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About herthajames

* BSc Zoology, University of Calgary, Canada * Lifelong interest in animal behavior * 5 years working as a zookeeper and movie set animal handler * Diploma of Secondary School Teaching, Christchurch, New Zealand * 23 years teaching high school Biology and Science * Diploma of Information and Library Science, Wellington, NZ * Writer specializing in creating teaching and learning resources * Lifelong student of horsemanship in its many guises * Began study of 'natural horsemanship' in early 1990's * Author of NATURAL HORSEMANSHIP STUDY GUIDE * Took up Equine Clicker Training in 2008 * Author of Obstacle Challenges for Equine Clicker Trainers on Facebook. * Author of nine books about training horses with positive reinforcement available as e-books or paperbacks from Amazon.

Leading Position 4 – Beside Ribs

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If we have first taught and consolidated and generalized Leading Position 3 (beside neck/shoulder), it’s usually easy to move from LP3 into LP4 (beside ribs).

This leading position encourages the horse to move with us with his shoulder well out in front. The handler is where he or she would be when riding. In fact, riding is Leading Position 4 sitting on the horse rather than walking on the ground with him.

I sometimes use a body extension to clarify the task for the horse from a distance. A light touch signal just behind the withers for ‘walk on’, (as well as all the ‘walk on’ body language – big breath in & raised energy, step off with outside leg, voice cue) helps to make our intent clear – ie. we want to stay beside the horse’s ribs while we walk along together. The other use of a body extension is to indicate, by bringing it forward, that we don’t want the horse to turn toward us, but to walk on straight.

We also ensure walking straight by using a lane (horse in the lane, handler outside the lane) and by walking in straight lines between a series of targets. Once the horse understands the task, a small finger tap behind the withers and our voice signal, are usually all that is needed.

to summarise, if we have taught the horse that a tap behind the withers (with our fingers, eventually phasing out the body extension), the tap, a deep breath in and a voice ‘walk on’ – are all signals to move forward, these will continue to make sense to the horse when we mount up if we intend to ride.

The main concern for the horse when we ride is that most of our body language suddenly becomes invisible to him. Here Boots is intent on targeting the body extension which I’ve left on the ground.

The rider suddenly disappearing from view is a big deal for horses because horses are, by nature, strongly tuned in to visual body language. Body language plays a key role in equine culture. An empathetic trainer will give the horse ample time and opportunity to adjust to the new touch and weight shift signals, plus the many balance adjustments that the horse has to learn.

Riding has us in Leading Position 4, behind the horse’s withers. If we teach moving forward in this position on the ground, we are building the horse’s confidence in having half his body out in front of us. For timid horses, this can be challenging. The cues/signals we teach on the ground will stand us in good stead if we intend to ride. If we are working with a young horse which will be ridden, this training gives him a major head start with the ridden experience.

Training Plan 18

Aim:

To have the horse comfortable walking along with the handler when the handler’s position is behind the horse’s withers, alonside the horse’s ribs.

Environment:

  • Horse in an area where he is usually relaxed and confident.
  • Herd buddies not able to interfere but in view if possible.
  • Horse in a learning frame of mind.
  • A safe stretch of fence or a waist-high lane.
  • Series of destination mats or nose targets for the teaching phase, .
  • Body extension to clarify signal as necessary.
  • Halter and lead.

Slices:

See clips #55 and #56 in my HorseGym with Boots playlist. Clip 55 also looks ahead to when we want to walk alongside the hindquarters, which is the topic of the next blog.

Click here for Clip #55.

Click here for Clip #56

  1. Ensure the horse is comfortable walking between you and a safe fence (or in a lane) in LP3 (beside neck/shoulder).
  2. When the horse is relaxed in LP3, glide back so you are walking just behind his withers. After a step or two, relax (click&treat). Be sure to let the lead rope flow out to keep a float (smile) in it as you drift back, so you don’t give him a ‘slow down’ text message up the rope without realizing it. Move promptly up to the horse’s head to deliver the treat so he is not tempted to turn toward you. Walk on again in LP3 and glide back into LP4. It can be quite difficult for us to remain in LP4. For some reason, most people, including me, have a tendency to creep up toward the horse’s neck and shoulders.
  3. This smooth letting out of the rope is another skill it’s good to practice first with another person standing in as the horse.
  4. Repeat 2, adding a few more steps in LP4 each time before you relax (click&treat).
  5. If we are working along a fence rather than in a lane, using a body extension makes it easier to keep our position behind the withers because we can bring the body extension forward to gently block any tendency to turn toward us. The instant he goes straight, put the body extension back in neutral by your side or lying lightly behind the horse’s withers.
  6. It can help to keep our hand behind lying gently behind the withers as we walk with the horse, as Bridget is doing in the final photo of the blog. This might not be an option if the horse is very small or very tall.
  7. If you use mat or nose targets, set these out and ask the horse to walk between them, stopping for a click&treat as he reaches each one. Return to LP4 after delivering each treat and ask for the ‘walk on’ with a gentle tap behind the withers.
  8. If the horse tends to move his shoulder toward you rather than stay straight along the fence, use your body extension to disturb the air alongside his neck.
  9. If the horse has a habit of moving his shoulders into you, create an Individual Education Program to address just this issue. It would include a release (click&treat) the instant the horse responds to the signal pressure from the body extension swung forward in the air next to his neck, inhibiting his shoulder movement toward you. Once he realizes that the release/click point is when he stays straight, you can begin to gradually add more steps forward before you relax (click&treat).

LP4 asks the horse to have his eyes, nose and shoulders well out ahead of us. That can be worrying for an anxious type horse who is more comfortable following than being out in front. Bolder, more confident horses will may find it easier. If you are developing a riding horse, it is important to understand this lack of confidence to ‘be out in front’.

By setting up mats or nose targets, we can make this a much more interesting game. The horse will begin to look for the next target so he can earn his next click&treat.

For horses who are anxious about leaving their home area or their herd mates, this is a great exercise to give them a brand new focus for going out and about with their handler.

We can collect plastic drink bottles for nose targets and hang them around our training area. Then we can devise different walking patterns between the various targets, including turns and weaves. A series of rags hung on fences or shrubbery can also make interesting targets (be aware of horses who may try to eat them).

The activity of walking along together with the hand or stick behind the withers needs to become comfortable and ho-hum for the handler and the horse.

If we want to ride out or walk out, setting up a series of nose targets along the way gives the horse something to seek out. His mind will be engaged in the next target rather than the fact that he is moving further away from his friends or barn area.

At first we’d have the targets close together. As the horse gets keen on the game, we can gradually spread them further and further apart. It also works to use something like a Frisbee or a ball as a target. We can throw it out ahead of us, move to target it, throw it again, and so on.

If the horse is very barn or buddy sweet, we can lay out the target destinations in an arc. The arc will first guide the horse away from where he sees his ‘safety’, and then closer again. Over days and weeks, we can gradually set the top of the arc further and further away. One day the horse’s desire to seek out his targets will eclipse his need to get back to the barn or his buddies.

If the horse has developed the habit of rushing home or rushing to the field, we can slow the rushing by having him seek out targets on the way home or on the way to the field.

Summary of LP4

Leading Position 4 became important to me when I was preparing my horse for riding. When I came to teach long-reining, it was an excellent intermediate position to having the horse comfortable with me walking right behind.

Mat or nose destinations enable us to play the nose or mat target game, which gives the horse an incentive to move smoothly from halt into walk (or trot) and back to halt at the next destination. Since ‘go’ and ‘whoa’ signals are the backbone of all of our communication with horses, the targeting games have many positive outcomes.

When we move the horse around us on a long line (lunging), our position usually moves between LP3, LP4 along with LP8 when we face the horse’s side.

Walking out and about on the road in LP4.

Leading Position 8b: Rope Texting and Sidestepping

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Things get a little complex here. At times I have backed up to to highlight the skills needed to make sure the horse is confident with all the prerequisite bits before introducing the new bits.

Please be aware that at this point in our training of more complex maneuvers, where Boots has already learned many things over many years, I use a body extension to make my intent as clear as possible for her to understand. It is a visual aid for the horse. It compensates for our strange upright posture so different from the ‘long’ postue of a horse.

A. Rope Relaxation

Before we do anything else, we have to ensure that the horse is relaxed with long body extension such as a stick&string combination or a lunging whip which we use merely to clarify our intent. The horse needs to totally cool with such things moving around him. If he has been traumatized by such things in the past, it will take time and patience. The Most we need to do with a body extension is to create air disturbance with it. (See video clips #121 and #22 below.)

B. Rope Texting Signals for the Back-Up and the Halt

A clip called Rope Texting in my Thin-Slicing Examples playlist gives a visual demonstration of parts of this process. 

When you write your Individual Education Program, decide whether you want to use a lane rather than just a fence to help keep the horse straight during the teaching and learning (acquisition) phase.

Slices: to start

  1. Ensure the horse has a good understanding of a voice back-up’ signal.
  2. Begin at halt, standing in LP3 (shoulder to shoulder). Position the horse facing a barrier so it makes sense to step back because it is the only choice.
  3. Holding the rope straight up toward the horse’s ears and wiggle it gently and rhythmically while using your ‘back-up’ voice signal. Drop your hand plus click&treat the moment the horse even shifts his weight back. Then work toward getting one step, and so on. Most horses seem to quickly work out that stepping back will immediately stop the wiggle pressure plus earn a click&treat.

Back-up: Lift the rope straight up and jiggle it and use your voice cue, starting extremely gently and amplify until the horse even thinks, “back”, at which point, click, drop your hand, and deliver the treat. By teaching this with positive reinforcement, we don’t need to put a lot of energy into the rope, since horses feel everything.4. Gradually ask for a few more steps before you relax (click&treat). However, each time you begin again, be sure to stop the rope jiggling the very instant the horse begins to move back. It’s the removal of the signal energy plus the click&treat that teaches the horse what you want.

Slices: to continue

  1. When the horse takes one or more steps back, walk backwards along with him.
  2. When the horse can back smoothly with a light jiggle of the rope lifted up toward his ears, gradually jiggle as lightly as possible to get the response. If you start feather light, you can amplify as necessary. If you start heavy-handed, the horse does not have a chance to be sensitive to the light signal. Eventually just your raised hand will be all the signal the horse needs.
  3.  LP 8: When the horse backs up readily with a light rope text (jiggle) gradually stop moving with him. Instead, glide into LP8 facing his ribs and keep your feet still as he moves.
  4.  Gradually step back a bit in LP8 so you can give the rope text signal from further away.
  5.  Work along a fence minus the mat destinations if you were using mats. Tap behind the withers for ‘walk on’ (plus your ‘walk on’ voice cue, and use rope texting to signal a halt; relax (click&treat).
  6.  Repeat the ‘walk on’ gentle tap and ‘halt’ gentle rope texting until they are smooth.
  7.  When 6 above is good, after the halt, use rope texting again for ‘back up again please’. Release (click&treat) for the smallest sign of backing at first, then gradually ask for a bit more before the release (click&treat).
  8.  When you can use a gentle tap signal behind the withers (or just your voice cue) to ask the horse to walk forward, light rope text to ask him to halt: relax (click&treat), then use light rope text to ask him to step backwards; relax (click&treat), you have almost achieved the whole behavior.
  9.  When 8 above is smooth, ask for the ‘walk on’ and the halt before you relax (click&treat). You have chained two separate parts of the overall task together.
  10.  When 9 above is smooth, ask for all three parts of the whole task: the ‘walk on’, the ‘halt’ and the ‘back-up’ before your release (click&treat).
  11.  When it is all smooth on one side of the horse, teach it again, from the beginning, on the other side.
  12.  Generalize by working away from the fence, using a lane of rails on the ground.
  13.  When that is smooth, use one rail. You can vary having the single rail on the far side of the horse or between you and the horse.
  14.  Work away from fences with no props. If each slice of the overall task is in the horse’s deep memory, it will have become a habit. If the task falls apart at any point, go back to where it is still successful, and work forward from that point again.

As mentioned earlier, teaching the ‘walk on’, ‘halt’ and ‘back-up’ signals from LP8 can make it easier for the horse to learn to confidently work in a circle around us.

There are a variety of suppling exercises we can do on the long line or lunge. See clip #37 in my HorseGym with Boots playlist for a short overview of some of the things we do on the lunge.

C. Stepping Sideways with LP8

I’ve included this here because it is fun to work with and a great suppling exercise for the horse. But it’s important to take all these things slowly and build them up over weeks and months, depending on how often you can play with your horse.

Horses move sideways by crossing one pair of feet while the other pair is spread. If they crossed both at the same time they would be very unstable!

Stepping sideways: When horses step sideways, one pair of legs is stretched apart while the other pair crosses over. In this photo Smoky is crossing his front legs.In his next step they will separate and he will cross over his hind legs.

#52 and #53 (further down the blog) illustrate a process for developing the ‘moving sideways’ task.

We can begin by asking the front and rear legs to move over independently and build up his skill until we can ask the horse to move both hind end and front end in rhythm, ideally keeping his body in one plane.

Moving sideways is not something horses do much in their everyday life. It may therefore take the horse a while to get his legs organized smoothly when we first ask for such movement.

You can get a sense of this if you step sideways crossing your legs. While your legs are crossed, spread out your arms. While your legs are apart for the next step, cross your arms. If you’ve never done this before, it is quite hard to synchronize at first. I’ve seen horses having to think very hard to get this sorted, so be especially patient, give it lots of time and celebrate small successes.

A few background points

  1. An angle of up to 45 degrees is fine at the beginning. Most horses will find this easier on one side. Aim to eventually become equally smooth on both sides.
  2. Yielding sideways is the basis for many ridden maneuvers right up to flying changes of lead.
  3. Moving sideways helps suppleness by gymnastic stretching of the muscles.
  4. Moving sideways will enable the horse to do other things better. It helps develop his spatial awareness and his body awareness.
  5. It teaches isolation of forequarter and isolation of hindquarter movement, to lead into graceful movement sideways in one plane as well as the ideas that relate to shoulders in and haunches in.
  6. It’s useful for all safe maneuvering on the ground. It’s useful to negotiate gates and when asking the horse to line up with a mounting block for mounting and dismounting.
  7. Doing a little bit often gives the most reliable results. As usual, we are teaching a habit in response to a signal. We don’t want to make the horse sore.

Aim: Teaching Sideways in Motion.

Environment:

  • Horse in an area where he is usually relaxed and confident.
  • Herd buddies not able to interfere but in view if possible.
  • Horse in a learning frame of mind.
  • A safe, straight stretch of fence. Electric fence turned off if using that.
  • Good footing for the horse.
  • Halter and about 12 foot leadrope.
  • Ensure the horse is warmed up.

Slices:

There are a few steps in the teaching of this movement. Be careful not to do too much of this at once. You don’t want to make the horse sore. Break up the training with other familiar activities inbetween working on sidestepping.

  1. Ask the horse to move the front end over; click&treat(see Blog 84 via the Blog Contents List link at the top of the page).
  2. Ask the horse to move the hind end over; click&treat ( See Blog 83)
  3. Quietly, with the horse facing a barrier, ask for font end over, then back end over. Click&treat and treat each movement until they feel easy. Then begin to ask for both ends to move over (still one at a time) before you click&treat.
  4. At some point, it will feel like you can link these two movements together with a touch signal where your leg would be if riding, and get a smooth step sideways. Celebrate.

Generalizations

  1. Practice in other spaces where there is a safe barrier.
  2. Set up intermediate exercises by using a row of barrels laying down or a rail set at knee height as a barrier to stop forward motion.
  3. When that is perfect, move to doing it with a rail on the ground and then without any barrier. Using a road or driveway can also be helpful to keep the line straight.
  4. Eventually advance this game by asking the horse to move sideways around things like cars, trailers, logs set out as a square or shapes made out of cones, barrels or plastic bottles of water. 
  5. When the side-pass is smooth at the walk, you may like to ask for it at the trot. To teach it at the trot, go back and work through the slices again.
  6. Generalize by asking for sideways straddling a rail, log or barrels.

LP8: Side-stepping straddling a rail.

In LP8 as Boots steps over a wagonwheel obstacle for Horse Agility.

Note:

To teach ‘straddling a rail’ as in the cover photo, see Blog Number 67.

Straddling a Rail

Leading Position 8-a

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In the photo above, Bridget is using Leading Position 8 to ask Boots to go through a gate.

Leading Position 8 (LP8) is anytime we are facing the side of the horse. We can be in LP8 facing his ribs, his head/neck or his hindquarters. Still to come in future blogs are notes about LP7 – facing the front of the horse, and then LP6 facing his tail, as when walking behind him (long-reining) or sending toward something away from us, or asking for a back-up from behind the horse.

Remember, when we say ‘leading position’ we mean any position we use to orchestrate the horse’s feet, whether we want them to move or to remain still.

I want to look at LP8 next, because it is the Leading Position we often use for grooming, saddling/unsaddling, mounting and dismounting. For all of these, we need the horse to be comfortable standing still while we move around him.

We are in LP8 when we saddle the horse as well as for mounting and dismounting.

Clip #49 in my HorseGym with Boots playlist looks at our position when we are grooming, saddling and checking for relaxation.

Boots is not always relaxed about being brushed. It’s not something she experienced early in life before I got her. Giving her something else to think about, like the cloth in the video clip,  seems to act as a ‘soother’.

Some horses love rubbing and cuddles while others are much more aloof. When Smoky and Boots lived together, the difference was very obvious. Smoky adored being groomed and fussed with. When we sat with him Sharing Time and Space, he would nibble and lick and want to be very close.

Boots learned to tolerate being touched all over for grooming, but sometimes finds it hard to relax into being brushed or massaged without a lot of licking, chewing and yawning. In summer, when we groom every day, she is able to settle into it a bit more.

When Smoky and Boots indulged in mutual grooming, Smoky was very tentative because after a few mutual nibbles, Boots would have had enough and give him a nip.

Any time we are along the horse’s side and pointing our belly button toward him, we are in Leading Position 8.

We can use signals behind his withers to ask the horse to move forward, shift his hindquarters or move his whole body sideways.

To get Boots used to the idea of shafts in a cart, I asked her to move sideways to push the gate along. Another LP8 position.

LP8 allows us to use signals in front of withers (the base of the neck) to ask the horse to yield his shoulders to change direction.

LP8 is handy for teaching a horse to become fluid with ‘walk on’, ‘halt’ and ‘back-up’ signals when we are facing him side-on. These skills lead nicely into teaching the horse to work in a circle on a long line or reverse pen.

Teaching circles has us facing the side of the horse.

Slices:

For illustration, please see clip #48 in my HorseGym with Boots series. Please note that I use a body extension only to make my signal clear for the horse and be able to give a clear signal from further away. Once the horse understands the ‘tap behind the withers signal’, a finger tap is all that’s needed. The rope texting at the end of the clip is next month’s theme.

