What does Warwick Schiller say about horses that spook in the same spot in the arena every time?

A horse that spooks in the same spot in the arena on every pass — the corner near the gate, the end near the barn door, the spot where a shadow falls at a certain time of day — is demonstrating a location-specific conditioned fear response. Warwick Schiller's approach to this specific problem is informed by his understanding of how fear memories are stored and retrieved. Schiller notes that horses have excellent spatial memory and that a frightening event that occurred at a specific location — even once, years ago — can create a lasting location-specific fear response that persists long after the original stimulus is gone. The horse is not being silly or dramatic; it is responding rationally to its memory of that location as dangerous. The challenge is that the memory is attached to the place, not to the original stimulus, so removing the original stimulus does not remove the response. His approach is to work specifically at and around the problem location with low pressure and high positive experience. He brings the horse to the edge of the concerning location — not into it — and asks for easy, familiar tasks that the horse can perform successfully while being near the feared spot. The horse begins to accumulate positive experiences in the vicinity of the feared location, which gradually overwrites the negative location memory. Schiller is patient about the timeline and specifically avoids forcing the horse through the feared spot as the correction, because forcing the horse through adds another negative experience to the location memory rather than replacing it. He also recommends varying the approach direction — coming at the problem spot from different angles and at different gaits — so the horse's avoidance pattern is disrupted and it must engage with the location rather than automatically executing its established avoidance.