Harness & wagon fitting queries

[Sanhestar]

You mix several situations:

Learning environment: here it is important that the learner is right as often as possible because this will keep him/her in a state of mind that will promote good and lasting learning. I would like you to refer you to Susan Friedman's talks about errorless learning on that. Or, if you want to stay with Alexandra for a while longer, check her blog posts on myelin and "The Talent Factor".

https://theclickercenterblog.com/2014/11...-practice/

Here's Susan Friedman's article

http://www.behaviorworks.org/files/artic...arning.pdf

Granted, the most errorless learning will happen in a laboratory setup but also in the real world we can minimize errors in the teaching session much more than conventional training methods will think possible. Here the benefits of a training plan - written and thought through before hand - and thin-sliced training apply themselves.

Dangerous situations: in SUCH a case, anything that works and keeps animals and humans safe, is allowed. This is a no-brainer. But the more you looked to errorless learning in the past BEFORE the incident, the more good training history you will have on the wanted behaviour and the less correction will be necessary.

And again, any time your animal can practice a "false" behaviour, this behaviour will be more strongly imbedded in the behavioural chain that you are building because in one way or another this part will also be reinforced and the connections in the brain will become more and more. Each repeated action will be protected by the brain with myelin sheaths along he neural pathways and these sheaths are really hard to "unravel" later. It's better, to spend time and effort into forming neural pathways of wanted behaviour because these will then be the more effective and might even over-write instinctual reactions.