‘Walk On’ Signal

  1. Ensure the horse is comfortable halting in the lane or alongside the fence (on a mat if you like).
  2. Stand facing the horse’s withers, at a distance which allows you to easily tap him gently behind the withers with your fingeers or your body extension.
  3. Move into and out of this position a few times with click&treat for the horse remaining in a relaxed halt.
  4. When 3 is ho-hum, rub the horse all over with your body extension or your hands; click&treat for relaxation. To encourage relaxation, pause and turn your energy away from the horse at every indication of relaxation (lowering head, sighing, softer ears, more relaxed lower lip, cocking a hip).
  5. For this part of the training, it helps a lot to have a mat or cone at which the horse knows he gets a click&treat, just a few feet in front of the horse.
  6. When the horse can stay relaxed as you move into position facing his ribs and you can rub him all over, tap him behind the withers, then ask him to walk forward to the mat or cone, click&treat.
  7. If the horse does not understand at first, just tap, then guide him to the cone or mat. He will quickly pick up that the tap means, move foreward to the cone or mat.
  8. As his confidence increases, stop moving with him to the cone or mat. Wait until he gets there before you click&treat.
  9. When the horse reliably steps forward when you tap gently, gradually increase the number of steps before you click&treat by moving the destination mat or cone further away. Always stop tapping the very instant the horse moves and relax your body language.
  10. Eventually, set out a circle of cones or mats and and ask him to move between them with a click&treat at each one, followed by a wither tap to move to the next one.
  11. If you are using a leadrope, keep a float (smile) in the lead rope. At first you may find yourself changing from LP8 into LP3 (shoulder to shoulder) or LP5 (beside hindquarters) and back to LP8 again.
  12.  Once he understands the tap signal, add in your usual ‘breathe in strongly’ and voice signal (e.g. ‘walk on’) that you will always use. You could include these earlier, but I like to make sure the horse understands the tap signal on its own. (See Number 16 in the Blog Contents link at the top of the page for details about smooth ‘walk on’ and ‘halt’ transitions.)
  13.  When he is smooth on one side, teach it from the beginning on his other side.
  14.  Generalize using this ‘walk on’ signal in other venues and situations.

Here I am in LP8 getting Boots confident with flapping things moving across her for a Horse Agility course.

Leading Position 2

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Leading Position 2 (LP2) has the handler in front but to one side of the horse; the horse keeps his eye/nose at or behind the handler’s shoulder. We walk in parallel tracks. Note that I use a body extension to make my intent clearer for the horse, but this soon morphs into an arm signal.

In the photo above, I’m about to step forward. In LP2, we want the horse to remain just at or slightly behind our shoulder and walking in his own track beside our track, not right behind us.

Clip #47 in my HorseGym with Boots playlist looks at LP2.

Leading Position 2, in some ways, resembles the position in which a mare often keeps her foal when the herd is moving. She wants it close beside her and keeping its nose behind hers. So in a way it is a position of safety for the horse. He is not out in front.

Training Plan

Aim:

To teach signals that indicate we want the horse to walk, in a relaxed manner, keeping his nose/eye at or behind our shoulder. We want the horse to stay close beside us on his own track, not edging behind us into LP1 or moving forward to bring his neck/shoulder into LP3.

Environment:

  • Horse in an area where he is usually relaxed and confident.
  • Herd buddies not able to interfere but in view if possible.
  • Horse in a learning frame of mind.
  • Safe fence-line (not a wire fence).
  • Body extension can be an aid for initial teaching.
  • Halter and lead.
  • This plan is written for a clicker savvy horse.

Slices:

  1. Begin in LP3 (beside neck/shoulder). Ensure the horse is confident walking with you in LP3 along the fence. The horse is between you and the fence.
  2. Work out a signal that lets the horse know you want him to keep his nose/eye behind your shoulder. It might be the same signal used to teach Leading Position 1 – i.e. stepping in front of the horse and staying in front. For some horses, an arm held out in front of his nose is enough of an indicator. For other horses, a swishy body extension is useful to disturb the air in front of the horse to let him know you want him to remain behind your shoulder. Think of a mare letting her foal know it needs to stay close and keep its nose behind her nose. Once the horse understands the concept, the initial larger signal can morph into a small hand gesture and your body language. It may take a while to sort out your exact signal. It can help to try things out with another person standing in as the horse.
  3. Walk along in LP3, then increase your pace slightly while at the same time giving your signal to let the horse know you want his nose/eye to stay behind your shoulder or elbow. Walk a step or two in the desired position, slow to a halt; click&teat. A clicker savvy horse will stop when he hears the click – turn to deliver the treat. It may be a rough approximation at first, but each time you do the movement, it will get a bit more accurate as the horse learns that staying back earns the click and treat.
  4. Once 3 above is smooth, walk a bit further, repeating your signal to stay in LP2 if necessary, before you click&treat.
  5. Once 4 above is smooth, gradually walk even further each time before you click&treat. Using destinations makes it easier because you can put them a little further apart each session. Destinations allow the horse to know when the next click&treat stop will be, no matter what leading position you are asking for.
  6. Once 5 above is smooth, build in halt duration with the horse remaining in LP2. At first turn toward him as you click&treat to reinforce the idea that staying in LP2 was the right thing to do. Then build up duration at the halt (before turning and the click&treat) one second at a time.
  7. Teach it all from the beginning on the horse’s other side.

Generalization

  1. When it is very good along a fence, use LP2 walking along a track or the road and in open areas.
  2. Play with it doing serpentines or weaves and walking a circle.
  3. Play with it at the trot.

Summary of LP2

LP2 is a nice position to use at times for companionable walking together. The horse can easily read our body language from his position just behind our shoulder.

In some situations we don’t want the horse’s eye and nose ahead of ours, as it is using LP3, and we don’t want him right behind us in LP1.

Using a safe fence. Horse and I in parallel tracks. Building ‘wait time’ in LP2.

Leading Position 1

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Leading Position 1 (LP1) has the handler in front of the horse, facing the same way as the horse.

Bridget is walking right in front of Smokey with a nice loop or ‘smile’ in the lead rope.

This concept of ‘Walking Away’ can also be useful whenever we want to get our horse used to something new. Horses have a tendency to follow anything moving away, and move away from anything coming toward them.

Leading a horse on a narrow track or road, spooky things can happen behind, so having the horse walk a meter or so behind you on a loose lead means the horse can spook right or left without running into you. For casual walking out, this can be a useful position.

However, Leading Position 1 is especially interesting because horses have two ways of looking at it.

Concept One: the horse is happy to mosey along behind.

We can cruise along together like horses following each other on their way to water or new grazing. The horse in front watches for snakes or other dangers, allowing the horse or horses filing behind to relax their guard a little bit.

Boots is happy to mosey along behind me knowing I will keep a lookout for dangers ahead.

Concept Two: The horse is ‘driving’ us from behind.

The second concept the is that horse sees it as an opportunity to haze (drive) the person along. Horses often haze each other from behind. Stallions use hazing to gather up and move their mares if they feel the need to shift them, and mares do the same with their foals.

Horses higher in the social order do it to move a horse lower in the social order if it is in their way or being annoying – something that is very noticeable in domestic horse situations.

When we taught Smoky to walk behind us through the S-bend for Horse Agility, we had to be watchful because he loved to catch up with us and give us a solid nudge with his nose to ‘move us along’.

It’s definitely best if the horse is happy to work with the first concept – follow behind in a relaxed mode. We’d also like the horse to know signals for slowing down or stopping when we are walking in front of him. It’s quite different from when we ride or long-rein, and are guiding from behind.

So: We can teach the horse clear signals to indicate when we intend to walk out in front of him, and that we’d like him to maintain a polite distance behind us, slow when we slow, and stop when we stop.

The following Training Plan looks at a possible way of teaching clear boundaries with Leading Position 1.

TRAINING PLAN

Aims:

  1. To develop a signal that lets the horse know when we are going to move from LP3 (beside neck) into LP1 (in front facing away from him).
  2. To have the horse comfortable with us in front and moving in single file.
  3. To develop clear signals while in Leading Position 1, to let the horse know when we are slowing into a halt and when he needs to halt or back up.

Environment:

  • Horse in an area where he is usually relaxed and confident.
  • Herd buddies not able to interfere but in view if possible.
  • Horse in a learning frame of mind.
  • Body extension during the teaching/learning phase if we need to emphasize a signal.
  • Halter and lead.
  • Lane 10-12 feet long with one high side (e.g., a safe fence) and one side a rail on the ground which the handler can easily step over.
  • If using destinations, set a mat or nose target destination several meters beyond each end of the lane.
  • Prerequisite: horse is confident with various ways of backing up in a lane. https://youtu.be/XcKSrz8feN8,
  • https://youtu.be/rMN5jWSn-HU
  • Consciously look for signs which indicate that the horse is reaching the limit of his ability to keep trying. Aim to stop while he is still engaged and willing. You can stop at any time on any slice of the process.

Slices of the Plan: 

For each slice, begin walking with the horse in LP3 – beside neck. Move on when each slice is smooth and ho-hum for the horse.

  1. Refresh the three basic lane tasks using LP3 – beside neck: a) walk through; b) walk in, halt and walk on out; c) walk in, halt and back out. Make sure these are all smooth when you are leading the horse on his left side and on his right side.
  2. Walk the horse into the beginning of the lane, halt, and step over the rail into the lane, pivoting into LP7 which is facing the horse. Give him an arm’s length of space. Turn off your body energy; relax (click&treat). Check for any signs of anxiety (looking away, shifting feet, backing away, stepping toward you, nudging you or stepping over the rail out of the lane). Stay with this slice until the horse can remain totally relaxed as you move into position and stand facing him (which is Leading Position 7), with your energy turned off, for a few seconds before the click&treat. Gradually work up to about ten seconds.
  3. When 2 is good, repeat but now step in front of the horse facing away from him after the halt. Give him a couple of feet of space behind you as you step into the lane to stand in front of him; relax (click&treat – turn to deliver the treat, then turn away again), pause.
  4. Ask the horse to walk forward out of the lane while you stay in the single file facing away position in front of him. You may need to create a new ‘walk on’ signal for this context. Hopefully you have already established a strong vocal ‘walk on’ cue. Walk to your destination; relax (click&treat). Walk a loop in LP3 (beside neck) to return to the lane.
  5. Repeat 3-4 until it is ho-hum for the horse.
  6. Repeat 3-4 but gradually stand in front of him (facing away) a bit longer before walking on. Increase the time in one second intervals. Ten seconds is a good time to aim for.  When he can do ten seconds before a click&treat, vary how long you wait facing forward before walking out of the lane.
  7. Once the horse is cool about having you step in front of him into the lane, decide on a clear signal you can use in motion to let the horse know you are about to step in front of him. I used a raised outside arm because that seemed easiest for the horse to see. The signal Boots and I eventually developed is more like a half halt in my body, change in breathing and a small hand gesture. Each horse and handler will work out and refine something that makes sense to them.
  8. First use your new signal to let him know you are going to step in front of him when he is halted in the lane.
  9. Then walk alongside his neck/ears and step in front of him while he is still in motion, using the signal you worked out in 8. above. After stepping in front of the horse, keep walking along in LP1 (facing forward) all the way to your destination mat or nose target; relax (click&treat).
  10. When 9. is smooth, we can start to build in the back-up. Check that the back-up is in good shape by asking for it first while you remain outside the lane.

Building in the Back Up

Step into the lane into LP1, then gently turn and ask the horse to back-up. Ideally the horse will quietly step back as you make the request; relax (click&treat).

11. When 10. is smooth, you can begin to teach the horse to back up while you remain facing away in LP1. First, refresh 8 above: as you approach the lane, move from LP3 into LP1 and walk right through the lane in LP1 to the destination mat for a release plus (click&treat).

12. When 11. is smooth (over however many sessions, this is not something to rush) gently slow down your walking pace in the middle of the lane for a few steps, then pick up your original pace. This should give you feedback about whether your horse easily keeps a safe distance behind you, or might barge into you. You might need your body extension to wave behind you to remind him to keep a nice space between you when you slow down. Safety is always first.

If you are unsure, it is smart to carry a body extension in neutral. You may or may not need to activate it. Having it there allows you to be clear for the horse the first instance he needs clarification. You don’t want him to nudge you, push through you, step out of the lane or push past you.

13. The most straightforward body language signal I’ve found, to let the horse know I am slowing down, halting and backing up from LP1, is flapping my elbows sideways. It’s possible to flap elbows and wave a body extension toward the horse’s legs or chest at the same time. If we can be crystal clear right from the beginning, that he needs to keep space between us, the horse usually picks this up easily.

14. Introduce your flapping elbow signal as you slow down, then pick up pace and walk to your destination; relax (click&treat). Repeat until smooth and ho-hum.

15. When the horse easily keeps his distance during 14 above, slow down gradually into a halt in the middle of the lane. If the slices have been taught carefully, the horse will also slow down and halt; relax (click&treat – turn around to deliver the treat). Repeat until smooth and ho-hum. Also use your ‘whoa’ verbal cue.

16. Now that the horse knows that flapping elbows means ‘slow down’ and possibly halt, we want to add a back-up while remaining in LP1. As you approach the lane, step into LP1 (using your signal). Walk into the lane, slow down, halt, and then energetically flap your elbows to ask the horse to move back a step or two before you halt. Drop your elbows; relax (click&treat – turn to deliver the treat). In the beginning, reward any indication that the horse is thinking ‘back’. Then use your voice and body languate ‘walk on’ signals to walk on out to your treat destination.

17. When 16. is smooth, ask for a few more steps of back-up before you relax (click&treat).

18. When you are smoothly getting several steps of back-up, work up to a series of ‘walk forward, slow to halt, back-up’ sequences before you walk to your relaxation and click&treat destination.

By now you may not need the rail on the ground but it is a good idea to work along a fence for a bit longer, to put the ideas into deep memory.

Ideally you can now signal the horse that you would like him to ‘follow you’ and he will slot in behind you. He will stay in LP1, slow as you slow and step back when you step back.

Generalization

Generalization often requires us to go back to early slices in order to build the horse’s confidence in new situations.

A horse’s confidence is highly dependent on context. He may do something perfectly ‘at home’ or in his initial training environment but be totally thrown by the same request in a different environment.

For generalization of LP1 we can play with:

  1. Different safe fence lines
  2. Away from fences
  3. New places
  4. Following us through narrow spaces
  5. Following us over water and unusual surfaces
  6. Following us through a pattern such as a weave, a U-bend, Z-bend or S-bend
  7. Following us in a circle
  8. Following us at liberty
  9. Following us at trot
  10.  Halt – walk – trot – walk – halt – back up transitions

I’m flapping my elbows to indicate to Boots that I would like her to back up.

Using LP1 to teach a new skill. She learned this quickly when coming through the curtain earned a click&treat.

Do let me know if you decided to take up this big piece of training or have already trained something similar.

Leading Position Seven

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I’m going to focus on Leading Position 7 next because Leading Positions 1 and 2 require us to be in front of the horse, facing away from him.

Leading Position 7 (LP7) has the handler face to face with the horse, either directly in front or a bit to the right or left of the horse’s head.

Remember that horses have a blind spot right in front of them for about 3 feet or a meter, due to the way their eyes are positioned at the side of the head. You can check this out for yourself by cupping your hands in around and in front of your nose to imitate a horse’s long nose. You will notice that you can no longer see right in front of yourself.

In order to feel safe in front of the horse facing away, we want to know that the horse backs up easily whenever we ask him to do so.

Face to face interactions include:

  • Greeting (horseman’s handshake).
  • Teaching the horse to put his nose on a hand-held target often has us standing facing. him, maybe at a bit of an angle.
  • Recall, e.g., asking the horse to come to us from the paddock.
  • Recall across unusual surfaces, and in a variety of other situations.
  • Rope Relaxation: tossing the rope around the horse’s head left to right and right to left.
  • Asking for back-up.
  • Protecting our personal space bubble while sharing time and space.
  • Backing up over a rail and recall over a rail.
  • Teaching sideways with the mirroring technique which can grow into a ‘square dance’ when it is paired with back-up and recall.
  • Teaching poll relaxation and flexion.
  • Tummy crunches

Greeting

When horses approach each other front-on, they usually greet by sniffing noses. If they don’t know each other, a sparring match might follow. If there is a sparring match, typically, one horse will strike out with a front leg. The other horse then retaliates or backs away.

Eventually one will capitulate and move out of range of the other. They may play a chasing game. Or they might both tire of the game and go back to eating or snoozing.

Two horses carefully checking each other out.

So it appears that a face-on approach from the front can be recognized as a greeting or a challenge/confrontation. If the horses belong to the same ‘in-group’, the approach from the front is usually a friendly greeting showing recognition. It resembles the smile and nod we exchange with colleagues at work. 

Once we have established a positive relationship with our horse, we can maintain the bond by offering the standard ‘Greeting’ every time we approach. We extend the back of our hand – which stands in for another horse’s nose. We allow the horse to close the last inch of the gap to touch our hand, then we carry on with our business, as would another horse in the herd.   

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We must let the horse close the final gap between his nose and the back of our hand.

If the horse is not interested in closing the gap to touch our hand, we have powerful feedback. For some reason, at that moment, the horse is not in the mood to greet us. The horse has spoken, but are we listening? We have an opportunity to reflect on why this might be.

We want to develop this into a habit for each time we visit with the horse. To teach the horse, we use the Greet & Go procedure. This seems deceptively simple, but it is extremely powerful to both establish and maintain the connection between the horse and the person.

Generally, horses are not comfortable with having people’s hands all over their faces to ‘say hello’. Horses don’t go around patting each other on the head. Getting people to stop doing this is quite a challenge.

This desire that people have to rub on a horsse’s face is a factor in the biting urge that some horses exhibit around people.

This is sometimes called “The Horseman’s Handshake”. As soon as Boots touched the back of Ada’s hand, Ada walked away. She is using the “Greet and Go” procedure. A greeting like this is the polite way to approach any horse. Once the “Greet and Go” procedure is well established, we can “Greet”, then carry on with what we plan to do with the horse.

Targeting: Teaching the horse to put his nose on a hand-held target often has us standing facing him, maybe at a bit of an angle.

We need to remember that horses have a blind spot right in front of them for about 3 feet or a meter, due to the way their eyes are positioned at the side of the head.

Teaching Back-Up Signals

Straight body with raised fingers tapping the air, plus a voice signal are our cues for backing up while in front of the horse. Here we are working on a straight back-up between two rails.

The following four short video clips show the many ways we can play with Leading Position 7. Be aware that sometimes I use a body extension to help amplify my signal to make it clearer for the horse. Once the horseunderstands what I am asking, the body extension is no longer needed. Eventually we can do most things at liberty with gesture and voice cues.

