Have thought about this as well. Both martial arts and riding horses are relating to another being directly as an expression of intent. That said, for animals,

Have thought about this as well. Both martial arts and riding horses are relating to another being directly as an expression of intent. That said, for animals, it could be as simple as an interface to a pleasure centre and actuating it according to the needs of the controller. Punishment with animals, as other species, doesn't work as well because it lacks information about your intent, and presumes the animal has understood the intent it is being punished for. Negative reinforcement works in only very limited and immediate circumstances where it's designed to set a memory - but you don't get much influence in the memory you are setting with it, you just get pain and an association of their own experiencing. In the case of an electric fence, you don't care, you just want them to respect fences (though I work with a stallion who balks at fences now because he was in a paddock with electric fences to keep him from knocking them down), but if you wanted to put electrodes on their body to send them in directions, you would need a neuro-feedback reward mechanism. In the case of training dogs and horses, that feedback mechanism is the emotional approval and praise, which builds rapport and a way of relating. In all but actively malicious situations, even most people don't understand what they are being punished for, let alone animals, and it's a neutralizing mechanism. Using ML/AI for stimulus/response training seems like a risk for a lot of cruelty to train the model, and even where it uses rewards, the deprivation and dependency becomes a kind of cruelty as well. I don't know there is an ethical way to do this.