I have now been training dogs professionally for a little over a year. I trained horses professionally for 12 years. I have found dog owners to be entirely unlike horse owners in how they approach training as well in how they approach their own responsibilities as animal owners.
Here is a brief outline of the differences that I have found in the general lay-owner for each species.
1. The learning process.
Horses have little innate need to be trained. No one will ever state that an untrained horse is in some way missing out. Horses have no intrinsic need to please their owners. No one ever asked me how to motivate their horse to learn. Horse owners train horses and horses learn whether they wish to or not.
An interesting counterpoint to this is that in spite of a dog's innate desire to please, and overall better mental health when they are trained - horse owners are far more likely to believe that training their animal is absolutely mandatory. Dog owners are much more willing to put up with issues stemming from an untrained dog.
Dogs actually must have some level of training both to live within the family structure and to fulfill intrinsic psycho-social needs - horses can get by with only basic handling skills.
Few horse owners would attempt to DIY train their horse - almost all dog owners will.
2. Problem behaviors:
Almost all horse owners will see their horse's problem behaviors as a training issue - whether they lay the blame at their horse's feet or their own, behavior is related to training.
Dog owners see many problem behaviors as intrinsic to the dog and therefore fixed, or due to boredom.
Horse owners will try to train their way past problem behaviors. Do owners will try to buy toys, special collars, harnesses or decorate the house in puppy pads in an effort to address problem behaviors.
3: Training philosophy:
Horse owners have a saying, "you are always training", which they use to illustrate the need to be endlessly vigilant about how they interact with their horse. They also understand training to be a long term - usually many months, and in most cases many years to decades - activity. Horses are rarely 'trained', they tend to always be 'in training'.
Many horses start training after a previous career has ended - an ex-barrel horse becomes a kid's 4-H mount, an ex-racehorse starts again as a jumper, an ex-trotter starts life anew as a police horse.
Dog owners think that training is a fixed experience. They 'train' for x number of minutes a day. It is also a very short-term exercise. Most dogs are 'trained' in a few weeks. Many people believe that if their dog reaches a certain age and doesn't know something she never will.
Most people train puppies and that's all. Adult dogs either know it all, or are incapable of learning more.
Training errors:
Communication with an animal can be frustrating for people and in the case of both dog and equine owners, often the fault for misunderstanding is placed on the animal instead of on the human.
In the case of horses, owners will resort to 'louder' hands and more aggressive cueing. They may move to different mechanical means to 'fix' what they have failed to train, compounding errors and needlessly causing suffering.
Dog owners over use their voice. Some 'chatter' at their dogs or 'explain', others repeat cues or get louder. When these fail, they too move to equipment to solve the problem, this leads to the same needless suffering that it does in horses.
Interestingly, horsemen are more educated about the tools that they use than dog owners. A horse owner, switching out a plain snaffle for a double-twisted-wire to put more 'brakes ' on their horse, knows that the reason that this may work is that the new bit hurts more.
Dog owners believe nothing of the sort, they will change to a harness or collar designed to stop pulling and will never ask how this miracle gets done.
Training styles:
Horse owners tend to see training as methodical. Halter training is done from birth, a lot of thought is put into method and style of training and it begins as soon as it can. Then comes longing and long-lining and then slowly at year two or three under saddle work.
Dog owners tend to slap a collar on the dog and expect the dog to 'get it'. Owners rarely think of how the environment affects their dog, and are shocked when their dogs make a hash of walking on a leash in a new environment.
As stated above, no horse owner wonders how to motivate a horse to learn. This is partly because training in horses is a one-way contract; the trainer trains, the horse absorbs. The horse does not get a say in how he feels about training. A good trainer will adjust to learning style and speed as well as physical limitations, but will never expect the horse to eagerly engage in the learning process. That is not to say that horses may not enjoy being trained, or that some horses do not actively participate in their training, it is merely to observe that neither of these is a prerequisite.
Dogs are expected to engage in the process. Partly because it makes training easier for us, and partly because we feel better as trainers if we see that the dog too gets something from the interaction. Dogs who are 'shut down', 'dull' or 'flat' are more difficult to train than dogs who are eager and involved. We expect the dog to engage in the process, and if they do not they are generally considered to be at fault.
Obviously these are generalizations, and they are based on the experiences of one person, but overall it appears that the general populations of people owning these two species both expect their animals to perform certain actions reliably; horse people have largely seen the method to attain this as training, whereas it appears that many dog owners think that these expectations can be achieved through osmosis.
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