The body extension is never a ‘punishment’. It merely makes it easier for the horse to understand what behaviour will both remove the signal presssure (negative reinforcement) and earn the click&treat (positive reinforcement). It’s easy to use both methods of reinforcement at the same time. For some tasks, it makes out intention much clearer for the horse. Horses thrive an clarity. I know some people in the clicker training world find this highly problematic, but it doesn’t need to be. It depends on how much finesse, and how many different moves, we want to build into our training program.

Recall

Once the horse knows that a ‘recall’ signal (my rounded open arm position, leaning forward slightly, and voice cue) will result in a treat, we can practice from further and further away. For paddock recall, I use a whistle and reward the coming with an ample treat.

Boots likes to show off her ‘bow’ because she knows it always results in a treat .

Be sure to check out my blog number 13 (see the ‘Blog Contents Quick Links’ at the top of the page) for using thin-slicing to plan a Training Program. Each task or move you want to teach your horse needs careful consideration of how you will make it easy for the horse to understand what you want – you need to design a Training Plan for each task.

I’d love to hear which move you have chosen and how it is going.

Leading Position Three

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There are 8 diffent basic positions we can be in when we want to communicate with our horse. In order to simplify the notes about each one, I’ve given the leading positions numbers 1-8.

1 is in front of the horse walking with ones back to him, the horse walking behind the owner.

2 is walking alongside the ear/eye area, as we migh be if we are asking the horse to turn away from us.

3 is beside the horse’s neck/shoulder area, which is often the most comfortable spot when leading the horse. It’s the one we will start with.

4 is alongside the horse’s ribs if we are teaching him to walk with us confidently having his nose well out in front. It puts us in the position we will be in if/when we ride.

5 is beside his hindquarters as we mighte be when grooming,asking him to lift a hind foot or enter a trailer.

6 is behind the horse, as for long reining.

7 is in front of the horse, facing him if we are asking him to back up away from us or come toward us.

8 is facing the side or back of the horse, as for grooming, saddling, mounting, foot care.

This clip demonstrates the 8 leading positions.

FIRST: Leading Position 3 – Beside the neck/shoulder

When I started working through the 8 Leading Positions, it made sense to start with Leading Position 3 (beside neck or shoulder) because it is the ‘handiest’ position if we are moving along in close communication.

Leading Position 3 (LP3) has the handler beside the horse’s neck or shoulder, facing forward in the same direction as the horse.

I think of LP3 as our ‘baseline’ position when moving between two points.

Walking shoulder-to-shoulder in step with each other.

Much of ground work starts with Leading Position 3. From this position we can easily read the horse and the horse can most easily read our intent.

When we walk with our horse we are always between two points: the point we just left and the point to which we are heading. The two points can be relatively close together or, if we are walking on the road or on a trail, they can be miles apart.

Staying in LP3 we can:

  • Walk forward together in a straight line.
  • Walk forward together in a weave pattern.
  • Walk forward together doing inward turns and counter-turns.
  • Walk forward together over rails, tarps, and other unusual surfaces.
  • Walk together through water or curtains or under arches and overhangs.
  • Walk forward together with the horse in a lane while we walk outside the lane.
  • Walk forward together, then do 180 degree turns together.
  • Walk forward together in circles or triangle shapes – handler on the inside
  • Walk forward together up slopes and down slopes.
  • Go over a jump together.
  • Back up shoulder-to-shoulder.
  • Trot along with a bicycle or mobility scooter.

Figure 63: LP3: An outing with the bike. It gives her an opportunity to do sustained trotting on the grass verge.

Teaching Leading Position 3

It makes sense to teach everything on both sides of the horse right from the beginning so both the horse and the handler become more ambidextrous. Then we won’t have the problem of ‘left neglect’ or ‘right neglect’ in either the horse or the handler.

The term ‘neglect’ simply means that lack of use has resulted in lack of strong nerve pathways developed on that side of the body.

Since both horses and people have a ‘preferred side’, (i.e., we tend to prefer using either our left hand or our right hand) things will feel more awkward on one side for both the horse and the handler. Frequent short practice on the ‘hard’ is ideal.

If both the horse’s weaker side and the handler’s weaker side come together, it will take extra time and effort to get things on that side moving smoothly, since both parties have to form new nerve pathways/habits.

Working with mats as destinations makes it easy to develop the horse’s interest and willingness to walk along with us. See the training plans at Number 9 in my Blog Contents List (at the top of the page).

#29 and #30 HorseGym with Boots illustrate of a variety of approaches to teaching LP3.

The end-of-video comment about ‘notes’ have now been superceded by my book, Walking wiht Horses.

It is a great exercise to play with this task at libery if you have a safe enclosed area. Have fun with it.

Let me know which leading positions you use the most and which might be a new challenge for you.

Using Lanes

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Lanes are incredibly useful for teaching horses about:

  • *leading without the horse blocking you (i.e. movement work in protected contact)
  • *trailer loading
  • *careful foot placement
  • *building suppleness for turns
  • *backing up straight
  • *recall
  • *sideways (lateral movement)
  • *backing up toward handler
  • *confidence with unusual narrow spaces, eg. walking between parked vehicles or narrow tracks
  • *backing harness horse between shafts
  • *lateral movement

Leading without Blocking the Handler

We are walking toward a mat where a click&treat will happen. This keeps the horse focussed on moving forward and he knows what will happen on reaching the mat.

Charging direction with this set-up is great for developing supple turns in both directions. Obviously the arrows in the lane should have an arrowhead on either end LOL.

Trailer Loading Prep

Getting the horse used to walking in a narrow space for pre-trailer loading confidence. We’ve set the lane up right next to the trailer and walk through it many times in both directions. Evenutall ask for a halt in the lane, then walk out. Evenutally ask for a halt and then back out.

Here we are stepping over a rail into the lane and out of the lane. Again, building in a confident halt plus forward again. Followed by a halt and backing up over the rail to get the horse used to seeking where to put his hind feet, as he will have to do when backing down a ramp. The next step would be to block off one end of the lane so it becomes a dead end space like the trailer.

Backing up Straight

This includes backing up out of trailer.

Walk into a dead-end lane, click&treat, and pause for dwell time.

Raised rope and signal with outside hand are our cues for backing up out of the space.

We have graduated to the same movement using just ground rails. Once that is solid, we can use just a fence or a line of single rails on the ground to avoid the hind end swinging away from us.

Backing up with the Handler in Front

The white markers make it easier for her to see the entrance to the narrow lane. Sill using halter and rope here.

A raised lane and she understands my raised hand signal for backing up.

Eventually we could back up from in front with great accuracy. This took a while to achieve, doing a little bit most days.

Backing through a series of pool noodles for a Horse Agility task.

Another way to set up a lane.

Backing Prospective Harness Horse Between Shafts; i.e. tight spots

Confidence with unusual narrow spaces

It pays to start wide and narrow the lane gradually.

Long-reining

Walking into the lane and backing out with long-reining.

Careful Placing of Feet

Careful foot placement with long-reining. We can start trotting poles in a lane to make it and easier for the horse to know our intent.

Weaving a series of parallel rails for careful foot placement and supplesness.

Using a lane to teach Back-Up to Target my Hand with her Withers.

Eventually we no longer needed the rails and she is learning to back up with a signal when I am behind her.

Lateral Movement

Once it’s easy with a lane, use just one rail to help the horse keep straight.

Recall

First I teach the ‘wait’ game at the end of the lane. Probably started by using a mat.

My recall body language signal is bending forward slightly and making a circle with my arms.

Would love to hear in the comments what you have taught, are teaching, or intend to teach using lanes.

Signal Opportunities

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The photo above illustrates a moment when it would not be a good idea to give the horse a signal/cue, becaue her attention is strongly focussed on something happening on the road.

Horses are generally co-operative beings. Most horses are happy to comply if the message is clear for them and if what we ask is within their emotional, mental and physical capability.

On the other hand, if we send mumbled or mixed messages or use non-natural signals that the horse has not learned, or which he physically can’t do (perhaos due to pain) the horse is in a real bind. A horse in this situation may react in one of the following ways.

  1. He may try to fill in with what he thinks the handler might mean, best as he can.
  2. He may give up trying to understand and opt out mentally.
  3. He may opt out physically by moving his feet to escape the situation, if he can. 
  4. If he can’t escape, he may ‘take over’ physically by pushing on, through or over the handler.
  5. He may ‘freeze’ into a catatonic state. Some horses simply collapse.

Choosing the right opportunity to ask our horse to do something is important. It’s pointless to ask our horse to do something unless there is a 99% chance that he can and will do it. Otherwise we are teaching him to ignore our requests because they are too hard to understand or beyond his physical ability at the moment.

Setting Up Opportunities

Do we set up lots of occasions for the horse to practice learning what we want him to learn?

By playing with picking up, then walking, carrying her feed bucket every day, Boots became adept at it.

In other words, do we give the horse ample opportunity to learn in a controlled environment where he can gradually build his confidence and expand his comfort zone as he comes to understand each new thing we are teaching?

Traditional training was geared to what the human wanted right now, and proceeded to demand it with force, coercion and body extensions designed to inflict increasing discomfort. 

Since what people want is usually not part of a horse’s natural repertoire of behavior, the horse is often catapulted into a state of bewilderment.

How much more comfortable and safer all around, if we thin-slice a large task into its smallest parts, teach each part and then chain the parts together to achieve the whole task?

When we do this, we allow the horse opportunity and time to master each small part before moving on. Please see Blog Numbers 13 and 106 on the Quick Contents Page for lots of detail about thin-slicing.

We want to allow the horse to keep his integrity and we want to keep his goodwill. We allow him to adjust to the strange life he must live with us. We earn his trust so that he is willing to put the placement of his feet into our hands. For an animal, whose sole defense is the ability to flee from perceived danger, this is a big ask.

To build the horse’s knowledge and confidence, we need to first get (and reward) the behavior that we want, then we can add a specific signal to it. Often a signal arises naturally out of the way we initiated the behavior.

The desired behavior here is for the horse to target a specific object. We make it easy at first and set it up with the least distractions, so we can quickly click&treat the behaviour we want. Once it is good 99% of the time with a simple set-up, we can add verbal and gesture signals to ask for the behavior. Then we can start to ask the horse to touch all kinds of things with his nose, so building his confidence and courage.

Because Boots had a long history of touching unusual objects with her nose, she willinging targetted the cart.

Once the horse understands the key signal, we can layer in other signal types. We can also replace a signal by adding a new one and fading out the earlier one.

Most horses don’t seem to have any trouble understanding several signals for the same thing. For example, my horse will ‘walk on’ with a verbal signal, a ‘breath-in’ signal, an arm gesture signal and an ‘outside leg steps forward’ signal. If we are doing work on a long line or reverse round pen, she understands the verbal, breathing and arm gesture signals from different angles and distances.

Additionally, horses can understand one signal in a variety of different situations. My horse understands the verbal ‘whoa’ signal when walking beside me, when she is behind me, when I am walking behind her as in long-reining, and from the riding position.

It’s also essential to be aware of the ways that our horse signals to us. Often, we are so immersed in working out what we want the horse to do, we miss the signals the horse is sending us about what he need us to do so he can remain confident.

By reading the horse, we can decide whether we should:

  • Carry on with what we are doing.
  • Go back a step or more to regain confidence.
  • Have a break and do something that’s already easy.
  • Stop for the day or for this session.

Multi-Signals or Signal Bundles

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In the photo above, I am using a multi-signal. In terms of environment, I’ve asked Boots to park on the mat. My body orientation is beside her butt, facing backwards. My hand is giving a touch gesture on her hock to ask her to lift her leg. I also say, ‘Lift.’ Because I use this signal bundle or multi-signal consistently, she can link them reliably to foot care.

Behaviors Must be ‘On Signal’

Once we have taught a horse a response, either by free-shaping it or through careful application of approximations to reach a desired ‘finished’ behaviour, it is essential that we put the behaviour ‘on cue’ or ‘on signal’.

Often the last thing we taught our horse is his favorite because it has a recent high level of reinforcement. When I taught Boots to target her hindquarters to my hand, it became her favorite thing. But when she keenly wanted to show it off while I was talking to visitors, it became a bit of a problem.

Let’s look in detail at the topic of signal or cues. It’s imprtant that we are aware of everything that the horse may be observing.

Sometimes we use one type of signal in isolation, but often our signal is a mixture of body orientation, body language and gesture, energy change in our body, and often it has a verbal component. We are in essence using a ‘multi-signal’. 

In this photo Bridget is using a signal bundle or multi-signal to ask Smoky to exit the trailer. She is in position behind the trailer, using touch on the tail, a clear ‘back up’ hand signal, and body energy indicating ‘backwards’. I’m in the front of the trailer using a ‘back up’ signal Smoky already understands.

We may think we are giving a clear signal but our energy, orientation and intent may not match what we want the signal to say. The horse will always do what he believes to be the right thing to do at that moment.

Even if we think we are giving one clear signal, the horse is noticing everything that is happening. That is why it is so easy to inadvertently teach horses things we didn’t intend them to learn. 

One reason Clicker Training is so powerful is because it allows us to pinpoint exactly what we want the horse to do and teaches us to be more consistent. Horses appreciate this clarity enormously. It removes much of the guesswork for them.

The marker signal (click) tells the horse that what he just did is what we wanted and that he can go into treat-retrieval mode. The treat is offered right after sounding the marker signal.

 We must remember that body language is a big deal with horses. It is their first and essential language. It’s what they use with each other. It helps explain why horses who do marvelous groundwork may suddenly become ‘lost’ when their handler mounts up. Suddenly the horse can no longer see all the body language signals that accompany groundwork.

Looking at signals in isolation can make it easier to become more mindful about exactly how we are using:

  • our environment
  • our whole body orientation
  • our gestures
  • our voice
  • our hands
  • any of our body extensions (ropes, reins, lanes, etc.)
  • our energy
  • how and where we present the treat after the clicker.

#38 HorseGym with Boots illustrates some of these ideas. You will notice that Boots is so clued in to some of my body orientations that she offers a belly crunch while I face her front on, a front leg lift when I stand shoulder-to-shoulder facing backwards, and a wee back-up when I face her. Now and then I do make a request but mainly I’m asking her to stay parked on the mat and not do anything else. It’s important that I keep my body energy low.

As an exercise, you could work out what you usually ask the horse to when you are in each of these body orientations.

The Concept of ‘Feel’

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In the photo above, Bridget can FEEL that Boots is relaxed enough for her to carry on with foot care.

Feel is an aspect of horsemanship that sometimes seems elusive, but it doesn’t have to be. It is closely linked with the idea of empathy. Empathy itself is the ability to ‘feel’ what another being is probably feeling.

When dealing with horses, empathy and feel are involved with everything we do. The more we understand about the nature of horses as a prey species that depends on rapid moving away from danger and group life for security, the more empathetic we can be when our horse shows us that he is uncomfortable about something we are asking him to do.

The more we understand that the horse’s digestive system is geared toward a steady flow of low nutrient forage, the better job we can do at providing such forage. We know that to keep the horse comfortable, we must feed the bacteria in the gut in a way that keeps them happy. 

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Horse have evolved to reqire a constant supply of low-energy forage to keep their microbiome in good working condition.

Horses have small stomachs and a large caecum where bacteria break down the food so it can be absorbed by the horse. These bacteria need a constant flow of food and do not like sudden changes of diet.

The more we understand how the horse’s circulation system depends on slow, regular walking movement over 24 hours, the less inclined we will be to confine horses in boxes. After all, they are not chocolates.

The horse’s feet compress and expand with each step the horse takes. Foot movements work like four extra pumps to help send blood the very long way up the legs back to the heart. 

Horses step along as they graze. The only time they are still is for the few hours that they sleep, which are spread over 24 hours. Consistent movement is an integral part of horse circulation health.

Horses are naturally active on a 24-hour rhythm, not a day/night rhythm like we are. By ‘putting them in at night’ and by ‘feeding them meals’ in one place, we are seriously mucking about with their movement, their blood circulation and their natural biorhythms.

Many horse ‘problems’ stem from unnatural housing and unnatural feeding regimes as well as the damage caused by nailing inflexible steel shoes to a dynamic live foot mechanism.

As we develop empathy and ‘feel’ about what a horse is experiencing in the strange human-based world in which he finds himself, it becomes easier to know what we should do to ensure the horse is as comfortable as possible.

A horse high on adrenalin will find comfort in being allowed to trot or run the adrenalin out of his system. When he becomes high-headed and agitated, a handler with feel gives him the opportunity to move until he can switch from reactive mode to responsive mode.

A strong-spirited, low-energy horse can be extremely frustrating. A handler with feel for this sort of horse will use click&treat motivation as much as possible. Then it is easier to appreciate the reliable nature of this type of horse once he is on-side with the handler rather than trying to outwit him or her.

As soon as we can see our horse, he can see us. As soon as he can see us, he is gauging our energy level. He is ‘feeling’ us. A person with ‘feel’ will be doing the same with the horse – gauging his mood, the way he is moving or grazing, checking for anything out of the ordinary.

As soon as a horse sees us, he is feeling our mood, our energy level and our intent.

When a handler develops ‘feel’ of this sort, s/he is not frustrated by undesirable horse behaviors. S/he seeks the cause(s) and adjusts the horse’s lifestyle plus his Individual Education Program (IEP) to accommodate the horse. This is the essence of a handler’s emotional neutrality. 

Horses don’t do things just to annoy us. At any moment in time the horse is doing what he believes is the best thing do.

With careful education, we can enlarge the horse’s comfort zone and areas of expertise. We can expand his repertoire of things he can do with confidence.

It takes considerable time and effort, but done at the horse’s pace, he will gain skills to help him through his whole life.

27-1: Some concepts of ‘feel’

‘Feel’ comes in many guises.  Here are some of them.

  1. Feeling the difference between reaction and response
  2. Realizing that every horse will feel different, and that to the horse, each handler feels different
  3. Knowing the precise moment to release signal pressure (click&treat)
  4. Acknowledging the difference between teaching and forcing
  5. Knowing when we are pushing too much, resulting in a loss of willingness
  6. Knowing when we are pausing too much, resulting in a loss of interest
  7. Recognizing physical well-being, so that lack of wellness stands out
  8. Finding the ‘balance’ between the two extremes of ‘unbalanced’
  9. Able to cause a subtle shift in the horse so he regains balance
  10. Staying grounded when the horse loses his physical, mental and/or emotional balance
  11. Able to pause for lesson absorption or for a shift in balance
  12. Able to ignore unwanted behavior and quietly ‘re-set’ a task
  13. Understanding a specific horse’s underlying character type
  14. Recognizing when the horse is ready to move on to the next slice of the new learning
  15. Recognizing when the horse-human connection is present and when it is absent
  16. Not taking the horse’s trust for granted
  17. Understanding the lives of horses in the wild; their natural 24 hour and seasonal rhythms
  18. Understanding physical, mental and emotional thresholds of a specific horse
  19. Understanding how habituation works
  20. Understanding how desensitization works
  21. Understanding how sensitization works
  22. Physical feel through the rope
  23. Physical feel through the reins
  24. Physical and emotional feel through the whole body when riding
  25. Feel for two-way communication playing at liberty. If the horse decides to leave, knowing how to motivate him to join up again or deciding to call it a day
  26. Knowing when to stop a session, or a part within the session
  27. Understanding that the way the handler feels is instantly picked up by the horse, good feelings and bad feelings equally.

