Regardless of your experience, being around horses can be dangerous, and the most common cause of injury to people is the unexpected flight response of a horse to frightening stimuli.  It has been shown that a horse’s response to repeat frightened stimuli will lessen over time as they learn the object causing the stimuli is actually not harmful.  This learning to not fear something is called habituation.  To determine the best method to decrease response to frightening stimuli in a horse, a study was performed in Europe that used three different training methods on 2-year old warm blood stallions.  The first is habituation that is simply exposing the horse to the same stimulus over and over again until they respond to it less and less.  The second method is called desensitization in which a frightening stimulus is gradually introduced to the horse at first and then the horse is stimulated or exposed to the object more and more.  Once the horse does not respond, the amount of exposure is increased.  The third method is called counter conditioning in which horses are trained to associate the stimulus with a positive reward that consists of food.

Results of the tests showed that desensitization was the most effective method to decrease fear of the horses to a certain stimulus.  All horses trained with the desensitization method eventually responded and were not fearful of the stimuli whereas some horses that were trained with the other methods never did respond.  This indicates that gradually exposing horses to a frightening stimulus is more effective and quicker in training horses to be less reactive than is exposing them over and over to the same frightening stimulus.