The 3 Second Rule

One of my favorite sensible items for training is incorporating the "Three-second Rule."
Horses live for the moment; they do not worry about yesterday nor about tomorrow. In fact, the minute they are done breakfast, they are hoping for supper...yep, they are ready for it, as far as they are concerned.
Obviously, then, they are not going to remember what they did a few minutes ago that set your ears steaming, or why you are suddenly offering them a carrot before turning them out, even if they performed superbly over the jumps half an hour ago...that's forgotten to them and has nothing to do with the offered carrot.
Catching a hard to catch horse and then punishing him for taking 20 minutes of your time (and burning off 500 of your calories) might make sense to a human, but to the horse, they aren't getting that slap upside the head for running away from the human, they are getting it for being caught by the human.
If a thrown rider catches the horse, mounts up, then whips the horse for throwing him in the first place...what is the real message the horse is getting? You guessed it...don't let the rider who fell off catch you again, let alone remount!
Enter the 3 second rule. Regardless of the behavior of the horse that warrants a response from you, you have only 3 seconds to reinforce or reject it, or the moment is lost. There will be a tiny frame of only precious few seconds where they will understand that this is or is not the behavior you wanted.
But not to worry, even if it takes you 24 seconds to dig that crumbling treat out of your pocket, Dobbin will still be kind enough to accept your offering, even if he's not sure any more why you're offering it!