Developing Our Spatial Awareness

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In the photo above, Boots demonstrates how aware of, and responsive to, a horse can become if our body movements are taught and used with total consistency.

During everyday management of our horses, basic care or getting them ready for a walk or ride, we tend to move in and out of their personal space without thinking about it. When we do ground work, we move into and out of various positions as part of the signals we are giving.

Sometimes we forget that horses notice everything. If we can learn to become more conscious of our positions, we can use ‘position’ as part of our communication package.

If we are aware of, and consistent with, our relative body position, the position itself can become the signal if the horse is closely tuned-in to what we are doing. The horse will become more and more mentally connected to our intent. If we are totally consistent, it will seem as if the horse is reading our mind.

We can approach everything we do with one of two mind-sets. We can see horse behaviors we don’t want as dark problems we have to ‘fix’ or overcome. Or we can recognize that a horse always does what he feels is best at that moment. We can enjoy the challenge of creating a relationship with such a sensitive being by gradually building a mutual communication system.

By increasing our spatial awareness, our signals can become much lighter. The horse begins to find staying ‘in tune’ with us much easier because our body language has less ‘static’ or ‘background noise’ in it.

The more we can eliminate meaningless movement (and chatter), the clearer the horse will find our communication.

Expanding our Concept of ‘Leading’

We can expanded our concept of ‘leading’. When we think of someone leading a horse, we usually visualize a person walking beside a horse or in front with the horse closely behind.

We usually see a lead rope as part of the picture. But when we begin to think deeply about ‘leading’ it is easy to see that there is much more involved.

We can enlarge our concept of “leading” to encompass all the ways that we influence where the horse puts his nose or his feet. That is, when we want to make our idea his idea.

We can be on the ground, riding, using headgear, a neck-rope, or have the horse at liberty. We can be using any combination of body language, shifts in our weight, changes in orientation, rope/reins, and voice. With clicker training, we use a marker signal plus a treat to ‘capture’ or reward specific behaviors that we like.

In other words, everything we do when we want to influence the horse comes under the umbrella of ‘leading’.

We might:

  • Call him out of the paddock.
  • Ask him to wait while we go through a gate first.
  • Ask him to offer his head for haltering.
  • Ask him to back up out of our personal space.
  • Pick up a foot to clean it or trim it or dress a wound.
  • Ask him to step on, over and across unusual surfaces.
  • Ask him to step into and out of a tight spot like a trailer, lane, or water.
  • Ask him to move away from us as in circle work with a reverse round pen or playing at liberty.
  • Ride, or drive with long reins.
  • Ask him to stay tied up or parked.
  • Guide him through an agility obstacle.

In simplest terms, any time we want the horse to do something specific with his nose or his feet, we are ‘leading’ him. ‘Guiding’ may be a better word. We are orchestrating his movement, or lack of movement if we need him to stand still.

There are eight key leading positions which can be static or dynamic. They may flow into each other as we make a request, the horse complies, and we move or stand quietly together.

Horses value clarity of intent. They generally are happy to comply as long as they can understand what we want and we make our request politely and reward a positive effort.

Doing things with our horse is comparable to being on a sailboat. At every moment the sailor is conscious of the wind, the waves, and the relationship of his sails to how the boat is responding. He makes constant adjustments to keep his boat sailing smoothly.

Every moment we are with our horse, we need a similar consciousness of the immediate environment, the distant environment, how we are asking the horse to do what we want and how the horse is responding to our request.

We have to quickly compute the horse’s large responses, plus the nuances of his body language, so we can gauge his emotional, intellectual and physical comfort at the moment. As we get better at seeing all these things, it becomes easier to know the best way forward to yield the result we want.

Pictorial Summary of Eight Leading Positions

Leading Position 1: The horse is in relaxed mode on a morning walk. I carefully keep a drape (smile) in the lead. This is how horses in a herd follow each other during quiet movement from A to B.

Leading Postion 2: Horse keeps his nose and eye just behind the handler’s shoulder.

Leading Position 3: Anywhere between the ears and the shoulder. A versatile position that we can use as our basic leading position for all kinds of things.

Leading Position 4: Behind the withers, alongside the ribs. This position has the horse moving out in front of us like he will be if we ride . Horses used to following behind can find this difficult at first, so we teach it en route to a stationary target where he knows he will earn and click&treat.

Leading Position 5: Beside the horse’s hindquarters. If the horse knows a touch signal on his butt as a ‘walk on’ signal, we have a way of sending him in front of us into a narrow space like a trailer or a gate. Again, teaching this first with a well-known stationary target makes it easy for the horse to understand our intent.

Leading Position 6: Behind the horse: Long-reining is a superb way to teach the horse all about turning and backing signals applied to his head gear via reins from behind, before adding the complication of a rider.

Leading Position 7: Face to face: I asked Boots to wait so we could do a recall. She is just beginning her recall. We also use face to face when we want the horse to back up away from us.

Leading Position 8: Facing the side of the horse. I’m in relaxed mode while waving the flag over her for a Horse Agility task. She is more interested in what is going on next door. Obviously grooming and foot care, tacking up and mounting also require this position.

Conclusion

An awareness of leading positons allows us to include ‘position’ as one of the key elements of any signal we use to communicate with the horse. By dissecting each leading position we can see the training possibilities it presents.

We often drift from one position into another without realizing that the shift can have a lot of meaning for the horse.

How Clicker Training Influences our Training

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Clicker training teaches both the handler and the horse important things.

  1. The horse learns that the click means ‘Yes’ that’s right. That’s what I’m asking you to do.

Here I used click&treat to show Boots that what I want is for her to halt with her back feet in the square of squashed bottles.

2. The handler learns to look for and click&treat the slightest try in the direction of the desired behavior.

When first teaching about mats, we click&treat the slightest interest in the mat, even looking at it or approaching it or sniffing the edge of it.

Clicker training allows us to shape* behavior by ensuring that the horse can be continually successful. We do this by putting the following points into place.

[Terms with an asterisk (*) are further explained in the GLOSSARY section. The link to this is at the tip of the page.]

  1. We start with an end goal clear in our mind.
  2. We note what the horse is able to offer already.
  3. We work toward our goal through a series of ‘successive approximations’* which in plain English means gradual tiny changes toward our end goal.
  4. Each tiny change becomes the horse’s decision. He then ‘owns’ that change because he understands that he made a good choice because it earned him a click&treat.
  5. Unwanted behavior is ignored or re-directed. If we feel unsafe, we return to having a barrier between us and the horse.
  6. If the horse’s behavior makes us feel unsafe or frustrated, it is essential to go back to the place in our training where both horse and handler feel confident and comfortable. Then work forward again from there. If we feel unsafe or annoyed, the horse will pick up our feeling and also feel unsafe and want to leave (if he is in anxious mode) or take over (if he is in confident mode).
  7. It is important to thin-slice* end goals into the tiniest clickable moves that we can think of. It helps a great deal to create a written ‘Individual Education Program’ (IEP)* for each horse. We make revisions as we go along and learn via the feedback from each interaction with the horse. A written plan allows us to look back and review how well (or not) a particular horse responded to each slice of our Program. Being able to look back gives us more feedback so we can adjust the Individual Education Program (IEP).

As a thin-slicing example, let’s look at Pool Noodle Task we did for Horse Agility

The various ‘slices’ of this task build the horse’s confidence to walk through an overlapping horizontal pool noodle arrangement, so the horse is comfortable pushing through them with his chest. Each slice* could take a minute or a day, week, month of short, fun sessions. How long each ‘slice’ takes depends on many factors.

We know we can move on when the horse tells us, through his body language, that he is OK with each slice. Boots is already familiar with this sort of work because she was taught to pull a cart using positive reinforcement. A horse new to these concepts will probably need multiple short sessions for each slice*.

SLICES: The video that follows illustrates the slices* for this task.

1. Investigate the pool noodle (PN) in her own time with nose and feet.

2. Comfortable with PN rubbed all over her body, both sides.

3. Confidently pushes her chest into the PN, held by the handler, as they walk along together.

4. Confidently walks over the PN on the ground.

5. Confidently walks over the PN between the gap created by the uprights for the eventual task set-up of the pool noodles.

6. Confidently walks through the gap with one PN in place at chest height — in both directions.

7. Confidently walks through two PNs in place (slightly overlapping).

8. Waits when asked, while handler walks through the PN, then follows on request.

9. As 8, at liberty.

10. Add more pairs of PN, one at a time, until we have 5 pairs.

11. Trot through.

Every change we make is relevant to the horse. If we change something, we have changed a parameter*, and need to be aware of how the horse might perceive the change.  A parameter is something we keep constant during our interactions with the horse. It becomes a condition or action that the horse can depend on because it stays the same. When we change a parameter, we have to carefully teach the horse what the change means.

Number 8 in the Blog Contents List goes into more detail about parameters.

The parameter here is that when I stand doing nothing, looking nowhere and with my hands crossed across my belly, the horse is required to stand quietly, and hopefully relaxed, waiting for the click – this is DURATION at the halt..

That parameter can be changed/extended to include when I’m in a sitting position.

Confidence with Unusual Surfaces

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The key prerequisite for all the tasks shown in the clips below about UNUSUAL SURFACES is having first mastered smooth ‘walk on’ and ‘halt’ transitions. If we have to first work on this prerequisite, we can do it using target destinations and training ourselves to be really clear when we are requesting ‘walk on’ and when we are requesting ‘halt’. Blog Number 16 in my Blog Contents Quick Links demonstrates. Below is a quick revision.

Walk-on Body Language

These four things are done all together – a ‘multi-signal’.

  1. Breathe in deeply (horses hear this) plus raise your torso and body anergy.
  2. Forward gesture with your outside hand. If you are using a hand-held target to first teach this, as in the video below, the action of moving the target forward into play will soon morph into just an arm signal.
  3. Step off with your ouside foot. It’s easier for the horse to see your outside foot moving forward.
  4. Use your chosen voice signal for ‘walk-on’.

Halt Body Language

These four things are done together – again, a multi-signal.

  1. Drain the energy from your body while you –
  2. Drop your weight down into your butt (as we want the horse to do when he halts)
  3. Breathe out loudly (horses hear this)
  4. Use your ‘halt’ or ‘whoa’ voice signal

The following clip was made to support relaxed foot care, so there is a bit at the very end about backing up to shift the horse’s weight

When ‘walk-on’ and ‘halt’ are solidly in place, we can carry on with unusual surfaces.

Thin-Slicing the 1m Board

Thin-Slicing Walking on Plastic Bottles

More About Unusual Surfaces and Backing Up

Other related blogs: You can find the links easily on my Blog Contents Quick Links page.

  • No. 9: Mats: Parking or Stationing and Much More
  • No. 10: ‘Zero Intent’ and ‘Intent’
  • No. 17: Destination Training
  • No. 26: Getting a Smooth Halt in Many Situations
  • No. 33: Willing Response to a Halt Voice Signal
  • No. 51: Reverse Pens
  • No. 68: 20 Steps Exercise
  • No. 101: Precision Leading

Also, all the routines in my book, Companion Horse Training Using Positive Reinforcement, refine the skills of walking with a handler. The book works through a series of activities that require minimal equipment (set of rags and a fence). They are designed to make the horse ‘handy’ and happy following our clear body language including turns and backing up.

Moving Away From Touch or Gesture

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In the photo above, Boots is lifting her foot in response to Bridget’s arm signal gesture and the intent of her body language. It makes hoof care so much easier.

Shaping with Touch Guidance

Research on dopamine release shows that knowing how to avoid or decrease a stimulus we don’t like gives a ‘reward hit’ to the brain, similar to how achieving something desirable feels rewarding. For example; stopping in time for a red light gives an instant feeling of relief and accomplishment.

This is why the training system made popular by Pat and Linda Parelli gave such ‘good’ results in teaching horses how to respond to human requests. People who have been considered ‘good’ horsemen over the years have used the same principle for millenia.

The principle is basically this: Use a consistent touch/gesture signal and remove the touch/gesture the instant the horse complies even just a little bit. Build from there with repeats until the horse responds readily because it understands the cue and the system. This is negative reinforcement – called negative because the touch or gesture energy is removed when the horse responds. The term ‘negative’ is here used in the mathematical sense. It is not related to it’s other common meaning of something ‘bad’.

BUT: It takes considerable skill in reading horses – to know when the horse remains in the learning zone, i.e. under threshold (see Number 107 in the Blog Quick Links for more about this) or has been pushed beyond threshold. Is the horse responding or reacting? If the handler is not sensitive and/or lacks experience helped by a good teacher, it can end up with a confused and unhappy horse. Also, the touch or gesture signal needs to be totally consistent so the horse can depend on it being the same each time.

Pressure is not a dirty word. Horses understand pressure. They use it with each other all the time. It is the nature of the pressure, plus when it is removed, that makes or breaks good training to create a horse confident with people.

Using touch/gesture pressure followed by a click&treat immediately the horse responds, is an essential step in teaching a horse to be resilient in a variety of human environments. We can’t know the future, If our personal situation changes, the horse may have to go elsewhere. If confronted by flood, fire, earthquake, the horse may need to be moved quickly.

Such teaching with negative reinforcement, backed instantly by positive reinforcment, is often called ‘combined reinforcement’. Some people refer to it as negative reinforcement ‘with a cherry on top’, as a way of discounting it. Yet, if we use a neck rope or headgear or our legs for riding, we usually want the horse to move away from our touch. It’s convenient to be able to touch the horse’s chest lightly to get a back up. Or to touch his leg for a lift if we want to tend the hoofs.

Gesture

Horses interacting with each other use gesture as a first communication. If the annoying horse does not move away, the gesture escalates gradually via touch with nose, teeth or hooves. The first suggestion might be a just a ‘look’ or an ear/tail flick. Play between youngsters is full of touch and gesture.

Because horse are super sensitive to movement, they easily pick up the meaning of a specific gesture if we use it with total consistency.

Once a horse understands our meaning:

  • Reaching down to his foot will have him lift a leg.
  • Fingers raised in front of him (far enough back to be out of his blind spot) and tapping the air at his eye level will have him back up.
  • A light touch or gesture to his shoulder will have him move it into a turn on the haunches.
  • A light touch or gesture (or even a focussed look) to the side of his rump will have him move it away into a turn on the forehand.
  • A light touch at (or gesture toward) his ribs will have him sidestep.
  • A light touch to his chest or nose will have him back up.

I taught moving the front end away into a turn on the haunches with touch to the neck and shoulder, but eventually only my focus and a gesture were enough of a cue.

Likewise, I used touch to teach a signal for moving the hind end away from me, but after a while my body orientation. intent and gesture, even from quite a distance, was enough of a cue, even when her front feet were on a pedestal.

A simple arm/hand gesture is enought to tell Boots that she will earn a click&treat for backing off the pedestal.

We spent several weeks perfecting backing between two tall objects at greater and greater distances. In the first photo I am looking toward her right butt to get it to straighten out so she doesn’t knock the barrel. No doubt this one earned a triple treat or a jackpot.

If you have an interest in seeing how we reached this stage in the photo above, I filmed most of the days we worked on this. We did a few repeats over many, many days. Here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHJTeGrtF98Pjy3zvmPhgBxBP6V3lwhkh

First we learned sidestepping along a rail with touch to shoulder and butt in rhythm. Once she had the idea, a light touch to the ribs became the cue. Eventually it only needed a gesture and my focus toward her ribs.

Eventually we didn’t need a rail to do side-stepping, which is a good suppling exercise.

Here I’m using a gesture as well as the idea of ‘follow the feel of the rope’ to teach a twirl. (See Blog Number 116 in the Quick Links.) Confidence with ropes touching the legs is another essential skill we should teach in a gradual, nuanced way. (Not starting with the above photo!). Before long, a voice and gesture signal were enough information for her and she would happily insert a couple of twirls into a recall. It became one of her favorite things to show off. Ample click&treat during the teaching process made it a favorite.

Here we are both doing a twirl or spin during our dancing routine. We are both turning to our right and seem to be in step. As she comes around I will click&treat. What began as a ‘follow the feel of the rope’ exercise morphed into just a combined hand and voice signal at liberty. It’s easiest for the horse if they are already in motion in a recall.

All these skills take time to develop, but are so much fun.

Guided Shaping of Voluntary Touch

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Guided shaping is when we set up the environment in a way that encourages the horse to offer a behaviour we would like to develop – in this case putting his nose on an object. We may have the horse on a halter and lead and give him a few ‘pointers’ along the way. The aim is to make it as easy as possible for the horse to figure out what will earn the clcik&treat (i.e., the behaviour we want.)

Here I’ve set up the environment for teaching relaxation in tight spaces – essential as a prerequisite for trailer loading. She is wearing a halter and lead, as we’ll usually have to do when trailer-loading. I’ve asked Boots to walk into the ‘dead end’ space where there is a nose target (white bottle) and given her a ‘wait’ signal. Then I walk behind her, then forward to her front again, before a click&treat. I want to be able to walk to the back and forward again at least three times without her wanting to back out, before I ask her to back out. When we load into most trailers we have to walk to the back (and out of the horse’s view) to shut the tailgate.

Shaping ‘Touch’ with Your Nose’

Targeting many different things to earn a click&treat does a lot to build a horse’s confidence. We usually start as in the fourth photo above, with a handheld target, and teach a ‘touch’ voice signal once the horse understands that putting his nose on an object will earn a click&treat.

Teaching confident touching of the nose to unusual objects and obstacles at our suggestion, is a good way to begin building confidence with new things. The more different positive ‘touch’ experiences the horse has, (built up with a little bit each session) the bolder he becomes.

If the horse is wary about putting his nose on the object you’ve chosen as your first target, It can help to rub fresh grass juices on it, or a wet peppermint, or a slice of apple, in order to increase their curiosity.

Once the horse understand the ‘touch’ voice signal using his nose, we can expland to touching other body parts to a target.

Teaching TOUCH with Other Body Parts

The goal behaviour here is to raise her knee to a target. This is an excellent skill to teach to develop the horse’s ability to shift his weight to achieve confident balance on three legs. It is a game changer when it comes to hoof care, because lack of balance on three legs training like this is the root cause of many horses’ struggle with hoof care.

