Category Archives: skills

Keeping the Balance

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Photo: Teaching the horse to target a pool noodle with his hind foot to help his confidence with standing on three legs is one half of the task.

Bex confidence

Photo: The other half of the task is to teach relaxation while being rubbed all over with a pool noodle, keeping all feet on the ground.

Keeping the Balance

For everything we teach our horse, we have to be mindful of also teaching the opposite.  If we teach a very good ‘whoa’, it is also important to teach an excellent ‘walk on’ signal.

For most things we teach, we have to also teach a counter-balancing task.

  1. If we teach ‘head down please’, we also need to teach ‘head up please’.
  2. If we teach ‘back up please’, we need to teach, ‘come forward please’.
  3. If we teach targeting a mat with the front feet, we have to teach happily stepping off the mat and walking away from it. Some horses get strongly attached to their mats.
  4. If we teach a turn followed by a ‘halt’, we have to teach a turn followed by a brisk ‘walk on please’.
  5. If we teach entering a trailer, we need to carefully teach exiting the trailer.
  6. If we teach the horse to ground tie, we also need to teach him how to move with a dragging rope so he learns not to step on it and isn’t frightened if something happens to make him move dragging his rope.
  7. If we teach the horse to come to us when we are playing at liberty, we also need to teach him to go away from us in a way that is fun rather than seen as a punishment.  Being sent away to the outskirts of the ‘herd’ can be seen by horses as a punitive action because it’s a less safe place to be.
  1. If we teach a move or behavior on one side of the horse, we need to teach it again on the other side of the horse. Maybe also from in front of the horse and from behind the horse. This concept is explored in detail in my book, Walking with Horses: The Eight Leading Positions (see the BOOKS link above).

If we don’t do these things, the horse will become fixated on one way of doing a task. He’ll be determined that he’ll always do it this way. In some situations, the power of the click&treat dynamic can work against us rather than for us.

So, for everything we teach, we need to counterbalance it with another task. How much time we spend balancing out these sorts of tasks depends on many factors. As we get better at understanding our horse, it will get easier to know when we’ve done too much of one dimension and need to consider the other dimension. We’ll find it easier and easier to keep a better balance.

The clip below looks at how we can generalize working with mats to balance the expectation of landing front feet on a mat to earn a click&treat, which we teach first. Once the horse heads straight to a mat as soon as he sees it, we can use tasks like this to balance out his eagerness.

What is Equine Clicker Training or Training with Positive Reinforcement?

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cone pick up 4 01-06-2017_091234 (2)

This article gives a brief overview about what is involved with using markers and treats to make it easier for a horse to understand what we would like it to do.

What is Positive Reinforcement Training
also known as Equine Clicker Training or Reward Reinforcement?

‘Clicker training’ or ‘reward reinforcement’ is also called ‘positive reinforcement’ because we add something (usually a small morsel of food the horse likes) to the situation. ‘Release reinforcement’ is also called ‘negative reinforcement’ because we put signal pressure on the horse to do something. When we ‘release’ the pressure we remove something from the situation.

The terms ‘positive’ and ‘negative’, in the field of animal behavior, are used in
a mathematical sense, not in the sense of being ‘good’ and ‘bad’.

Clicker training can work with ‘reward reinforcement’ only. You can observe and wait for the horse to do something, and click him for it. For example, you can click and treat each time he itches himself. Once he’s made the connection, you can put a signal (either a gesture or a word or both) on that action, and then you can ask him to do it whenever you like.

The ‘click’ is the ‘bridge’ between what the horse has done and the treat he will get for it right after the click. It allows us to ‘mark’ the exact behavior we would like the horse to do, or at least a first approximation of the behavior we would eventually like him to carry out.

This is called ‘free shaping’. Once he responds correctly to your signal most of the time, you have created a ‘conditioned response’. If your horse comes to you every day at feeding time, you have created a ‘conditioned response’. If he sees you with a halter or bridle and moves away so you can’t catch him, you have a ‘conditioned response’.

They key is to set up the environment to make what we want the horse to do as easy for him as possible. Most often, we introduce a ‘target’ object. The natural curiosity of the horse causes him to put his nose on the target, we click and deliver a treat. Once nose targeting is firmly established in the horse’s mind as a way to earn click&treat, we can use targets for all kinds of things’

  • follow a hand-held target
  • move between stationary targets, gradually put further and further apart
  • sent toward a target
  • reach around to touch a target for lateral flexion
  • gain confidence with tight spaces by seeking out the target, eg. trailers
  • move on to targetting mats with the front feet
  • target feet to a mat beside a mounting block
  • target a mat on a pedestal
  • always stand on a favorite mat for foot care
  • mat destination on the outside of a reverse round pen to encourage movement

The click/treat system causes the horse to be strongly focused on finding out what earns the click and treat. He’ll start to offer behaviors to ‘earn’ the treat. It gives him a way to communicate with us. It also allows him a stronger ownership of the new learning. Soon after starting to learn things with click&treat, the horse will begin to offer the  behaviors we have taught this way, hoping to motivate us to ‘pay’ for his effort with a click&treat.

At this point, it is important to put a new task ‘on signal’. A signal can be a gesture, a touch or verbal. Often it’s nice to use touch or gesture and voice together. Signals usually arise naturally out of the nature of the task we are teaching. For picking things up, I ask Boots to, “Pick!” and point to the object. At the end of a session, she likes to come around with me to pick up all the cones and rags we were using as arena markers.

Once the horse knows the task and the signal, it is important to only click/treat when you have asked for it by giving the signal. Otherwise it might be hard to use cones as arena markers while riding or doing ground work exercises!

Using the click&treat only when we’ve asked for the behavior, will slowly tone down the horse’s desire to ‘throw the new move at you’ as soon as he sees you (much like a child dying to show you his new painting). When I taught Boots to ‘spin’, it was quite startling when she wanted to show it to me and visitors all the time, while standing right beside us!

There is more information in the GLOSSARY which you can access with a link at the top of the page.