What did Ray Hunt mean by making the wrong thing difficult and the right thing easy?

Making the wrong thing difficult and the right thing easy is one of Ray Hunt's most cited formulations, and it captures the essential principle of how effective pressure-and-release training works — the trainer arranges the situation so that the behavior they want from the horse is what the horse naturally gravitates toward when it searches for relief from pressure, while the behavior they do not want requires the horse to work harder or face continued or increased pressure. The principle is deceptively simple but requires significant skill to apply because it demands that the trainer think from the horse's perspective about what is easy and what is difficult in any given situation rather than simply applying pressure and waiting for a response. When the principle is correctly applied, the horse appears to discover the right answer rather than being forced to produce it — because the trainer has structured the situation so that the right answer is genuinely the path of least resistance. This is different from simply punishing wrong behavior and rewarding right behavior: Hunt's formulation emphasizes the arrangement of the situation as much as the response to the horse's behavior, with the trainer thinking ahead about how to set up each interaction so that the desired response is what the horse naturally moves toward. The principle connects directly to Dorrance's concept of presenting ideas in a way the horse could find — the trainer making the right thing easy is the trainer ensuring that the horse's search for release from pressure leads naturally to the correct response rather than requiring the horse to discover the answer through trial and error in an environment where wrong answers are as available as right ones.