The task in the photo above was begun by touching the target to the horse’s knee, click&treat. After a while, I held the target a fraction above the knee and the horse quickly learned to lift her leg to make the touch connection: click&treat. Then I could hold the target further up and she quickly learned to raise her leg higher. After a while I added our verbal signal (touch) to the action, and could simply use my hand as the target.

Eye to Hand

Boots targetting my hand with her eye. Very useful if we ever have to treat eye infection or injury. She also learned to target her ear so my hand, for the same reason. Some process as described above: touch eye/ear gently – click&treat. After a while, hold your hand a tiny distance away and wait for the horse to make the contact – click&treat.

Chin to Hand

Targetting her chin to my hand. Same process as above.

Using the process described, we can teach lifting the hind feet to a target (front feet = Number 59 in the Blog Contents Quick Links, and hind feet = Number 74) , moving the shoulder toward our hand (Number 27 in the Blog Contents Quick Links) , moving the hindquarters toward our hand (Number 28 in the Blog Contents Quick Links). Stepping back to touch our hand with his withers or his rump.

Stretching the neck to touch a target.

Neck Bending: I started by asking for just a slight bend to touch the target. Then as she understood the task, I gradually asked for a bit more.

Butt Bingo

Backing the butt to touch a solid upright: We started with safe fences, walls and hedges, then graduated to barrels, big cones, trees and things like this 4×4 post. It’s an important exercise if we want to put our horse in a trailer and close up behind. Here she looks rather proud of herself while she waits for me to deliver the treat after the click. We did one or two repeats of this, often, over a long time. It was a prerequisite for backing between the shafts of a cart, as in the photo below.

If we want to teach backing between shafts in preparation to teaching driving, we can use simulations like this that will come apart if the horse gets startled. I taught backing butt against many safe solid objects before adding the pretend shafts.

Months of preparation, with many stages, which started with just targeting all parts of the cart, allowed hitching up to be a relaxed process.

What will your horse voluntarily touch?

Have you taught ‘voluntary touch’ with any of his body parts other than his nose?

The blog below looks at Seeking the Horse’s Consent Signal, (also often called a Start Buttons or similar), which can fascilitate confident touching of various body parts to our hand.

Seeking the Horse’s Consent Signals

Following the Feel of a Touch Signal

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Application

In the photo above, we are doing a long-reining ‘change direction’ exercise. Because Boots knows how to ‘follow the feel’ of the slightest touch on the halter, we can long-rein a cloverleaf pattern using four rails. I only need to change my hand position slightly to give her the directional signals.

In the photo we’ve started at rail 2, will wallk across rail 4, arc right to walk over rail 1 followed by rail 3 (plus the other two rails lying there); arc right to walk over rail 4 followed by rail 2. Then arc right over rails 3 and 1; then arc right again and we’ve done the last leaf of the pattern and are in front of rail 2 ready to repeat turning to the left this time.

Following the feel of a touch signal is an essential skill the horse needs for leading with a rope and for using reins either riding or long-reining. And it is especially important if we go places where we have to tie up the horse.

Since we have no control of what the future may bring, for ourselves or the horse, it’s a skill we must teach early and to a high standard, so that in a situation of stress, or new ownership, the horse knows this response well.

With Positive Reinforcement

Ideally we teach a horse at liberty with targets, using body language, gesture and voice signals. This is what is shown in the four short video clips that follow.

When the horse shows us that he is ready, we add halter with rope and repeat the exact same exercises. In this way we teach that rope or rein pressure means move toward the pressure, so releasing it. The voice and hand gesture signals are excellent aids if we want to eventually ride bridle-less.

Teaching Soft Rope or Rein Response.

These clips look at teaching soft rope/rein response with the horse standing still. Once he understands this well, we introduce walking toward stationary targets at liberty, adding gesture and voice signals for ‘walk on’ and ‘whoa’, and changes of direction. Then we add the rope. By using our body language and voice signals, the rope basically stays slack most of the time. When we do use it to indicate change of direction, it takes just the hint of a touch.

It’s important to stay with each step of the training until the horse is comfortable with it, and responding ‘correctly’ each time. Be aware that external distractions can take his attention. If that happens, simply wait until his attention turns back to you. Boots, in the clips, was very focussed on what was earning each treat, and hightly experienced with clicker training.

Prerequisites

  1. If you don’t already have your horse loving to target mats with his feet, you start with targeting mats first (Number 9 in the Blog Contents Quick Links).
  2. if you have been using a long-handled target, get the horse hooked on a short, hand-held target.
  3. You may need to first spend time getting the horse comfortable standing in a corner by using your hand-held target. Standing in a corner makes it easier for the horse to understand the option (turning just his head toward you) that you want him to choose.
  4. The Anchor Task: in this case the the anchor task is horse standing beside you with his head forward. It is the key part of this exercise. It has to be solid before you begin asking for the ‘turn head’ request. It must be kept solid throughout the teaching exercises. Later, once you are moving with the horse, it’s no longer needed as much.

Clip 1

Clip 2

Clip 3

Clip 4

Let me know if you have a go at teaching this, and how it is going. You can do it with a horse that already leads well, or with a horse new to training.

Free-Shaping

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Free-shaping means clicking and treating the moment the horse naturally displays a behaviour you want to encourage. The click&treat encourages the horse to repeat the behaviour that earned the treat.

The first free-shaping exercise most handers use is to hold (or set) out a target and wait for the horse to investigate it with his his nose = Click&Treat. Most horses pick this up quite readily. Many equine clicker trainers use it to teach their horse the meaning of the ‘click’ or whatever marker sound they are using. My older mare (with a chequered background before I got her) took nine short sessions over a week before she made the connection between her nose touching the target, the click, and the treat that followed.

Because it is the horse’s choice to do the task, they learn it readly because it was their idea in the first place. It gives them a sense of ‘agency’ – being in control. Like us, horses like to be in control of their lives.

Boots has to her nose on a stationary target. I clicked as her nose touched it and I walked to her to deliver the treat. Once the horse loves to do this for a click and treat, we can put such objects all around our training area and walk or trot between them to earn a click&treat at eachone. Also useful for ‘destinations’ when we begin leaving home. We can use destinations for groundwork and riding.

Using a hand-held target, It’s always wise to start out with ‘protected contact‘, i.e., the horse on the other side of a barrier. Until we begin clicker training, we have no idea how the horse will react to food treats from our hand. This is also the time to try out different treats .

Here I’ve created a barrier in a corner, which is another option if you don’t have a suitable fence handy, but with a new horse – maybe make the person’s space a bit bigger!

Your safety barrier for PROTECTED CONTACT does not necessarily have to be fancy.

If you can use electic fence tape for training, make sure the power is turned off during training time.

In this clip, I’m free-shaping head lowering.

Eventually we added a verbal signal, and a body language signal, so when I bowed, she bowed.

The following clip shows an alternative to hand-feeding while teaching the TARGET = CLICK = TREAT process.

In the next clip, I free-shaped step aerobics.

It’s also a possible way to build confidence with any tight space or a trailer.

In the next clip we are doing the 20 Steps Exercise. Depending on your starting point, it could take a few or many short sessions to get 20 smooth steps with one click&treat at the end. All you need is for the horse to willingly walk one step with you, click&treat, and work forward from that.

The next clip is a very early lesson in free-shaping Boots’ confidence moving along with a bicycle.

The following clip with the bicycle is much later.

The next clip is a demo of tummy crunches.

I learned this from Alex Kurland.

1. I began with the horse behind a low barrier. I stood at neutral (zero intent = Number 10 in the Blog Contents Quick Links) and watched casually (not staring at the horse) with a relaxed stance, watching to click&treat any upward or backward shift of weight.

2. I did this IN THE SAME SPOT for a minute or two once or twice a day, mainly right before afternoon feeding time. And as a ‘last thing’ at the end of a play session. Having usual times in the same place seems to make the horse look forward to having ‘another go’.

3. Once we were getting a purposeful weight shift back because she realized that’s what earned the click&treat, I sat down to bring the horse’s head a bit lower. Previously we had ignored head position as the horse was experimenting with different possibilities. When I sat down, she lowered her head position because the treats were offered lower. This developed over months and months.

4. At some point, the crunches became a part of her personal repertoire because she would offer them if she wanted to initiate an interaction. At this point I added a verbal signal/cue.

5. I’d never do more than about what is on this clip at one time.

6. Eventually I could ask for the crunches standing her shoulder, her butt and behind her, using the verbal signal (zzzip) plus my body language of leaning backwards. We had such a long and strong history of reinforcement that she readily adjusted to my different positions. She happily did it with a rider aboard as well.

Free-Shaping Boots doing a STRETCH:

Once Boots realized that her ‘downward dog’ stretch earned a click&treat every time she did it, she offered it frequently. I initially free-shaped it by noticing that she often stretched like this after getting up from a nap. I managed to ‘capture’ the behavior two days in a row, and she then began to offer it often enough so I could put a verbal cue to it – ‘Stretch’.

What sort of things have you free-shaped?

Part 2 of Relaxed Foot Care – the Hind Feet

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When the horse is comfortable picking up the front feet on request, we can proceed in a similar way with the hind feet.  We start as usual with the horse willingly targeting a familiar mat and able to stay parked on it.

Then we make sure the horse is comfortable being rubbed all over with a body extension, paying special attention to the belly and hind legs.

If the horse expresses concern about being touched with a body extension or with having a rope swung lightly around his hind legs, we’ve found a big training hole. It’s essential to go back and build the horse’s confidence about standing still while we do things around him.

Before we proceed with picking up feet, we need the horse calm and relaxed having his legs brushed with a soft brush right down to his feet. We want him to remain calm and relaxed when we rub and massage his legs all the way down.

To develop the idea of lifting a hind leg on signal, we can touch the hock gently with a target such as a pool noodle or a tomato stake with bubble wrap taped around it. Click&treat as we touch the hock. Repeat until we can hold the target a little above the hock and the horse lifts his leg to touch the target because he’s figured out that’s what causes the click&treat. Be careful to click as the leg is coming up, not on its way down.

The hock is a convenient point at which to teach a touch signal for lifting the hind feet. Bridget has asked Boots to target her hock to the body extension which is bubble wrap taped to a tomato stake.

Eventually we just have to point to the hind leg we want lifted.

Once leg lifting is well established, we generally use touch when we want to do foot care, like a farrier or hoof trimmer would expect. We always start with our hand at the withers, and run it across the horse’s back and down to his hock. This gives the horse time to shift his weight so he CAN pick up the leg on that side.

Bridget is running her hand down to the hock. Touching the hock is our signal to ask for a foot lift.

By the time Bridget reaches the hock, Boots has already taken her weight off that leg so she can pick it up and stay balanced.

Lifting feet is all about weight shifts. It needs to be taught carefully and systematically, making sure that the horse understands each slice of the process. By teaching targeting a body extension first, the horse figures out how to shift his weight and balance on three legs without other complications thrown in – like the foot being held, cleaned, trimmed.

Bridget has a willing hind leg lift and the horse looks balanced. Gradually, one second at a time, we built duration of keeping the foot up so we can clean, inspect, rasp, spray it.

Teaching relaxation with a hoof stand is the next set of slices. It can be helpful to have a calm helper to deliver the treats when you click.

Here I’m working on duration having the foot up and forward. For hoof officianados, you might notice how much better Boots’ heel buttresses are compared to earlier pictures.

Teaching the foot to lie backwards on the hoofjack. Note she is not standing squarely in front, which makes it harder for her.

It can be helpful, timewise, to be able to clean all the feet from one side. We draw the far foot, once offered, across behind the near leg.

Checklist

No.DETAILSTick
Prerequisites
1Handler & horse are clicker-savvy 
2Leads easily, halts promptly & backs up readily 
3Horse can park & be rubbed all over 
4Foot awareness with mats & other exercises 
5Brush legs 
6Rub legs with hands 
7Comfortable ‘foot care’ spot sorted 
8Stand squarely 
Major Slices for Building Front Foot Behaviors
1Lift knee to target an object: click for foot rising 
2Lifts knee to hand 
3Add in consistent voice signal 
4Handler faces tail to ask for knee to target hand 
5Catch & hold foot briefly: click before releasing 
6Hold foot for one second 
7Hold foot for two seconds 
8Gradually hold foot longer, one second at a time 
9Clean foot with stiff brush 
10Clean foot with hoof pick 
11Teach spray bottle confidence 
12Set foot in sling (or on knee) 
13Build duration of foot in sling or on knee 
14Bring foot forward onto a hoof stand or stump 
15Build duration of hoof brought forward 
16Back foot off hoof stand (no click&treat, just praise) 
Major Slices for Building Hind Foot Behaviors
1Confident with body extension rubbed over legs 
2Confident with brush and hands rubbing legs 
3Touch cap of hock with body extension for lift 
4Add voice signal 
5Lift hind foot with pointing 
6Run hand from withers to cap of hock – relaxed 
7Lifts foot with tap on hock & voice signal 
8Hold foot briefly; click; go to head to give treat 
9Hold foot one second; click; go to head to treat 
10Hold foot two seconds; click; go to head to treat 
11Gradually hold foot longer one second at a time 
12Clean hoof with brush 
13Clean hoof with hoof pick 
14Spray hoof 
15Clean both hind feet from one side 
16Rest hind foot in a sling 
17Bring hind foot forward onto a hoof stand 
18Build duration on the hoof stand 
19Teach ‘back’ signal for foot off stand (no click&treat) 
Generalizations
1Familiar mat in new spots 
2Familiar spot without mat 
3New spots without mat 
4Away from home 

Number 74 in the Blog Contents Quick Links (at the top of the page) takes you to the blog about ‘Counting with the Hind Feet’, which goes into detail. Here is the video from that blog, which is a quick summary of a year’s work.

Part 1 of Relaxed Foot Care: Front Feet

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In the photo above, Boots noticed that Bridget has the hoofpick and spray bottle in her hand, so she knows it is foot care time, and offers her foot.

‘All behaviors rest on an emotional ediface.’ I don’t know the source of this quote, but it underpins just about everything.

Our aim is to have the horse confidently lift each foot on signal and keep it up for as long as we need it.

Environment:

  • Work in a space familiar to the horse, where he is usually relaxed; buddies in view but not able to interfere. Horse is not hungry.
  • Horse at liberty or wearing halter and lead (not tied up). Halter and lead allow us to help him stand square. If the horse can’t stand quietly without being tied, that is a skill to work on first. A familiar mat gives the horse a destination spot for standing quietly. See Number 9 in the Blog Contents Quick Links ( at top of page) if you need to establish confident parking on a mat first.
  • Ensure the horse is warmed up a bit so it is easier for him to stand on three legs.
  • Ensure the horse is in a learning frame of mind. If not, encourage activity to use up adrenalin or do relaxing activities he knows well before starting.

It pays to remember that if you are nervous about picking up a horse’s foot, your anxiety pales into insignificance compared with how worried a horse might be if he has not been introduced to foot care with thought to his feelings.  

Some horses may have had a bad experience with a particular leg. Be aware that a reluctance to lift a foot, or keep it up, can be due to pain from an old injury, current sore muscles/joints and/or arthritis. 

Horses know that if their feet are compromised, they are close to death. It pays to teach ‘picking up feet’ carefully and thoroughly and not leave it to other people. By going through all the steps outlined below, we can also overcome our own natural fear and anxiety about getting hurt.

Our first job is to make sure we can rub and massage the front legs down to the heel with the horse able to stand still in a relaxed manner, totally confident that we are not going to hurt him. With some horses, to keep everything safe and low key, it’s a good idea to use a body extension to rub the legs. We can keep our body erect, stay relaxed, and use a high rate of reinforcement. If we are tense, the horse will be tense.

I’m using a pool noodle to get the horse used to having things rubbed on her legs, the back and front of each leg as well as up and down.

The rate of reinforcement must allow the horse to be continually successful. At first it might be a barely touch of the body extension to a front leg. We start where the horse is, and work forward from that point. See Number 5 in the Blog Contents Quick Links (link at the top of the page) for The Four Stages of Learning.

Use advance and retreat. That means start up high and move down a leg until one of you feels uncomfortable. When you reach either you or the horse’s threshold of comfort, retreat by moving back up to the withers, relax, then advance again. This is called a re-set. You know you have reached a threshold if you feel tension in the horse’s body or you begin to feel anxious or uncomfortable.

Every time we do a re-set, we have a new opportunity to clarify our signal and our intent.

The mindmap below looks at the the tasks involved with front foot hoof care. Note that the first stage, rubbing the length of the leg, is omitted – my mistake.

Stand Square: the prerequisite task of stepping forward and backward, one step at a time, ensures that the horse understands our request to stand squarely. It helps if we routinely ask for square halts in a variety of situations. Each square or almost square halt, on request, earns a click&treat.

Using a mat makes it easier because, as the mat-savvy horse approaches the mat, he knows he will halt with his front feet on the mat. In other words, he has time to mentally and physically prepare himself and often halts squarely to earn his click&treat. Remember, he has four limbs to organize!

When asking the horse to square up, slightly tilt his head away from the front foot you want him to move. Moving his head away frees up the shoulder so he can move the leg.

Knee-Lifts to Touch a Target

Always start by asking the horse to stand squarely. This will help him remain balanced when he lifts a leg.

If we touch a target item gently to the front of the horse’s knee, accompanied by a click&treat, most clicker-savvy horses will quickly learn to raise the knee to touch the target. First, touch it to his knee, click& treat. When that is well established, hold the target a little tiny bit above the knee. He will work out that raising his knee touches the target and earns a click&treat. If he doesn’t, go back to touching the knee gently, click&treat until he makes the connection.

A pool noodle, a plastic bottle attached to a light stick (e.g. bamboo), or a light stick with bubble wrap taped around it, are the sorts of items we can use for knee targets.

#89 HorseGym with Boots demonstrates. Work with just the front feet until you are both totally solid with them. More detail about hind feet will be in the next blog.

Front Feet

If you’ve taught your horse to target his knee to your hand when you stand near him, facing him, he will have already shifted his weight so he can lift his foot, and you can catch hold of his foot while it is in the air.

Some people choose to touch the chestnut as a signal for lifting the foot. If you start with your hand at the withers each time, the horse will most likely soon learn to shift his weight and be already lifting his foot when you reach the chestnut.

It can be handy to teach a concurrent verbal signal such as, ‘Lift’. This is also helpful when we ask the horse to step cleanly over a rail, forwards and backwards.

Before we can gain the horse’s confidence about trusting his foot to our care, we must build up our own confidence. The best way is to do it in short, 3-minute segments, working through a series of thin-sliced questions that might look like the list below for the front feet.

As you play with the slices listed below, you will be collecting feedback on how you feel about each slice, and how your horse feels about each slice. You stay with each slice until the answer to the question is, ‘Yes.’

