This week we are joined by Ella Bradshaw-Wiley, Associate Lecturer in Equine Science at Charles Sturt University in Australia, for the first of a two-part conversation inspired by her paper, 'Combined reinforcement: Poisoned cue or a panacea for modern equine training? A narrative review.'

Ella grew up around Thoroughbred breeding and is a passionate Thoroughbred retrainer, but her interest in understanding why horses behave and learn the way they do led her into equine science. Her work now focuses on horse behaviour and welfare, learning theory, affective state, the horse-human relationship, and how our training practices can influence both welfare and safety.

Her paper asks a deceptively simple question: are positive and negative reinforcement really as separate in practical horse training as we often make them out to be?

In Part One, we get stuck into the learning theory behind the paper. We talk about studies labelled as “positive reinforcement” that may actually contain elements of negative reinforcement, why real-life training rarely fits neatly into individual quadrants, and why positive reinforcement doesn't necessarily mean food or automatically mean that the horse is experiencing the interaction positively.

We also discuss what we actually mean when we call something aversive, who gets to decide whether a stimulus is aversive, negative punishment, food frustration, reinforcement schedules, reward prediction error, and the fascinating research around cognitive bias, stress, learning and resilience.

As always, the aim isn't to decide which “camp” is right. It's to look at what the horse is actually learning, what they may be experiencing, and whether our understanding of learning theory stands up when we take it out of the textbook and apply it to real horses.

Find Ella at Charles Sturt University:
https://science-health.csu.edu.au/schools/ag-environmental-vet/research/research-areas/profiles/equine-science/ella-bradshaw

Read the paper:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.applanim.2025.106718

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