Key Lesson PATIENCE: teach your horse to Stand & Relax in Clicker Training

Can you teach your frustrated horse, that is mugging, dancing, sniffing your pockets and offering all his latest trick to be calm and confident in training? Yes, and here’s how!

HippoLogic’s R+ Horse Training system contains 12 Keys to Success: 6 Key Lessons for Horses (Key Lesson PATIENCE is one of them) and 6 Keys to Success for Trainers that help you give your horse Clarity, Consistency and Confidence in your own clicker training skills.

Can your teach a horse to be calm and relaxed with Clicker Training?

It’s debatable in the R+ training world, but since I’ve taught many horses to relax I believe it’s possible!

In this video you see Fionn who transformed from a very eager but frustrated horse into a calm and relaxed horse. The “AFTER” is not the end result yet! 😉 He’s already better than in the video.

Behaviour in Horse Training

Behaviour is always changing and the horse will always do what’s best for him: is mugging while standing reinforced? He’ll choose the mugging every day, just to see if it works! Even when it doesn’t he won’t give up!

Therefor it’s best to teach him Key Lesson #1: Table Manners for Horses first. Then focus on the next behaviour: Standing.

Mugging while Standing

When you’ve already taught him incompatible behaviour with mugging, and something that is DESIREABLE, you both will benefit in all your future training. The “non-mugging” behaviour (keep head straight and away from your pockets) will be default in your next behaviour, for instance Stand & Relax.

Benefits of Key Lesson Patience (Stand & Relax)

Your horse get Clarity! He’ll know what is expected from him and what behaviours are reinforced (if you do it right 😉 ). You’re building confidence in your horse and Key Lesson Patience is an EXCELLENT default behaviour:

• Safe behaviour/increases safety
• Helps teaching your horse to be calm and wait for cues
• It’s the best default behaviour!
• Start laying the foundation of a two-way communication with your horse
• Foundation of ground tying
• Helps with mat training
• Safe behaviour for mounting
• Safe behaviour for when the vet comes
• Safe foundation for husbandry skills: deworming, eye care, mouth inspection, taking temperature
• Grooming
• Tacking/saddling your horse

Incompatible with/Solves

• Pawing
• Wandering off
• Starting to graze
• Ignoring you
• Pushing you
• Fidgeting with his head
• Dancing around you
• Backing up
• Flipping his head
• Trying to face you (a common behaviour that takes all pressure away in NH)
• Stressed/tense
• Mugging for treats with tricks like kissing faces
• Pinned ears, nipping

Aggressive behaviour

When your horse is showing aggressive behaviours, take away the cause first! Aggression is often coming from anger or fear! Do not try to stick “calm and standing still and relax” on top of frustration, anger, fear. It will backfire! Listen to your horse, figure out what he’s worried about and work on that issue first.

Once you solve the reason for his anger, fear, frustration that leads to aggression everything else becomes much safer and easier to train! When your horse shows aggression, ask help from a professional!

Do not punish your horse for aggressive behaviours because that will make it worse. Yes, you can defend yourself if necessary, and I hope you never have to! Beware you won’t get into ‘a spiral of aggression’ with your horse.

Work on Basics first, to offer your Horse Clarity in Training

All Key Lessons for Horses are foundational behaviours in Clicker Training that will help you train save, strong basic behaviours that will then automatically be ingrained in all future behaviours.

Take the time to teach your horse these 6 basic behaviours in positive reinforcement horse training:

• 1 Table Manners for Horses: save behaviour around food and treats in training
• 2 Patience: Stand & Relax, waiting calmly and confidently for your next cue. Increases safely and reduces frustration. Keep your horse in Learning Mode
• 3 Targeting: the most versatile behaviour that help you train almost ANY behaviour!
• 4 Mat training: basically targeting the feet, offers so much clarity for your horse
• 5 Head lowering: can help calm your horse down, increases safety and helps your horse to encourage exploration behaviour
• 6 Backing: super important for safety reasons, makes going though gates and unloading horses easy and effortlessly.
  
  In the next blog more about how YOU can improve your clicker training skills, stay tuned. If you don’t want to miss it: simply subscribe to my blog with the button in the side bar!

Additional reading: Teach Your Horse to Stand & Relax

Want more?

Are you teaching yourself to clicker train your horse? Are you outgrowing the trick training phase (which is super fun and a great way to lay the foundation of a two-way communication with your horse) and now you want more?

Your interest in positive reinforcement horse training is spiked and you would love to do everything you do now, but then using clicker training? This is for you!

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!

Happy Horse training! You are the trainer!