It could take five minutes to get all ‘yes’ answers with one horse. With another horse, it could take a week or a month of brief 3-minute sessions to get all ‘yes’ answers.

Remember, warmed up muscles will find the strain of standing on three legs and holding up a leg easier.

The rate of reinforcement must allow the horse to be continually successful with what you are asking.

  1. Can I: gently & confidently rub his leg & foot all over with my body extension (stick, pool noodle)? If you can, practice on an experienced horse (or practice on a person) to get the feel for it, if this is new to you.
  2. Will my horse: let me rub his leg and foot with my body extensions? Make sure he is already comfortable with being rubbed over the rest of his body.
  3. Can I: confidently rub his leg & foot with my hand? Start at his withers and rub down only as far as you feel comfortable at that time. Over many tiny sessions, you will get the confidence to rub all the way down.
  4. Will my horse: let me rub his leg and foot with my hand?
  5. Can I: get him to stand so he is balanced before I want to pick up a foot? Have I taught him how to line up squarely to target his front feet to a mat, and/ormove forward and back one step at a time? If not, you want to teach that first.
  6. Will my horse pick up a foot when I ask him to target my hand with his knee … OR slices 7.-9.
  7. Will my horse: take the weight off his right front leg when I run my hand from his withers and down his leg?
  8. Can I: confidently ask him to pick up his foot by touching his chestnut?
  9. Will my horse: pick up his foot when I touch the the chestnut?
  10. Can my horse: keep his balance okay standing on three legs?
  11. Will my horse: let me hold his foot for one second before I release it back to the ground? (Click just before you release, then move to his head to deliver the treat.)
  12. Can I: let my hand and arm holding the foot swing freely with any movement the horse makes with his leg until it stops swinging, at which point I click, gently release the foot and move forward to deliver the treat? (I do this only if I’m feeling safe.) If you feel whole body tension in the horse wanting his foot back, I would release the foot and work on earlier steps. The horse has an emotional block somewhere and we need to winkle it out. (All behaviors rest on an emotional ediface.)
  13. Will my horse: gradually let me hold the foot longer and longer (one second at a time) and stay relaxed until I click&treat?
  14. Will my horse:  hold his foot up in a relaxed way for as long as I need it up, waiting for the click&treat?

Boots is targeting her knee to my hand. For the next slice, I would change my body orientation to stand beside her shoulder so when she lifts her foot it is easy for me to ‘catch’ it in my hand.

I build duration of keeping the foot up one second at a time, before I release it gently, followed by a click&treat.

It’s also possible to build duration by reaching back to deliver the treat while holding up the foot. Some people set up a raised tub into which they can toss the treat.

To Make Your Job Much Easier…..

Check out Number 59 in the Blog Contents Quick Links (see top of page), for Counting with the Front Feet. This exercise has the added benefit of developing the horse’s skill of organising his weight to stand on three legs, to a high level.

Reading Ears

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It’s hard for us to understand how much better horses hear than we do. Our sounds or words easily become signals if we use them consistently. Sounds can also become environmental signals the horse adopts according to the routines of his captivity.

  • house door opening if the horse lives near the handler’s house
  • person’s car arriving at the paddock (with special feed, treats or anticipated adventures)
  • rattle of food buckets or pellets in a tin
  • whistle to recall for a treat or a feed

When we use Clicker Training, we refine this response to sound when we use a click or other unique sound to mark the precise response we want.

Horse ears have ten muscles each, which means they can move their ears almost 180 degrees. The shape of the ear allows horses to capture more sound, and from further away, than our ears. On top of that, horses can pick up sounds at higher and lower frequencies than we can.

The shape and mobility of the two ears allows accurate gauging of the direction of a sound. Sound and vision are obviously linked, but sound serves better when vision is restricted. Due to the horse’s ecosystem role as a prey animal, he is wired to notice any sound, especially sneaky, sudden, or unusual sounds.

Horses have strong emotional responses to sounds. Anxious type horses will find the sounds and tense atmosphere of shows and events over-stimulating and problematic. It helps to gradually habituate them to this sort of environment rather than depend on flooding (overstimulation until the horse ‘shuts down’) to get a horse more able to cope with noisy, unfamiliar surroundings.

Ears, it seems, can give us a large range of signals, ranging from curiosity, acceptance, concentration, irritation, fear, dominance and submission. All we have to do is work out which is which – and when – for each horse in our life!

It seems that horses also pick up vibrations from the ground through their feet or through their whiskers and teeth while grazing. No doubt this relates to the ‘early warning’ horses and other animals can give us about earthquakes and other catastrophes. It might also be why they are waiting at the gate before they can see our car. But that could also be a function of their hearing.

Ear postions might be categorized as:

Alert — forward, scanning in observant or anxious mode.

Alert ears. Probably she is watching for someone to appear with treats to entertain her.

Curious/Interested — forward with head movement up or down to focus the eyes.

Because the lens in the horse’s eye does not adjust like ours, horses have to lower and raise their head to get a good focus on an object – like a person wearing bifocal or trifocal glasses.

Attentive — total focus on what she is doing.

She is extremely focussed on the task. It has her full attention.

Back/Sideways – Tension or Anxious — only the context of the situation and the rest of the horse’s body language can tell us if the ears are back due to anxiety (very stiff), or back/to the side because the horse is strongly focusing on a task, causing natural tension (not as stiff). See also, ‘Working Ears’ below.

Ears are sideways and lower lip is a little bit tight, so Boots is putting a lot of concentration into this task which she is just learning. There is some tension, but the rest of her body language does not, which suggests that she is in focus mode, rather than anxious.

Back/Sideways – Floppy — a chilled out, resting, or casually moseying along horse often has the ears half back in a relaxed state. 

Smoky is dozing beside a favorite person. His eyes are partly closed and his lower lip is floppy. His ears would be soft for the ear-bending test described below.

Pinned — truly pinned ears are a very strong signal that all is not well, and other action will follow if things don’t change immediately. Some horses lay their ears almost flat when they are strongly focusing on a complex task.  This can be more like a ‘frown’ of concentration and we must be careful not to presume the ears are pinned and take evasive/inhibitory action that will confuse the horse who was just busy thinking his way through a problem. 

Truly pinned ears. Boots is giving Smoky a clear message that his presence near the treats is not wanted. Her next move, if there wasn’t a fence between them, would be to lunge at him.

We should always give the horse the benefit of any doubt and read the overall situation and body language rather than just the ears. Truly pinned ears are unmistakable, once seen. They are usually accompanied by a very angry face overall and are often followed by snaky-neck movement toward the cause of annoyance, lunging at the intruder, or wheeling around ready to a kick.

Working Ears:  Back or Sideways, – Focused/Thinking — horses often put their ears to the back or side when they are in ‘thinking mode’.

We often see these sorts of ear positions in horses doing their ‘job’ of the moment; e.g., cutting horses, calf-roping horses, dressage horses, horses doing an agility course or a gymnastic routine.

Because they are carrying out a learned pattern in a known environment, their mind is focused on the task at hand and the precise signals coming from their handler.  Their ears often resemble the ears of a dog working sheep. Back and full of concentration on the job.

Such ears may resemble that of an irritated or disgruntled horse, but if the horse is doing his ‘job’ and his overall tension and body expression suggest that he is focused, we are probably seeing his personal ‘working’ expression. 

Often, as soon as the horse has finished a part of his ‘job’, the ears pop forward before the next obstacle or cow or whatever.

It’s helpful to watch video clips focusing just on the horse’s ears. Usually they are constantly in motion and give us an insight into what may be going on in the horse’s mind. Obviously, we can never be sure, but we can get an idea. 

The Ear Test:

The Ear Test: how easily we can bend the tip of the ear is a good indicator of the                        horse’s overall tension or relaxation.

If we can easily bend the tip of the ear, the horse is generally relaxed. If the ear is too stiff to bend easily, it tells us that the horse has tension in his whole body and lacks confidence or is anxious at the moment.

Each horse’s ear expressions will follow the same general pattern, but at the same time be unique, so we should be careful about generalizing too much between horses.

Ear Expression Summary Chart

More about ears

A. Ear differences between mares and geldings/stallions.

It’s interesting to study the ear differences between mares and geldings or stallions.

I watched YouTube clips of the Pignon brothers Frederic and Jean-Francois. Frederic and his wife, Magali Delgado, were the original stars of Cavalia (2003-2009).

Below is the link if you would like to watch Frederic playing with three of his young stallions. It is interesting to note the way they respond to Frederic’s energy levels. He uses a body extension to help communicate with the horses.

https://youtu.be/w1YO3j-Zh3g (accessed 15.03.24)

In another clip, Jean-Francois Pignon played with a troupe of mares.  

https://youtu.be/qncbDfT5KsU (accessed 15.03.24)

I didn’t know they were mares when I first watched, but their behavior was so different from that of Frederic’s stallions, I presumed they were mares. The message was in the ears.

The mares were constantly using their ears to maintain their individual bubbles while performing their routines which often had them very close together.

Mares in a natural herd situation determine much of the social structure of their group. Social order within a group needs a ready language with all sorts of nuances. Mare’s ears have these nuances.

Mares’ job of giving birth and caring for their foals means that they need to cultivate detailed knowledge of their environment when they live in the wild.

  • Best grazing spots
  • Safe water
  • The nature and habits of the local predators
  • Health of the herd stallion
  • Bachelor groups in the vicinity
  • Intrinsic awareness of their present rank in the group of mares

Horses give way to horses above them in rank, and they expect horses lower in rank to give way to them, just like people do in many situations. Mares need to keep track of many things.

Mares have a full complement of hormones and hormonal cycles. In wild herds, their position in the herd is closely linked with survival of themselves and their offspring during the annual hard times of summer drought and winter cold and snow.

We often like to romanticize wild horses, but there is not much romantic about a life lived in the environmental margins of the deserts, plains and mountains where they manage to survive.

Having had mares and geldings, I have found a distinct difference. All other things being equal (which they never are) mares tend to be more independent-minded, geldings more easy-going. That’s a generalization, but it’s not a coincidence that Cavalia uses only geldings and stallions for their shows. 

B: Ears and Horse Character Type

The detail about how a specific horse uses his ears will also relate to the innate character type of the horse.

We can never put horses into labelled pigeonholes, but often it is helpful to describe what we see and create categories so we can communicate our descriptions to each other more easily.

One way of categorizing horse character types is to look at their tendency to move their feet. A strong need to move suggests an extroverted character type. Less tendency to move suggest a more introverted character.

Another way of looking at horse character types is to note whether the horse is innately bold and curious or if he tends to stay out of the limelight and easily becomes anxious.

Quite likely, an extroverted bold horse will want to know where the party is and get going with it. He’ll often show forward, inquisitive ears. If the handler is not providing fun, he is inclined to create fun for himself.

An extroverted but anxious type of horse, who tends to weigh up the cost/benefit of every situation, may have ears moving through many expressions.

An introverted bold, imaginative horse is usually most interested in the next blade of available grass.  He sees little reason to move if his life is not in danger. He is strongly committed to his own ideas. He will learn things readily enough if we make it worth his while.

Such a horse tends to love food reward reinforcement and easily becomes a Clicker Training star. Once he learns something, he likes to make it his idea. He then tries hard to ‘get it right’. His focus during training may often include ears lying back or sideways as he thinks his way through a puzzle we’ve given him.

An introverted anxious type of horse may have active ears regularly checking out all points of the compass. He may appear externally ‘quiet’ but is heaving with emotions inside. Horses like this are more suddenly ‘explode’ with an inexperienced handler, so it is important to identify them and keep a close eye on where they are in relation to the edge of their comfort zone in a specific context.

These are generalizations but generalizations can help give us an overview. Ears are obviously highly personalized for each horse. In new situations horses behave differently than they do at home, just as we do.  

What I want to highlight is that it is easy to simplify how ears should look on a ‘happy horse’ when we really have little idea of what is going on in the horse’s mind and being expressed in his ears.

We should always read ears in the context of the rest of the horse’s body and the specific context of the moment.

A horse in an enclosed space with little stimulation will have different ear expressions than the same horse out and about with a wide view of things going on all around him.

SMELL, TASTE, TOUCH

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Smell and Taste

Boots sniffing out a piece of apple on a tarp.

Horses need strong senses of smell and taste. Safe grazing requires horses to be constantly aware of poisonous plants.  Horses are adept at picking the best forage out of a pasture. Unless they are starving, they stay well clear of plants like buttercup and ragwort.

By sniffing a horse dropping, a horse can identify its owner.  In the wild, horse droppings mark home ranges and leave a clear message to other horses about who lives there.

When we bring out a tube of worming paste, our horse knows what it is. Vets have a distinctive smell. Since every horse, dog and person has a distinctive smell, horses recognize us or old friends after long absences.

They similarly recognize individuals they don’t like. In the wild, horses identify each predator by its distinctive smell.

If we toss a treat onto the ground, the horse must sniff it out because it will be in his visual blind spot. On our morning walks, my mare often busies herself sniffing things on the road surface. Some people teach their horses to track a scent trail.

This is a cookie ball with holes in it. It twists open to put in pellets which fall out as the horse rolls the ball along. It took her a few seconds to work it out.

To ensure safe grazing, taste is well developed. To some extent, horses can ‘spit out’ something they don’t like, but not as well as dogs or people. They are not able to vomit.

Sometimes horses are reluctant to drink water that tastes different to the water at home, so people teach them to drink water with a bit of apple cider vinegar or molasses added (before they leave home).

Horses are also very astute about knowing when their regular feed has been doctored with medications. I have to hide medicine in jam sandwiches for Boots, after first giving her undoctored jam sandwhiches for a while.

Horses can develop a lively set of acquired tastes. My mare loves tomatoes, celery, parsley, peaches (when she had access to a peach tree, she learned to elegantly spit out the stones), feijoa, mandarins, bananas, and plucks the odd lemon off the tree as she walks past but then decides it is not to her taste.

She is less keen on cucumber, cabbage, lettuce or spinach. My friend’s horse, Smoky, did not have such a refined palate and would distastefully drop anything unusual out of his mouth. By watching my mare enjoy tomatoes, he eventually tried one and decided he liked them too.

Touch

Whisker Touch

Whiskers are an important ‘early warning system’ to protect a horse’s eyes, nose and muzzle. Grazing in the dark or in tall grass requires a sensitivity that functions with touch.

Each whisker has its own nerve pathway connecting directly to the brain. There may only be two long and several short whiskers around each eye, but they are enough to keep the eyes safe in most circumstances.

It is therefore sad to see ‘show horses’ with whiskers cut or shaved off. Because people don’t have comparable ‘touch sensitivity’ organs they incorrectly presume that a horse does not need his whiskers.

My horse uses her muzzle whiskers to check if an electric fence is on or off.

Nose Touch

When a horse investigates something new, his first act is often to carefully put his whiskers on it, then his whole nose. The mobile part of the horse’s nose and upper lip have touch sensitivity similar to that of human fingers.

We followed the bike, being walked away, at a distance which Boots found safe. Eventually she was willing to come closer until she had the courage to sniff the stopped bike.

Foot Touch and Foot Awareness

Horses know that if their feet are compromised, they are an easy meal for the first predator that comes along. Unshod feet, working in the way evolution intended, feel the nature of the ground, helping the horse adjust his balance moment to moment.

A horse asked to step onto an unusual surface will often sniff it first, then paw with a foot to gain more information about the nature of the surface. When we introduce a new surface, it is helpful for the horse if we let him paw away until his curiosity is fully satisfied.

When I introduced my horse, Boots, to a tarp for the first time, she pawed it into a scrunched-up ball.  She did this the first five times I brought out the tarp. After that, she was comfortable walking across it or standing on it.

Above: Mat targeting (front feet and hind feet) and pedestal targeting all help to make the horse more aware of where his feet are. Placing the feet accurately helps to build proprioception – knowing where the limbs are and how to place them with precision.

Below: Boots became adept at lining all four feet up on her balance beam.

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Walking across rails and hoops with click&treat for a clean passage aids proprioception. Start with one rail or hoop, and when that is stepped across cleanly 90% of the time, add a second, and so on.

Horses are very careful about where they put their feet because they depend entirely on being able to move to stay safe from predators. There are numerous ways to help a horse build foot awareness and confidence with new surfaces.

For this task we started with organising the front feet either side of the rail. When that was solid, we added the back feet.

Teaching Foot Proprioception Skills

Body Language Awareness

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The main tool we have, to communicate with our horse, is our body language. We instinctively respond to the body language of other people because, like horses, we live in groups. But because people talk so much, we have become less aware of the effect of body language. 

Our awareness is still there, but it’s mostly subconscious. We may reflect on how an interaction with a specific person left us feeling good or not so good. Or we may get a ‘gut feeling’ about a person on first meeting. In these situations, we are tuning in to our instinctive understanding of human body language.

All species that live in groups need to be able to ‘read’ each other’s body language because the resources of the environment are finite and need to be used by all members of the group.

To prevent energy wastage by constant bickering or fighting within the group, animals that live together have invariably developed sophisticated body language communication.

With time and consistency, horses can get highly skilled at interpreting our body language.

In human terms, think of posture and intent:

  • Shoulders back versus slouched/slumped.
  • Head high and eyes focused versus head bowed/downcast.
  • Meeting someone’s eye rather than avoiding it.
  • Standing firm rather than moving away.
  • Striding purposefully rather than reluctantly.
  • Chest expanded rather than shrunken/subdued.
  • Handshake firm rather than limp or aggressive.
  • Offer handshake rather than wait for the offer.
  • Approach assertively rather than timidly.
  • Unsmiling to passer-by versus smiling at passer-by.
  • Ignore group member versus acknowledging him/her.
  • Determined versus dubious.
  • Confidently neutral versus jittery or nervous.

When a teacher and a class of students meet for the first time, the students have the teacher sized up in the first few seconds of visual contact. Horses are the same. As well as visual signs, people (and horses) give off an aura of energy that spells confidence, timidity, or anxiety.

Interestingly, with a few adjustments, the body language we already instinctively know and acknowledge in other people can be transferred to our interactions with other group animals such as dogs and horses. On the other hand, it doesn’t transfer nearly as much to solitary-living animals such as cats and bears.

This is a ‘relaxation’ or ‘no intent’ body language posture. Energy drained out of body, hands crossed over treat pouch, looking nowhere. Boots has learned that this posture means we are having a ‘rest’ and nothing is expected of her at this moment.

Body language postures are similar whether we consider people, dogs or horses. A horse willing to touch our outstretched hand with his nose is willingly ‘shaking hands’. A dog who rolls over and exposes his belly is volunteering a very timid handshake.

This foal is learning to greet a person. We hold our hand near the horse and must be sure to let the horse close the last inch of space to initiate the contact.

