Tag Archives: exercising horses with clicker training

Treats in TRAINING for Overweight Horses?

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I can hear you think already:
“But…

– my horse is already overweight
– my horse can’t have treats
– my horse has EMS/ Cushing’s/ is ill”

Clicker training uses food rewards

Clicker Training uses “treats” in training, but not the way you might think… 

  •  The ‘treats’ you use for exercising obese/recovering laminitis horses can be normal horse food: grass pellets, hay cubes or whatever you serve your horse. It can be herbs or grass or even simply hay!
  • You Click and give a food reward for everything your horse does well at first. After your horse understands the desired behaviour(s), like forward movement (walk, trot) you fade out clicks and treats
  •  Fading out clicks and treats makes behaviour even stronger, if you do it right.

But, a Click makes my horse STOP

Or my horse stops for a treat… This is not ‘Exercising’.

 Yes, that’s right! And that’s a good thing for 4 reasons:

1) Your horse probably LOVES to have a break. If he wasn’t, you wouldn’t be here. So click and treat, AND have a break is extra bonus for those reluctant horses.

2) When he STOPS moving, he gets ANOTHER opportunity to offer DESIRED behaviour: start moving

3) YOU get another opportunity to click and treat. Your horse learns by repetition! The more you repeat, the more you reward, the more your horse gets interested: Hey there is something GOOD in it for me!

4) Safety: it’s way safer to feed a standing horse, than a horse that moves.

It DOES NOT STAY like that: click-stop-treat

Remember: this is ONLY in the first phase that you click and give treats very often and have a high Rate of Reinforcement (click & treat). Once your horse knows the behaviour, you go to the next phase. In my course you’ll learn all 4 phases of training a behaviour with clicker training.

The goal

The goal is to teach your horse that Exercise is Fun, so he will offer the behaviours walk, trot ,canter on cue and by choice! No more coercion!

Once a behaviour is on cue, you don’t click and treat for every walk, trot, canter anymore. You can build on duration and ‘quality’ of the movement! That’s also a lot of fun!

My horse Kyra from Fat to Fit in a few months

Advanced benefits of At Liberty Movement Training

Sandra Poppema, BSc
Founder of HippoLogic & creator of the Confident Clicker Trainer

Become a Confident Clicker Trainer

When you want to do more with positive reinforcement and feel confident training your own horse, this is the course for you!
The Confident Clicker Trainer course is a high quality, online training program that you can do yourself. You’ll become automatically confident in your skills when you get predictable results. This course is aimed at novice and advanced clicker trainers who want to make their foundation really, really strong so that they can train everything else you want, faster and easier.

Enjoy Your Horse More

When you implement more positive reinforcement in your training and daily interactions with your horse, you ‘ll develop a strong bond. You’ll enhance the communication and built mutual trust and understanding. Clicker Training is so much more than a training method!