horse clicker training

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A new learner: Fig

the new learner

Aside from working with my own horse, Dragon, I am also helping my partner, Sara, start her new horse, Fig. Fig is a 4 or so year old Grulla Quarter horse mare. She has spent the bulk of her life in a pasture with other mares, and likely has gone years without handling except to have her feet done or to be pulled out once in a while when her (previous) owner made it out to the barn. Although she is friendly and social, I would not quite call her tame. She is definitely a new learner. What does this mean?

A new learner is an animal who isn’t experienced with any sort of training, and has no expectations that they can control their environment in a positive way through their behavior. Typically, they are more emotional than an experienced learner, because things are novel and they have not yet learned how to deal with frustration. New learners need simple but faster paced lessons that keep them busy earning reinforcement. Shorter lessons that leave them feeling successful.

Fig is especially food motivated: our barn owner Kathy told us she is going to video the pre-morning feed because of Fig’s “airs above the ground” as she anticipates her hay. Because of this, I am particularly impressed with how quickly Fig is figuring out the rules that surround earning a treat. She is perhaps on her 7th training session  and is not grabby at all.

She does have some worries, which I assume come from her previous life, and lack of exposure. She is anxious about being in buildings, anxious about gates and doors, particularly waiting outside closed gates or doors, and somewhat anxious about handling. The gate anxiety is the most pronounced and I assume she had a negative experience near or with a gate. But despite these (minor) worries, she is eager to learn and already waiting at the fence when she sees us.

Fig is working on her foundation lessons, which are: targeting, backing up, staying in your own space (the grown-ups are talking lesson), happy faces, head-lowering and stand on a mat. These are the lessons we use to introduce horses to the clicker and ensure they have good emotional control of themselves. For more information on the six foundation lessons of horse clicker training, visit: http://www.theclickercenter.com/

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Your horse is your mirror

Earlier last week it was pouring down rain when I went to train the horses. Dragon was in his lean-to when I got there; I wouldn’t have blamed any horse or human for staying in out of the elements. When I got to his pasture gate, he looked behind him, (anthropomorhic, I know, but it looked like he was weighing the pros and cons of giving up the security and warmth of his shed.), looked out at me, looked over his shoulder one more time and walked out into rain and mud to meet me at the gate.

This morning when I got to the barn, the horses had just been fed and Dragon was nose deep in 3 flakes of good hay. He left the hay to come in and train.

Almost failessly, he whinnies when he sees me.

While its tempting to think this is all about me, (and I’d be lying if I didn’t say I love it when I hear him call out to me the moment I appear), the truth of the matter is your training methods, in large part, define who you are to your horse. It’s not about me, but it is about the way I choose to introduce new concepts, the amount of stress/force I consider acceptable in a training situation and my ability to break down lessons  small enough so Dragon can be successful the first time. Horses don’t separate who we are when we are “training” from who we are when we are just hanging out with them in the pasture or going on a relaxed trail ride. All of our behavior when working with our horses informs their composite picture of who we are. Are you predictable? Calm?  Patient?

Since animals think in pictures, and are very good at predictive relationships, your appearance at the barn predicts the start of training. Their reaction, or lack of it, tells you how they feel about “school”.  If my horses aren’t meeting me at the gate, I need to look at my behavior. Remember, your horse is your mirror.

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Longeing, lumping and splitting!

If you asked most horse people whether longeing their horse was a simple or a complex process, I bet most of them would say it is simple. The horse walks, trots or canters out on a circle at a pre-determined distance from the trainer in the center. But that would be a lumper talking. See, you can be a lumper or a splitter. A lumper takes an exercise/new behavior and looks at it as a whole and expects the animal to immediately grasp all of its parts. Because humans are conceptual thinkers, we don’t always immediateley see all the  individual components of a behavior the way we need to in order to explain it well. A good trainer is a splitter. A splitter looks at the finished behavior and breaks it down into all of its component parts so it is easy for the animal to understand and achieve. I’ve been working on longeing with Dragon, not just go in a circle however you like type-longeing, but move off immediately on the first cue, move off softly, maintain emotional control, remain attentive, have an even tempo, hold your body in a way that is healthy for you type longeing. It’s practically rocket science when you focus on it in this way;) And its enjoyable because you are really focusing on shaping beauty. Here’s just a short clip of a nice, soft walk to trot transition. He is relaxed and has a nice tempo, but his head is too low, which is causing him to be on his forehand/not properly balanced over all four of his feet. My click is for when he shifted that balance.

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The long story…

My life with horses started before I was in the double digits, which is not unusual as horsegirls go. I collected model horses, subscribed to riding magazines and attended two weeks of “horse camp” every summer , the first of which I never removed my jeans and boots, even refusing to swim, so no one would mistake me for a “normal” camper. I know this describes thousands of little girls, past and present, who are enamoured with horses. By highschool I took riding lessons every weekend, and by the time I was 18 I was running the barn at the same summer camp I had attended, caring for 15 horses and giving 6 hours of riding lessons daily. Yet I never had heard “training” mentioned in any serious way, and I didn’t give much thought to how the horses we rode had learned what was expected of them. I was innocent.

I am an INFP by the Meyers-Briggs temperament test, which for me translates into : I am process over goal, incredibly sensitive to nuances in emotion and energy and aligned with a personal, internal set of morals. When I was younger this often meant I felt very alien in the world, but as I aged, it has transformed into a beautiful skill set when working with people and animals.(Ok, human and non-human animals;)  I am an animal trainer by profession, but it is also what I do for fun and most people would call it obsession. I am never tired of it.

I train all the animals I work with using a device called a “clicker”. It’s just a little plastic box with a metal lever  inside that makes a clicking noise when pressed. Simple. Deceptive. It doesn’t look like much at all, a child’s toy, really, but there is no better way to communicate with an animal. The click is a reward marker, it is always followed by a small edible reward.  In dog training, the clicker has become close to a standard tool. But in horse training it is still on the fringe at best and generally misunderstood. There’s a fair amount of mythology in horse training about the danger of using food in training and how out of control horses can become when fed by hand. The truth of the matter is ALL animals become somewhat unruly when fed indiscriminately, but when food is paired with a clicker, so that the click PREDICTS the food, animals very quickly understand the rules.

This blog is the chronicle of  my clicker training journey with my horse, Dragon, my partner’s horse, Fig and any other horses or people who may join us along the way. A map of a new frontier.