also happens many times unconsciously without us even being aware that it's going on. And it can be one of the reasons that we accidentally train our horse to do the wrong thing. Why we accidentally make our horses really mouthy. We teach them to get really bitey and mouthy around food. It can be one of the reasons that we actually accidentally can teach our horse to move around more when we come out with fly spray or when we come out to try to do something that they don't like and they're wiggling around. It's one of the behavioral principles that just explains how we accidentally teach bad behavior. And it's just as we all tend to have patterns of maybe getting more argumentative or a little bit more combative for some people or for others tending to be a little bit more inward and a little bit more brooding. Horses can also develop patterns of responses based on what has worked for them in the past. But if we think about these things and we talk about ideas and use words like fight or flight or freeze, these are really going to kind of the extreme ends. But those are really just the largest responses of stress. We think about all of these start in very subtle ways. So they start if we have a horse that is tending towards more of an outward expression of being reactive or being a little bit more combative. We can see that starting in tension in the horse's body. And I'm gonna point out some really specific points of those tension in a moment. On the other hand, when we have a horse that tends to go more into a response of freeze, other terms that are often used with this or a horse that's checking out or a horse that's dissociating. And this one can be harder to spot because it can seem as though it's a horse that perhaps is very quiet or is almost bomb proof. But in reality, if we don't notice the little signs of stress, it can be that the horse has just gone very inward and that he's in some of these kind of earlier stages of that freeze process. This is where they'll take their head back and they might kind of bite along their shoulders or they might bite along their chest. Other things that horses do as pacifying behaviors is head tossing, good illustration. Yawning can actually be yawning and the lick and chew like he just did are a self soothing behavior. Sometimes these things are often referred to as state changes, which is just another way to kind of refer to that same idea that something's shifting a little bit internally for the horse. But the information that it gives us is that there was some amount of stress that was present before that shift happened.