Here is a small horse experiment that could be illuminating.  It may be interesting to use with your horses or a horse you are thinking of buying.

  1. Stand in a roomy area or paddock where the horse can see you. Stand very quietly with a slumped and despondent posture. Wait. Observe what your horse does (casually, don’t stare at him).
  2. While the horse is minding his own business in a roomy area, make your body language large and assertive (not aggressive), focus on him strongly and walk briskly toward his shoulder in a straight line. What happens?

Some people may, without realizing it at first, slip from assertive to aggressive. As with horses and dogs, human aggression often arises from fear and is a defense mechanism. This is important to remember when we are around horses. 

What looks to us like aggressive, intimidating horse behavior is often grounded in fear if the horse is contained with ropes or in a small pen. A horse’s only way of regaining a feeling of safety is to move himself away as far as he needs to go. When we restrict his ability to move away, his remaining options are limited.

Some people (and some horses) are naturally on the timid end of a ‘timid-bold continuum’. A person may want to learn to be confident with their horse, but quickly slips from confidence to nervousness. This creates a problem for the horse when he is relying on the person’s clear communication, and it is suddenly fuzzy and incomprehensible to him.

The strength of the relationship we build with a horse depends on how clearly we can present ourselves to the horse as another being who is confident, trustworthy and fair. 

Emotional Neutrality

Our body language is intimately linked with our emotions. The more we can lay aside emotional responses, especially stress-related and negative emotional responses, the more we can be ‘in the moment’ with our horse. The more we are ‘in the moment’, the more open we are to noticing the signals the horse is sending us. 

The more we can be open to his signals, the better we can ‘stay with the horse’ and give him time to work out how he can earn his next click&treat.

If we are totally focused on our own agenda, it is hard to also be mindful of the horse’s signals and take them on board so that we can quickly act in the most appropriate way.

The more negative emotion a horse feels from the handler, the harder it is for the horse to focus on what we are asking. He will either withdraw into himself or seek to escape by looking away and moving his feet away as far as a rope or fence allows.

Emotional neutrality relates to the ‘aura of energy’ mentioned earlier. A horse can pick up our pleasure and joy when he does something well. He equally picks up every hint of frustration or annoyance. By the time we recognize we are annoyed or angry, the horse will have withdrawn from accepting our communication at that moment.

It takes a long time to build the trust of a prey animal wired for flight. A moment of aggression can erase a lot of trust. If the horse is contained with rope, reins or small enclosed spaces, he perceives human aggression as a threat to his life.

Horses don’t have a concept of ‘punishment’. In the wild, a horse always has the option to move away from assertive or aggressive behavior by herd mates. We must never forget that they are prey animals and their key defense is flight. We must accept that nothing a horse does is ever a personal affront to us. What a horse does at any one moment is what he feels he needs to do because he is a horse.

Body orientation, Gestures, Touch, Voice, Intent are all things we an refine to make it easier for the horse to understand our requests.

Successive Approximations and Resets

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The photo above shows one of the approximations we use when teaching trailer loading. Navigating a narrow space alongside the trailer, confidently, is a major step along the way to gaining confidence to enter a trailer.

Successive approximations, simply put, mean that we start with what the horse can offer already and gradually direct and reward each tiny move in the direction of the final behavior we want.

In other words, at the beginning of teaching something new, we click&treat for the slightest approximation of what we want as our final result. Each improved approximation is one tiny slice of the overall task.

When the horse feels ready, we encourage him to do a tiny bit more to gain the click&treat. This whole process of rewarding successive approximations is called ‘shaping a behavior’.

Shaping a Behavior: This is our second session of Free-shaping Head-Lowering

Putting a behaviour on signal/cue: In the next clip, you will see me re-setting the task repeatedly as I show Boots that a click&treat will only be forthcoming if I give the signal/cue for this behaviour, which is dropping my head and shoulders forward. We don’t want the horse forever putting his head down.

Putting Head-Lowering on Signal/Cue

A human example of shaping a behavior is teaching a child to write. The child starts with holding a pencil and using it to make random marks on paper. At some point the random marks become conscious curves and straight lines.

When the time is right, we introduce writing letters of the alphabet. Eventually the child can group letters to make words. Words are then arranged into meaningful sentences. Some children go on to write coherent paragraphs, essays, stories and books.

If the child loses confidence with any of the slices of the process, an element of discomfort creeps in, along with typical avoidance behavior. Not enough practice then results in a poorly shaped skill.

When a horse loses confidence in his ability to understand what we want him to do to earn a click&treat, we get typical avoidance behavior. He shuts down, stops trying – moves away if he can. Keeping the learner’s confidence is the essential role of a teacher.

Writing is an interesting human endeavor that starts at two years old and is still being shaped many years later at high school, tertiary education and beyond. There is always room for improvement.

Another way to look at successive approximations is to think of a sculptor starting with a piece of stone. He works in careful stages until the shape in his mind is visible to the rest of us in the shape of the stone.

In the same way, we gradually tease a series of movements (or stillness) out of a horse to yield the task we want. This is a bit harder than shaping stone because horses have minds of their own!

General Key Points

  1. The more quickly you click&treat, and simultaneously stop any signal/cue, when the horse complies, the faster the horse can learn to recognize just what it is you want.
  2. Once the horse understands your intent, refine your signals/cues and be TOTALLY CONSISTENT with them.   
  3. If you keep nagging with a signal/cue by repeating it, you will desensitize the horse and make him disregard the signal. Nagging is an easy habit to get into and hard to break. If the horse does not understand the first time you use the signal/cue, back up in your teaching until he does.
  4. The energy you use to communicate with a signal/cue will change with the situation and what you are asking the horse to do.
  5. To teach with the free-shaping, the horse learns without a direct signal/cue from you to initiate an action because you have set up the environment to make the action you want likely to happen. The horse does the action of his own free will. You mark the action with a click and reward it with a treat. Once the horse offers the behavior reliably, add a signal/cue to it. The signal/cue is usually determined by the nature of the task. It will be unique to you and a particular horse. For the haltering task in the video clip at the end of the blog, I started with the horse’s natural curiosity about the hoop, and shaped the haltering procedure from that.
  6. Just when everything is feeling really good is the time to STOP. Avoid at all costs the urge to do it again to see if we can. Change to something relaxing instead.
  7. One of the key skills of horsemanship is to read the horse accurately to be able to decide on the best activity (or rest) for the moment we are in. It is part of the concept of ‘feel’.
  8. When things go awry (which they will), always go back to where both you and the horse feel confident again, and gradually work forward from there.

When we watch a horse and his trainer perform a complex task, it is not always easy to see the steps the handler took to reach the smooth end behavior. Even if we can find out how the horse was trained, that only tells us about what worked for that horse and that handler.

Here are some questions we have to ask ourselves.

  • What did the horse know already before learning that task?
  • How experienced is the handler?
  • What method(s) of reinforcement does the handler use?
  • How long have the horse and handler worked together?
  • How long did it take them to reach this point?
  • What were the tricky bits along the way?
  • How often did the horse get confused?
  • How often did the handler have to go back a few steps and work forward again?

Seeing a horse carrying out a task that grabs our fancy is the beginning of our own adventure. It gives us the inspiration to teach our horse something new. The starting point for any Individual Education Program we set up for a horse will be unique to us.

Here is the definition of thin-slicing again.

Thin-slicing is a shorthand way of saying: split the overall task we want the horse to learn into its smallest teachable parts and teach each part in a way that makes it as easy as possible for the horse to understand.

Resetting a Task

When we teach something new, we are experimenting with our signals/cues and the horse is also experimenting to work out what it is we want him to do. It’s not unusual for things to get a bit complicated and messy.

If either you or the horse lose track of what you are doing, pretend it was perfect, relax (but no click&treat), pause. Count to ten and rotate your shoulders. Then go back to the beginning of the task and try again, starting with your visualization of how a good effort will look and feel.

The magic about pretending it went well (when it actually turned into a mess) is that it dissolves the natural frustration we feel when our communication is not getting through. Horses instantly pick up on the changes in our body when we are frustrated or angry, and will want to move away from the negativity, so any teaching/learning moment is lost.

If we can smile, breathe out and relax our body before the reset, we don’t upset the horse or make him anxious. We simply start again.

When someone tries to teach me something new on a computer or cell phone, they invariably go so fast that I have no idea what they did or what I should be doing. I think that is what often happens with horses.

The following two clips demonstrate teaching with successive approximations. Our sessions were never much longer than three minutes.

First Successive Approximations for Learning to Put on a Halter

In the next video clip, be aware that to make it shorter for easier watching, I cut out the bits where I reach into my pocket, after the click, so it is a bit jumpy. Everyone’s progress will be different.

From the Hoop to the Halter

Horse Vision is Different from Human Vision

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Shape of the lens

The lens of a horse eye is not able to change shape as easily as the lens of a human eye. Horse vision more resembles looking through a trifocal lens. A trifocal lens supports distance focus in one part of the lens, mid-distance focus in another part and close-up focus in a third part.

This explains why horses need to do so much positioning of their heads to see clearly. They need to raise their head high for clearer distance vision and drop it down low to get a better view of something closer.

Horses need to lower their head to see things up close clearly. Long hair obstructing the eyes does’t help.

Forcing a horse to keep his nose vertical with the ground restricts his visual field a great deal. It is easy to try this yourself. Stand with your head up and note your field of vision. Then drop your head so your nose points to the ground.  Note your field of vision now.

For a prey animal who depends on early detection of danger and a flight response for survival, restricting the field of vision by requiring (or forcing) vertical flexion can cause a lot of mental anxiety and related damaging muscle tension all over the body.

Eyes set in the side of the head

Being set either side of a large head, horse eyes work more independently than human eyes. The positioning of the eyes limits the horse’s binocular vision (being able to focus on something in front with both eyes) to a triangular area in front.

The shape of his nose causes a blind spot that extends about three feet directly in front when his head is straight, so his field of binocular vision is beyond that. So if we are standing directly in front of the horse within three feet, he is not able to see us or any signals we may give. But he can smell us and be aware of our energy level.

As well as his zone of binocular vision straight ahead, the horse can see almost 180 degrees beside and behind with each eye, similar to a person using rear-view mirrors on a car or bike.

Eyes set well into the side of the head allow rear view vision at almost 180 degrees. This peripheral vision is highly tuned to movement. A startle response due to a sudden movement from behind is an adaptation to get a head start on any predator emerging suddenly. In this view, Boots is able to see me on the right side of her body with her left eye.

This side or peripheral vision is not as exact as binocular vision, but it is excellent at picking up motion. That is why horses often jump away sideways first if something moving to the side or behind startles them, then they rapidly sprint away before turning to assess the situation. How far the horse moves depends on the intensity of the adrenalin rush.

When the horse is strongly focused forward using his binocular vision, his mind is busy with that and not linked to his peripheral vision. This helps explain why we need to be careful approaching a horse from the side or the back, as he can be genuinely startled by movement behind, if his full attention was on something in front of him.

It also seems that horses can doze with their eyes open. If you come across a horse looking very relaxed, with low head, floppy bottom lip, relaxed ears and a cocked hip, he may be too asleep to notice a quiet approach even though his eyes are open. It always pays to give a warning ‘nicker’ or say something while approaching the horse.

Light Intensity

With their extremely large eyes, horses have excellent night vision as long as there is some environmental light. I can vouch for this, having once been caught on the far side of a hydro river, when water was unexpectedly released into the river from the dam upstream during a sunset ride. We had to ride in serious darkness on an unknown track to reach the dam and cross over to our home side.

Horse eyes take longer than our eyes to adjust from light to dark or dark to light. It’s important to remember this when we move a horse from a dark building into bright sunlight or from sunlight into a dark arena, stall, truck or trailer. We should allow him to stand with his head in the entrance while his vision adjusts.

Blind Spots

As mentioned, horses have a triangular blind spot that reaches about a meter in front of their nose. That is why they need to lower their head as they approach an object closely to inspect it. You can simulate what it is like, to have a long nose like a horse, by putting your hands in place as in the photo below. Note how it affects your ability to see right in front of your nose.

Colette demonstrates how to place your hands to imitate a horse’s long nose to let you see why horses have a blind spot when they are looking straight ahead. If you spread your fingers wider in this position, the blind spot gets bigger.

They also have a blind spot right behind their tail if their head is straight as well as under their belly when walking across things. 

Horses have a blind spot directly behind if their neck is straight.

If we are experimenting to find the best position to give our horses a visual signal, it pays to be aware of their blind spots as well as how their vision differs from ours.

Depth Perception

A horse’s small range of close-up binocular vision makes depth perception for stepping into or onto unusual surfaces tricky. They again need to raise and lower their head to compare the object of interest with things they have seen before.

This comparison of the look of ‘new things’ with things already in the horse’s memory, helps explain why horses are so sensitive to anything which has been changed – anything added or subtracted to what was there the last time they passed by.

Their limited depth perception explains why horses are often reluctant to step into a puddle. The reflected light and the ‘unknown’ surface’ under the water are both problematic. Dangerous footing compromises a horse’s ability to flee if the need arises.

Horses need to lower their head to investigate unsure surfaces visually. Often they also paw to check the stability of what lies underneath.

The horse eye has a ‘visual streak’ in the retina (sensory screen at the back of the eye) which is the area of most accurate vision. As mentioned earlier, horses must move their heads in order to bring the item of interest into the range of this ‘visual streak’ to improve the depth perception and detail of the image.

If the horse’s head is restricted by tight ropes or reins, his ability to see clearly is compromised. Not surprisingly, such restrictions cause tension that affects the whole body.

Horse eyes appear to magnify objects more than our eyes (maybe up to 50%).  The acuity (sharpness) of what they see is less than 20/20 human vision but seems to be better than that of dog and cat vision.

Training in Both Eyes

The way horse vision works helps explain why it is so important to teach everything we do on both sides of the horse. A horse that is only handled from the left side will suffer from ‘right eye neglect’. Handling procedures will be ‘strange’ to his mind on the right side because the neglect means no nerve pathways have formed to build his confidence with handling on the right side.

This links to all aspects of training and handling. Like us, horses are naturally either left or right-handed. In other words, like us, their bodies are asymmetrical.

Unless both sides of the horse’s body are coached gymnastically, it is hard for the horse to be straight in his body. Which means a saddle will always be misaligned to some extent. A symmetrical saddle on an asymmetrical horse is a perennial problem for riders and painful for horses. 

When teaching a new movement, the less agile side of the body needs at least two or three times more attention than the agile side of the body. Think about how hard it is to brush your teeth with your non-dominant hand.

Environmental visual signals

Horses living within sight of their owner’s house use the lights coming on during a winter morning as a signal that their morning feed is not far away. Part of the year I provided hay in the late evening. The headlamp I wore was a visual signal the horses used to meet me at the shelter.

During groundwork our body language and gestures are visual signals. If we are approaching from behind, the horse is usually able to see us by turning his head.

When my horse’s companion, a large white gelding, went to live elsewhere, her attention was often riveted on a white Charolaise cow in a distant paddock as she tried to figure out whether that was her old paddock mate.

My thoroughbred mare, Gypsy, was super conscious of anything on the distant horizon. A rabbit hunter toting a rifle, so far away that I could barely see him, caught her immediate attention.

Awareness Needed

Horses are genetically wired to pay close attention to anything which looks different to how it looked before, or if something appears that wasn’t there before.

Because their eyes are not the same as ours, it is important to be aware of the following situations.

  • Depending on the shape of the horse’s belly, there is also a blind spot under his hind legs and under his belly. If we ask a horse to back over a rail, he can’t actually see the rail at the time, but is working from memory or feel. Just because we can see it doesn’t mean the horse can see it.
  • When we approach the horse from the front, it is best to be a little bit off-centre, so we are not in his front blind spot.
  • If the horse is focused on something ahead in his area of binocular vision, his mind is not engaged with his peripheral vision. This means that something suddenly moving behind him can result in a startle response, often called ‘spooking’. As mentioned earlier, peripheral vision picks up movement rather than detail, so the horse will move first, then turn and inspect the cause of the spook. How far he moves before turning depends on the amount of adenalin shock he experienced.

If the horse is strongly focussed on distance vision, with a raised head and a concentrated look, his peripheral vision is ‘off’, so sudden movement from behind will cause him to spook. Spooking is a highly effective method for escaping from predators.

  • If we are doing groundwork behind the horse, we need to move between his right and left peripheral vision and teach him to adjust his head so he learns to confidently keep us in view as we move left and right into and out of his blind spot.

Playing the peek-a-boo game from behind. In this photo Boots can see me standing behind with her left eye.

In this photo I have moved to her right, so she is watching me out of her right eye.

I’ve moved back to the left and she tracks me with her left eye. It’s fun to play this peek-a-boo game when the horse has front feet on a pedestal.

When we begin long-reining, it’s a good idea to play a peek-a-boo game from behind, while the horse is stationed on a mat or pedestal, and make sure he is comfortable turning his head to track your movement.

  • When horses negotiate a jump, the jump disappears from their vision as they approach it, so they are jumping from their memory of where the jump was. If the horse was paying attention to something else on the approach to the jump, he will run right into it without realizing it is there. You see this sometimes at jumping competitions.

When jumping or stepping over rails, the obstalce disappears from the horse’s vision and they work from memory of where it was.

Riding – Visual Signals Mosty Disappear

When we move from groundwork to riding, the visual signals the horse has learned suddenly disappear. We need to teach the relevant replacement touch and verbal signals we will use during riding from the ground first. In this way, we make it easier for the horse to navigate the change to riding.

Once mounted, we need to carefully re-teach the replacement touch signals by at first pairing them with the voice and visual signals the horse already understands from his groundwork. 

If touch and voice signals are clearly taught with groundwork, the switch to riding can simply be part of a systematic progression rather than a major change.

When we mount up, the visual cues and signals we use on the ground suddenly disappear. We have to carefully transfer these to voice and touch signals to make the transition smoother.

Comfort Zones

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In the photo above, one horse is within his comfort zone checking out the tarp. The new horse standing behind is unsure about what is going on. In this situation, the confident horse is helping to build the new horse’s confidence, which is a great way to proceed.

Beginnings are Hard

When we begin doing new things, it takes time and effort to get the feel of what we are doing. Getting this ‘feel’ for a new activity doesn’t happen in ten minutes. Same for horses.

Doing something new takes us out of our comfort zone. We know when we are out of our comfort zone because our heart rate and breathing speed up. We may sweat more and have feelings of un-ease, often beginning in our gut or stomach. Same for horses.

It’s important to recognise how we feel when we are out of our comfort zone, as well as how we feel when we are back in our comfort zone. And we need to recognize when our horse is out of his/her comfort zone.

Only desire, effort and application can make a comfort zone larger. Learning and education are all about expanding comfort zones.

