Clicker training is about finding ways to say 'yes' to our horse. We use a mechanical clicker to make a noise that we have taught the horse means ‘yes’. When you watch a horse being clicker trained you will see the handler or rider ask the horse to do something. When the horse responds with the correct answer the handler ‘clicks’. This click tells the horse he has got the right answer, and then the handler gives him a small treat, which acts as a reward (or reinforcer).
Creating extraordinary horses
One of the strengths of clicker training is that it helps us take the ordinary and make it extraordinary! We can take something as seemingly routine as putting a bridle on a horse and change it to the horse voluntarily putting their head into the bridle for us. Or we can teach something complex such as high school dressage and have the horse so motivated to perform for us, that they offer behaviours like true collection.
By approaching your training in this way it can benefit you and your horse no matter what you do with your horse; whether you are a high level competition rider or your horse is a family pet who you go hacking with each weekend. No matter which discipline you participate in what breed or age of horse you have and no matter what your own training skill level is! This training is about building a relationship with your horse, about good balance, keeping your horse sound and having fun while you do it.
Emerging relationships
What you will see emerging from clicker training is a wonderful relationship with your horse. As well as feeling fantastic to have that solid bond with your horse, it will keep you and your horse safe with everything you do and it can even give you ‘the edge’ over other competitors when you need it most.
Relationships are like bank accounts
Relationships with our horses can be thought of like bank accounts; we can make deposits and we can make withdrawals. Deposits, focusing on the behaviours we want and reinforcing them, are where we make our horse feel good. Withdrawals, making them stay with us, for instance, by using harsh pulls on the lead rope, will make our horse feel bad.
If we make more withdrawals than deposits then our overall relationship balance goes down and can end up in the red. When we are repeatedly making withdrawals it can take an awful lot of deposits just to repair the damage done, let alone get back in to the black. However, if we make lots of healthy deposits the relationship with our horse will be fantastic. It will be so healthy that even if we needed to make a withdrawal, for example, we have to ask the horse to accept wormer paste, then we would barely make a dent in the balance, or the relationship.
Great trainers have great timing!
We are all trainers! Our horse is learning from us with every second that we spend with them. Those occasional treats we give, the tug on the lead rope when they dive for grass, the pat on the neck after good work, are all teaching our horse about how we react to their behaviour. That in turn teaches them how to react to our presence, our emotions and our body language, basically how to react to all our behaviour. As such, we need to recognise that we are a trainer. That can be daunting at first, but with clicker training we can learn all the skills required to become a great trainer that our horse will love to spend time with.
The main difference between a good trainer and a great trainer is timing. Good timing can definitely be learnt and clicker training definitely helps us with timing. Clicker training helps our timing by teaching us to begin to notice the detail - to see the small behaviours (eg. a movement or muscle twitch) that came before the behaviour you asked for. In other words, we learn to recognise what our horse is about to do before they start to do it. We learn to fine tune our observational skills and by doing that, we fine tune our timing.
Clicker training is about picking out those moments that are predictors of the behaviour we want. We then use a mechanical clicker to ‘mark’ that moment and reward the horse with a reinforcer (this is usually a treat). We will go in to getting started in more detail a little later.
Learning the art of great timing
There is a very simple way that we can practice our observational skills and timing. We can practice seeing the clues that a behaviour is about to happen by videoing our horse. Get a chair and sit in a safe place watching your horse for a while. Pick out a behaviour your horse is already doing that you like. That could be anything from his ears being forward, interacting with an object, or anything you choose. Video your horse doing that behaviour. It does not have to be a long video, just a few seconds.
Once you have the video, go through it and pick out the moments where you think ‘yes’ that was it. Then instead of saying yes, watch for the behaviour and click (with a clicker) and this will help you to get started with the training.
By watching the video over and over, you will quickly be able to pick out what you see as the ‘clues’ that the behaviour is about to happen, and you can then practise clicking on the clues (ie. the behaviours that came before the behaviour itself). By learning to see the clues, your observational skills improve and by clicking on clues, your timing also improves. All that improvement can come without touching your horse!
