10/21/2025
This is important! ๐
Desensitizing in the way of forcing your horse to be around something that scares them until they stop reacting can result in learned helplessness. It may produce compliance, but it does not create confidence, a feeling of safety or positive correlations.
The four methods below are all ways to desensitize your horse to stimulus in ways that DO create confidence, safety and positive emotional responses. The goal is emotional change, not suppression.
Read this, save this, and try this out the next time your horse encounters something that scares them!
Letโs Talk About Desensitizing
For us horse people, desensitizing is often talked about as a form of training, but in behavioural science, itโs actually a learning process.
Desensitization describes what happens when a horseโs emotional or physiological response to something decreases after repeated exposure.
That exposure can take many forms.
When itโs carefully managed under threshold, it helps the horse learn that something is safe.
When exposure happens through force or without control, behaviour may still stop, but for a very different reason. Thatโs flooding.
Both are desensitization procedures, but the emotional outcomes are worlds apart.
Letโs get into breaking these down.
โธป
๐ข Systematic Desensitization:
Gradual, controlled exposure to a fear-inducing stimulus while keeping the horse under threshold.
Starting from a safe distance or low intensity, you increase duration or proximity only as the horse stays relaxed.
The goal is emotional change, not suppression, resulting in a horse that remains calm and confident even at full exposure.
โธป
๐ข Counterconditioning:
Pairing the feared stimulus with something pleasant, like food, scratches, or comfort, to shift emotional response from fear to neutrality or even positivity.
Over many repetitions, the horse learns that when the scary thing appears, so does something good.
Often used alongside systematic desensitization for faster, welfare-friendly progress.
โธป
๐ข Operant Counterconditioning:
Asking for a familiar, previously reinforced behaviour (often taught with positive reinforcement) while exposed to the fear-inducing stimulus.
The horse earns reinforcement for performing that behaviour instead of reacting with fear.
This helps maintain focus, control, and agency during exposure.
โธป
๐ข Approach Conditioning:
Using a horseโs natural curiosity and choice to build confidence.
The horse is invited to approach and investigate the fear-inducing stimulus on their own terms.
By controlling distance and engagement, they learn that the stimulus is predictable and safe.
โธป
๐ด Flooding:
Flooding is a form of desensitization, but it is the most intense and least controlled version.
Instead of gradual exposure under threshold, flooding exposes the horse to a fear-inducing stimulus at full intensity with no option to retreat or escape.
It can result in the horse appearing calm, but this often comes from learned helplessness, when the horse stops responding because escape feels impossible.
Behaviourally, flooding can โwork.โ
Repeated exposure without escape can suppress or extinguish a reaction, which is why some horses seem โdesensitized.โ But this happens because theyโve stopped trying, not because they feel safe.
โธป
โ๏ธ The Critical Distinction
Both systematic desensitization and flooding fall under the same learning category: exposure-based reduction of a fear response.
But the mechanism and emotional outcome are completely different.
In systematic desensitization, fear decreases because the animal learns the stimulus is safe and predictable.
In flooding, behaviour stops because the animal learns their actions donโt matter.
Those outcomes may look similar on the outside, a quiet horse, but they are neurologically and emotionally opposite.
Systematic desensitization and counterconditioning create new, positive associations through prefrontal-cortex learning.
Flooding produces suppression through overarousal and loss of control, a limbic-system shutdown.
Flooding may produce compliance, but it does not create confidence.
All flooding is desensitization,
but not all desensitization is flooding.
โธป
๐งฉ In Summary
Desensitization itself isnโt inherently good or bad. Itโs a learning process.
The welfare outcome depends entirely on how itโs applied.
When done under threshold, desensitization builds confidence and trust.
When done through forced exposure, it may silence fear, but it doesnโt resolve it.
Systematic desensitization and counterconditioning remain the gold standard, evidence-based approaches for reducing fear while protecting welfare.