Obviously, both the handler and the horse have comfort zones. If both parties are out of their comfort zones, it may not be a good horse day. So it’s important that when the handler is out of his or her comfort zone, the horse is in his comfort zone.

When we take the horse out of his comfort zone, we ideally want to remain in our own comfort zone so we can maintain our emotional neutrality. By understanding our own and our horse’s comfort zones, we’ll have more good horse days, until every day is a good horse day. (The bold items are in the Glossary page.)

For a horse at a particular time, ‘comfort’ can mean the freedom to move and run, using up adrenalin and enlarging his personal space.

At another time, the same horse may find ‘comfort’ in a quiet, restful state.

As the handler gets to understand the edges of a horse’s comfort zone, it becomes easier and easier to thin-slice tasks to suit that particular horse.

The diagram below has six arrows that illustrate the six situations that a person or horse will come across.

The inner circle with the smooth boundary is the existing comfort zone. We can call the boundary of this circle ‘Edge One’ because it is a threshold that determines our behavior, or the horse’s behavior.

To expand our comfort zone, we have to move out toward the wiggly, broken line. Out there is the world with all kinds of thresholds that challenge us. We can call the broken line ‘Edge Two’.

The numbered arrows following the diagram refer to the six situations that will arise whenever a person or a horse is faced with expanding their comfort zone.

Comfort Zones: All of us, horse or human, have a ‘comfort zone’ within which our heart rate is normal and we can allow ourselves to relax. Expanding a comfort zone takes active intent. The six numbers are explained below.

  1. Lacking confidence to leave the comfort zone.
  2. Can leave the comfort zone for a bit, but then has to hurry back.
  3. Able to leave the comfort zone for longer before going back.
  4. No longer needs to retreat to the former comfort zone. The comfort zone has expanded.
  5. Starting to feel comfortable well beyond the old ‘Edge One’ threshold.
  6. I can do this now. What is the next challenge? I’m ready to set a new ‘Edge Two’. ‘Edge One’ has moved out to encompass the original ‘Edge Two’. The comfort zone has expanded.

If we push ourselves, or our horse, toward ‘Edge Two’ too quickly or too soon, we, or the horse, will feel worried, anxious or fearful.

We will ‘run away’ in our mind and make up reasons to avoid going ‘out there’ again. The horse will indicate that he’d like to leave the situation or he will ‘shut down’. Either one means he has given up trying to understand what we’d like him to do.

This avoidance response is the brain’s way of keeping us safe. It’s a useful instinct in some situations, but in today’s human world, and with horses forced to live in captivity, we have to both find ways of successfully expanding our comfort zones.

As we learn to recognize where we and the horse are in relation to our comfort zones for any given situation, we will be able to take more control of where we are, in relation to where we want to be.

Safety is always the first priority. The horse has to learn how to respond appropriately to a variety of human pressures. The handler has to know how to influence the horse to keep everyone safe when a stressful situation occurs.

A stressful situation can arise in a split second. It helps a great deal if the horse has faith in us and if we know how the horse will probably respond when his adrenalin is up, so we can take pro-active measures.

With careful positive reinforcement training, stressful situations will become less common.

Boots is temporarily distracted out of her comfort zone as Smoky gallops around the paddock next door. Bridget waited quietly until the excitement was over, then carried on with trailer-loading skills.

Thin-Slicing Explained

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Thin-slicing is a shorthand way of saying: Split the overall task we want the horse to learn into its smallest teachable parts and teach each part in a way that makes it as easy as possible for the horse to understand.

As each tiny part of the task becomes ‘ho-hum’ for the horse, move on to the next part. Gradually all of the parts will come together so the overall task is seamlessly carried out with confidence and willingness.

It means starting with the most fundamental lessons and gradually adding complexity, one click&treat at a time, until we have shaped the whole behavior we want.

As each small part, called a ‘slice’, is mastered, we begin to teach the next slice, either separately or as a continuation of the first slice. If taught separately, once the second slice is learned, we link it to the first one.

Proceeding like this, we gradually chain all the slices together until the horse can do the whole task as a continuous movement with one click&treat at the end.

Some tasks, of course, like haltering, saddling or harnessing, mounting up, worming, vet inspection, grooming and foot care, require the horse to stand still.

When we teach these ‘standing still’ procedures, we begin with a release (click&treat) for relaxation during each tiny slice of the overall process. Gradually, as the horse can relax more, we do a bit more before each release (click&treat).

It’s crucial to remember that ‘standing still’ during an unusual situation is not something a horse in the wild would ever do.

Asking a horse to ‘stand still’ while we do all sorts of things to him, is a big ask.

To teach a flight animal to ‘stand still’ on request means we have to actively teach the horse to be inactive.

In other words, the horse learns to be actively inactive. His instinct will be to move his feet if he feels uncomfortable. Good training will give him the trust and confidence to keep his feet still when we ask.

This concept is explored in teaching the art of standing still, or ‘Parking’. It’s important to promptly move to the front of the horse to deliver treat so he doesn’t form the habit of turning toward you. Perhaps start by standing in front of him rather than to the side as in the video clip.

Example 1: Park & Wait

The key to good training of any kind is to keep the horse being continuously successful in his responses to our requests. If the horse understands our request and is comfortable with it, the chances are good that he will respond willingly.

Example 2: Free-shaping standing on a mat.

Example 3: to teach my horse to walk through a square of ground rails filled with squashed plastic bottles (a Horse Agility obstacle that shows up occasionally), I split the overall task into a series of tiny slices. It’s a great exercise to allow the horse to become more confident with putting his feet onto unusual surfaces like tarps, ramps, trailers, bridges, water, balance beams or mattresses.

Example 4: This clip looks at thin-slicing walking through a water obstacle. We start with things the horse is already familiar with. If walking across rails and tarps are new for your horse, that is where you would start and work with until they are ho-hum.

Example 5: This clip looks at free-shaping ringing a bell.

Thin-slicing and consistency are the holy grails of horse training. By using the mark and reward (click&treat) dynamic, we let the horse know what will earn the treat and therefore increase to probability that he will happily do that action (or inaction) again.

Refining our Body Language

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Horses are incredibly sensitive to body language because it is the language they use with each other. They are also highly aware of the body language of predators so they know if predators are in hunting mode or not. When our horse gets to know us well, and we are reliably clear and consistent, small changes in our body language can become a significant part of messaging with our horse.

Whole Body Language Signals

General Orientation of Our Body

  • Moving from A to B, the horse follows along or moves with us. 
  • When riding, the rhythm of our body in tune with the gait we are in, and our rhythm changes when we ask for a change of gait.
  • Facing the horse in front, we can draw him toward us by stepping backwards.
  • Facing the horse in front, we can ask him to back up by stepping toward him.
  • Facing the horse’s ribs, allows us to ask him to move past us or in a circle around us.

My body orientation is a large part of the signal that lets Boots know that I’d like her to move over the rails and continue in a circle while I pivot on the spot.

Specific Orientation – the alignment of our body axis in relation to the horse is a major part of the signal when we ask for:

  • Turning right or left
  • Weave pattern
  • Figure 8 pattern
  • S-bends, L-bends, U-bends, zigzag-bends
  • Hindquarter yields
  • Forequarter yields
  • Backing up with counter-turns (as in backing a square)
  • Standing on a mounting block as a signal for the horse to line itself up for mounting.

By shifting my body axis away from the horse, she knows we are turning right and no pressure on the halter is needed.

Gesture Body Language Signals

Large Gestures

We might sometimes use large body language signals if we are:

  • guiding from behind
  • sending the horse away into a circle
  • arm held out as a target to signal a recall.
  • Swing arms in front of us to signal end of a session, followed by jackpot on the ground or in a dish.

I’m holding out my arm as a large gesture for Boots to recall with my hat.

Medium sized Gestures might be ones we use as:

  • back up with hand signals
  • ‘walk on’ signal with arm and outside leg when walking together
  • facing the horse, hand put up for whoa
  • facing the horse, recall signal
  • please move sideways away from me
  • hand lightly on poll for ‘head down’ signal
  • please move your hip away
  • please move your hip toward me
  • please move your forequarters over
  • please move your forequarters toward me

Another recall signal is me leaning slightly forward and making a hoop with my arms. It works because it is clearly an unusual body position.

Small Gestures might include the following:

  • walking side-by-side, halt signal by handler dropping into her hips
  • hand positioned so horse can target the palm of the hand with his chin
  • stretching out hand, palm down, for the horse to complete the touch connection with his nose; often called the ‘horseman’s handshake’.

The horseman’s handshake. The back of our hand stands in for another horse’s nose.

Direct Touch Signals

Hand Touch:

  • Stroking
  • Massage & stretching exercises
  • Picking up feet, cleaning them and trimming
  • Backing up with touch to chest or nose
  • Sideways with touch to ribs
  • Yield hindquarters with touch to hip
  • Yield forequarters with touch to shoulder
  • ‘Walk on’ with finger tap behind withers or on butt.

We use body orientation and touch signals for foot care. Also often a voice signal.

Body Extension Touch: This involves all the things we have in our hand, or things we put on the horse. It might include:

  • grooming
  • cleaning and trimming feet
  • head gear put on/off
  • ropes all over body
  • saddles or harness on/off
  • guiding touch with a body extension, as for long-reining.

When we start using gear on our horses, we must remember how sensitive they are to touch.

Riding Touch:

Since horses are extremely touch-sensitive they feel every shift of weight and position. As long as we don’t desensitize the horse to touch signals by nagging, inconsistency, or rudeness, the horse learns to respond to the smallest of touch and weight placement variations.

Head Gear Touch Signals

Via rope while we are working on the ground:

  • poll pressure to walk forward when leading, although this can be replaced easily by using clear body language (breathe in, gesture with arm and step off with outside leg – easier for horse to see).
  • light nose pressure to halt, back-up (refined with voice signals)
  • light nose pressure for change of direction
  • light nose pressure for downward transitions, halt, back up
  • light nosepressure to ask for bend.
  • halter vibration to back-up.

A very light jiggle on the rope is one of our signals for backing up. By using props such as this, it makes sense for the horse to back up, making it easy to teach. The rope touch signal can then easily be morphed into gesture, body orientation and voice signals.

Verbal (Voice) Signals

  • “click or “yes” word
  • whoa” word or sound
  • upward and downward transition words or sounds
  • encouraging ‘keep going’ words or sounds
  • inhibiting warning words or sounds (squeal)

When I want to park the horse with ground-tying, I have first taught verbal ‘whoa’ and ‘wait’ voice signals to a high standard.

Before we deliver the treat, we have used a click (tongue click or mechanical clicker) or a special sound/word to let the horse know what he did at that moment, is what will earn a treat.

Breathing and Body Energy

  • breath in = raising body energy to prepare to ask for more movement
  • breath out = dropping body energy to prepare for slowing down
  • large sigh to encourage relaxation
  • relaxed posture during dwell or relaxation time between requests

This relaxed posture during ‘dwell time’ I learned from Alex Kurland. Shoulders relaxed, looking nowhere, facing away from the horse, hands quiet on belly. I’m also slowing my breathing and therefore my heart rate. Horses are incredibly tuned in to the body language of people they know well and who act consistently. They are also instantly aware of emotions. Body language is the key language between horses.

Intent

This links very closely with our breathing and body energy. Again, horses are incredibly perceptive. The more consistent our behaviour and emotional state, the more relaxed and willing the horse can be.

  • how we align the core of our body and our eyes
  • how strongly we are focused on what we want to happen
  • how we bring our breath and energy up in preparation for giving a signal
  • how firmly our inner belief backs up what our signal is requesting

In this photo I’m aligning my body axis to weave the obstacle in front of us. My energy and breathing are up. I’m strongly focussed on what I want to happen. As we round one obstacle I change my body axis alignment and my focus to weave the next obstacle. Because I’m consistent, the horse learns to read my intent and readily complies.

I hope you have fun seeing how small you can make your body language and touch requests and still be clear for your horse. They depend on us for so much.

By always starting at the withers when we want to ask for a foot to be picked up, the horse has time to shift his weight so he CAN pick up the foot we want. Here Bridget is about to ask for the left hind foot and Boots will shift her weight to make it possible – in fact, she will be lifting her foot as Bridget moves to her hindquarters, in anticipation. Just as we do, horses like to know what is going to happen next, before it happens.

ROPE RELAXATION

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ROPES: It’s hard to overemphasize the importance of educating our horses to be totally comfortable with ropes. Our main enjoyment may be to play with our horse at liberty and teach everything using targeting, voice and gesture signals. But sadly, horses in captivity are totally dependent on people for their well-being. Other people may regularly handle our horse or something may happen so that help from other people is needed. In case of fire, flood, or if you are hurt, or your horse must be moved, he will need a solid foundation of rope confidence. If he is sold, we want him to be comfortable with ropes.

If we take our horse out into public places we need him to be relaxed on a lead rope. If we tie our horse up, we have to get him comfortable with that. Rope Confidence includes ropes moving around him, ropes constricting him and ropes touching all parts of his body. The same is necessary if you want to teach your horse long-reining and maybe driving. Sooner or later we are going to drop a rope or rein and it is better if the horse does not see this as a reason to panic, which can lead to running into or over fences, or danger on a road.

#121 HorseGym with Boots in clip called Stick and Rope Confidence shows a way to begin. https://youtu.be/WIpsT4PPiXo

We don’t have to begin with a rope.

There are several elements to Rope Relaxation. #22 HorseGym with Boots in a clip called Rope Relaxation shows some of the elements mentioned in the list coming up. https://youtu.be/6Y34VlUk0Iw

The last part of this clip shows building confidence with dragging ropes.

We want to gain the horse’s confidence to remain parked while we do the following activities.

  1. Swing a second rope (not attached to the horse) near him.
  2. Gently toss the end of a soft rope all over his body, including around behind, under the belly and around the legs. It should feel like horses standing tail to nose swishing flies off each other with their tails. Start with a second rope not attached to the horse, then graduate to using the end of a long lead rope.
  3. When the rope is attached to the horse, make sure you keep a constant drape in the part attached to his halter while you toss the other end around his body. You want to avoid putting touch pressure on the halter.
  4. Toss a coiled rope (not attached to the horse) in the air across him.
  5. Randomly drop a coil of rope (not attached to the horse) onto the ground in various positions around him.

We also want to continue building his confidence with the rope when we:

  • drag a second rope while we walk along with the horse on a loose lead as in the second video above.
  • attach a second rope to the horse’s halter which he drags while we walk with him on a loose lead, including walking curves and corners where the dragging rope may touch the horse’s feet or legs, as in the second video above.
  • If the horse has reason to move when his rope is attached and dragging, we want him to be calm about it.
  • And eventually, with careful shaping, we can leave the horse ground-tied in different situations.

I’ve created a reason for Boots to walk forward dragging her rope on her own, so if she is ever in that situation, it is not unfamiliar.

Eventually we can practice ground-tying in different situations. The dropped rope and the gesture/verbal WAIT signals tell her that staying in place will eventually earn her a treat.

Here is the link to the complete ‘Ground Tying‘ BLOG: https://herthamuddyhorse.com/2019/10/31/ground-tying/

The Importance of Pause and Wait

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In the photo above, Bridget and Boots are at ‘pause and wait’ while I explain the next part of their task.

How does our horse know when we want him to stand relaxed beside us or when we want him to do something?

It is essential that we learn to manage our body langue to make it crystal clear to the horse when we are asking him to do something and when are in pause/no intent/ relaxed mode.

Horse sensitivity to the body language and intent of others is much more refined than ours because it is their primary language. In humans this ‘reading of body language’ has been dulled because we talk so much.

But we can stop talking and become aware of what our body language is saying to the horse. Body Language includes our orientation to the horse, our energy level, our breathing rate, our heart rate, our body temperature – these all communicate our level of calmness or agitation to the horse. To that we add the intent we hold in our mind.

Once we have a good awareness of our body language, we can begin to use its different aspects to communicate more clearly with our horse.

No Intent

In the photo above I am standing at ‘pause’. My orientation is not directed at the horse, my energy is down. I’m looking nowhere. My hands are quiet laid across my belly. My shoulders are relaxed. My breathing is slowed down, which also lowers my heart rate. My mind is quiet, not thinking of the next thing to do. This posture shows the horse I have no ‘intent’, allowing her to also relax into the ‘wait’ time.

Intent

In the photo above, my body language expresses clear intent that I would like Boots to step across the barrels. My focus is where I want her to go. I’m indicating ‘walk on’ with my outside arm and I’m stepping along with her.

Emotion Exercise

Find a stick and an inanimate object you can hit hard with the stick.

First, hit the object as hard as you can three times. Channel a time when you were angry or frustrated and put those feelings into thrashing the object. Your breathing, blood pressure and temperature will go up.

Second, kneel down beside the object and caress it lovingly. Channel your soft feelings for your horse or any other living creature. When you feel nicely relaxed, go back to hitting the object violently three times. Then kneel down and caress it lovingly.

Repeat a few times. Be sure to do this where it won’t upset your horse, dog, chooks, children, friends, partners, passer-byes or and other farm animal in the vicinity.

Take note of how your emotions mirror your actions. Keep this awareness. Horses need us to be calm and collected, especially when things go awry. If we are not calm and collected then the horse has no chance of being so.

No Intent

We can express ‘pause’ or ‘no intent’ sitting down.

Intent

My energy is up, I’ve asked her to walk with me and and while I maintain the increased energy and keep moving, she will move with me. When I come to a halt, I first drop my energy, release a long breath out and drop my weight down into my butt. And because I’m human, I also say, “Whoa”.

Strongly Reward the Pause or Wait Time

It makes sense to click&treat when the horse moves in the way we are asking. It makes equal sense to reward when the horse can relax into a pause/wait. We are not doing nothing. We are teaching active inaction. It can be difficult for horses to learn when most of their interactions with people caused movement or pain or restriction.

If you have already taught your horse to enjoy putting his front feet on a mat to earn a click&treat, use the mat to start building duration of the pause/wait.

Eventually we can incorporate ‘parking spots’ and have the horse WAIT while we stand in different positions around him. I am in my ‘no intent’ pose in a position where she can see me in her peripheral vision. It takes time to build up the duration. In each new spot start again with a few seconds and work forward from that.

Use a High Rate of Reinforcement

If the horse can stand still for 1 seconds, click&treat. Pay attention to your own body language. Start with whatever time the horse can offer, adding one second at a time before a prompt click&treat. Make sure the horse is not hungry and not needing to move to release pent-up energy.

Keep sessions short enough to maintain calm (you and the horse). Do some ‘pause and wait’ every time you are with the horse.

This video clip looks at using a mat to build duration. Number 9 in the Blog Contents List (link at the top of the page) has a number of detailed videos about using mats.

This video looks at staying parked while the handler moves further away.

A couple of more recent clips.