"You can’t expect to get a behaviour from your horse on a consistent basis if you have not gone through a teaching process to teach that behaviour to your horse." Alexandra Kurland
You can do the same for behaviours you don’t like. There is a fairly substantial caveat to focusing on the behaviours we don’t like; we CAN’T train for things we don’t like! If we focus on the behaviour we don’t like, the usual approach is to try to stop the horse doing it by making it unpleasant for him when he does. For example, if your horse pulls you to the grass as you walk to the field, the chances are you pull on the lead rope and create enough pressure (and possibly pain) around his head that he prefers to lift his head than keep it down. Infact, your options are limited when you focus on the behaviour you don’t want.
A better approach is to ask yourself "what would I prefer my horse to do instead ?" Now you need to think of something you would rather your horse did instead of pulling you to the grass when you walk to the field. Maybe you would quite like your horse to walk next to you politely without pulling?
The next question is: "Have I taught my horse to walk next to me without pulling ?" If you have not taught him to do that then you can’t expect him to do it when you ask. This change in focus to the behaviour you want, starts to form a training plan. Once you know what you want, you CAN train that and your training has direction.
Emotional enlightenment
We want our horse to be happy to see and greet us when we arrive. We want our horse to be around us because he likes spending time with us. It’s easy to change a horses behaviour, but we also need to look at the horses emotions and motivation for the change in that behaviour. Sometimes we may see a change but when we look at the overall body language and the look in our horse's eye, their feelings clearly did alter.
"Not only do we want to train behaviours in our horses but we want our horses to be motivated to perform those behaviours because they enjoy doing it."
If your horse dives for grass when you are walking to the field, using the lead rope to keep his head up might work but that does not mean he wants to keep his head up! On top of that, because he learns from you as a handler all the time, he has also learned that you will make him keep his head up. What he is learning is that "unpleasant things happen when I dive for grass, I better comply to avoid unpleasant things". His thoughts, and therefore emotions, are about avoiding unpleasant things (punishers). That is not what we want.
Good things happen…
By focusing on what I do want I can reward (or reinforce) my horse when he walks next to me. Now his motivation is keep his head up off the grass because "good things happen when I keep my head up, if I keep doing this more good things will happen". That is a very different emotional reaction to the first example. This is the emotion I want in my horse. If I punish him for diving for the grass he does as I ask because I made him do it. If I reward him for keeping his head off the grass, he wants to do the things I ask and will offer me even more of it.
The outcome is a motivated horse who wants to work for me, who wants to problem solve and even starts to offer new desirable behaviours.
Human horses?
Any time you are not sure about how your horse feels about something, you can put it into human terms. At clicker clinics we do this through examples and even with lead ropes and reins; if you want to feel what a horse feels then be a ‘human horse’ on the end of lead ropes and reins. Use the information you gather from that experience as valuable feedback and consider how you might change how you handle your own horses lead rope and reins.
Think about something you don’t like doing, maybe housework. Then think about someone supervising you to make sure you get it right. Any time you decide to stop, the supervisor yells at you until you start again. Think about how that makes you feel, not only about housework, but also about your supervisor.
Now imagine the supervisor praises you when they see progress. When you get that last carpet hoovered they will even make a cup of tea for you. Compare how you feel about housework and your supervisor in this scenario versus in the scenario above. It most likely feels very emotionally different. Which one do you prefer ?
Let’s getting started
I have explained some of the theory about what clicker training does and why it is so effective in creating horses that are motivated. Now it’s time to think about how to get started and how to teach your horse that the clicker means 'yes'.
When we start clicker training our first consideration has to be safety. Some horses are just not used to the fact that we might have treats in our pockets so we want to make sure we can make the starting process clear for the horse as well as safe for all of us.
Safety first
We can create a safe learning environment simply by training across a stable door or stall guard. Then we start by introducing the horse to the clicker and what it means. To do this we teach them to touch a target with their nose (this is the subject of the first Horse Hero video I made). We want to put guided training into play, so we want to start out making it really obvious to the horse what we want them to do. hold the target right next to their nose so that they can accidentally bump it, then click. Only once they understand it’s about the target should we start to make it harder, but always think in small increments to make sure we set them up for success.
Safe treat delivery
A big safety consideration is how we give the food to the horse. If you have ever seen a child give a treat to a horse for the first time you will be able to picture that the food can be a moving target. The child holds the food out, then gets scared and pulls their hand away resulting in the horse getting nothing. Then they put their hand back out and again, pull it away.
This always makes me think of the trick that people sometimes play on each other when they hold an item out to someone, then as the person tries to take it the item gets whipped away. The first time it is whipped away it’s not overly entertaining. The second time it happens it’s even less funny and the third time the person starts to really grab at the item.
Now think back to the horse with the food that is being held out and pulled away. You can start to appreciate why a horse might get frustrated and launch at the child’s hand with its mouth open. That sort of treat delivery is recipe for disaster. The horse is frustrated and just wants to get the food that they have been told is theirs. This sort of treat delivery, or hand feeding, has the potential to turn a horse in to a biter.
This means that it’s very important that we get our food delivery right. If you find your horse is missing your hand, the food is falling on the ground and so on, then you might want to check how you get the food to the horse’s mouth. Are you putting the food where the horse has to move to get it, or they bring their head in to your body? Are you inadvertently moving your hand around? Ask yourself these questions and more, and if you are in doubt about the answers go back to the video camera. Get some video of yourself hand feeding your horse and really look at what you are doing. In this video you will be looking and analysing you, not the horse.
Training strategies
The training strategies you use throughout your training will change as the behaviours change. This first behaviour of targeting is just one of many training strategies but is by no means all of it. Another training strategy you can use is pressure and release. One of the things that we don’t do is escalate pressure. Escalation of pressure gets us in to the realms of ‘I can make you do it’ and we definitely don’t want to do that.
Set your horse up for success
Something to think about as we work is to set your horse up for success. We want the horse to be successful, especially in the early days of clicker training. We are aiming for minimal errors in learning. If the horse is not successful very often then they are likely to give up quickly.
This is something else you can try with a friend. Take turns at teaching each other to do simple tasks (don’t tell the other what you are going to teach them to do). For the first task don’t use any guidance at all, just say ‘yes’, or click, when they move in the right direction. Then for the next task give guidance and click when they give you clues with their movement leading to the desired behaviour. Guidance might be taking the person's hand, turning their shoulders, pointing at the thing you want them to touch, and so on. Once you are finished teaching the two tasks compare how you both felt about each task and the way you were taught.
Guidance makes it easier to learn, easier to work out the right answer, and just enough guidance means you still have to think. There will be occasions where we want to let the horse figure things out for themselves and times when that is just not a great idea. If you wanted someone to learn about a chain saw, you would not leave them to figure that out on their own! You would give very clear guidance and detailed instruction. This is called 'directed learning'.
Foundations for everything else
The targeting training strategy that I have described is the first of the six foundation lessons that we teach in clicker training. These foundations lessons are exactly what they suggest; the behaviours that we build everything else on top of.
The foundation lessons begin to teach the horse both physical and emotional balance (emotional control). They create horses that are fun and safe to be around as you will have taught the horses each behaviour using a number of different training strategies.
Out of these foundation lessons emerges the balance work and all the other applications that you might use for your horse. What becomes extraordinary about the balance work is that the horse knows how to find good (physical) balance on their own. The same is true of emotional balance.
Pay attention to your horse and listen!
One final but very important point to make is that it is so important to pay attention to your horses while you train (and not be talking to others around you), so you see everything that is happening, as this helps to work out what we need to train. Don’t stop a training session gratuitously (without apparent reason eg. talking to other people, answering the phone, walking off and leaving your horse) as this constitutes a punisher in your horses mind. Remember, every moment you spend with your horse is training to your horse!
If you would like to find out more about clicker training, how to get started, the foundation lessons, right through to performance work please do feel free to email me, or visit my website.