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

Teach Your Horse to Stand Still and Relax

This important foundation behaviour is often skipped in training because we assume our horse can already do this. We often forget to spent a little time on this behaviour when we start clicker training our horses. Spanish walk, picking up items or lying down are so much more exciting to train, right? I get it! I started with the Spanish Walk after teaching to target a skippy ball. It got me in trouble and that’s what I don’t want for you.

Standing Still is Easy

Somewhere along the line we’ve picked up on the myth that that horses can do this…or have been trained to do so. Then when they don’t we get mad, impatient or annoyed. Can you imagine what the horse must feel when the handler (in the horse’s experience) “suddenly” yanks the lead rope- or worse the rein to make him stop moving?

Let’s see how we can avoid this! First let’s assume our horses don’t know to Stand and Stay. Then we’ll look at how long they would stand if we would ask them to or if we stand still, if they would stay with us, or wander off.

Key Lesson #2 in HippoLogic Clicker Training: Patience

In the HippoLogic R+ Training system Standing and Relaxing is covered in Key Lesson #2 Patience. It’s my favorite default behaviour, it can help calm your horse down, you can teach your horse to use this behaviour to communicate consent or ask for Patience before he’ll receive any other cue.

In my system Key Lesson Patience is when your horse lines up with you (shoulder to shoulder) and knows how to relax. That relaxation is then easier to ask in other behaviours too. Therefor this is a foundation behaviour, which in the HippoLogic system is called a Key Lesson: your Key to Success in Clicker Training.

Baseline Behaviour

This is what we call the ‘baseline’: how long can your horse stand and how does he stand? With ‘how’ I mean: does he become mouthy, pushy, does he gets impatient. Start pawing or walks away (at liberty) or walk around you (on a lead rope)?

Start Training

When we know where our horse is at, in huis education we can start in the proper way. If your horse stands for longer than 30 seconds, you can start with building duration. If your horse can stand for 2 seconds before he moves, I would start with teaching your horse to relax first.

Before and After

Fionn was not relaxed at all at first. This is a snippet of how he used to be: fidgeting with his head, offering Key Lesson Table Manners (non-mugging behaviours, like looking away) in order to get my attention and treats.

It got him overly excited! And this is to be expected with some horses when you start clicker training. Other horses are just not like that and are perfectly fine from the beginning.

BY teaching your horse to wait patiently and to relax,e ven when you have treats and are training, it decreases frustration (and potentially anger issues/ aggression later on in training) and increases the two-way communication and mutual understanding between you and your horse. Watch the video and see how close Fionn is to get overly frustrated…

Useful Training Tools

For some horses and some trainers it really helps to create a visual or physical space to start training this behaviour. Horses learn in ‘context’ and when we set up our learning space the same way every time, our horse will start anticipating with his behaviour when he recognizes the set up. This will make it so much easier for your horse to understand!

• A mat (Key Lesson Mat Training)
• 2 Parallel poles on the ground to mark the designated area to stand
• A square made out of poles
• A specific area in the arena (for example X)
• A cone to stand next to (only if they haven’t learned to target it)

Training Tools to teach Key Lesson Patience

Once your horse understands what to do (Stand and Relax), in that specific training area you created, you can raise your criteria and fade out your training tools. You can ask for longer duration, more relaxation, ask for this behaviour without the training tools (mat, cone, space in which you taught the behaviour) but in the same place, ask the behaviour in other places/circumstances (‘the ‘context shift’), you can add a cue and so on. Until your horse can do this anytime, anywhere and for a decent amount of time!

Train this with me

In my free March Masterclass (March 3rd, 2024) I’ll be talking about Key Lesson Patience in depth.

Register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMpc-CvrzIvE9b1MZazbhzvYwiusCFV6BCV

Happy Horse training! You are the Trainer!
Sandra

4 Ways to Calm Your Horse Down

Do you think it’s impossible to teach your horse to relax? If you imagine it being like a “relax-button” that you simply have to press and your horse instantly relaxes like a ragdoll? No, not like that!

However, you can teach your horse to calm down and relax more, that he is in that moment that you need him to be relaxed! How? Training!

What is training

Training is teaching your horse to respond with a specific behaviours to a specific stimulus (cue). If you’ve trained ‘relaxation’ into a specific behaviour/context, you can recall that state of mind on cue.

We, horse people, do it all the time. Mostly the opposite of relaxation. Think of how most horses all respond and behave, just before breakfast. They are excited! They’re energetic and sometimes frenetic! That’s part of the behaviour that have been reinforced with a jackpot (their breakfast).

Reinforce calm behaviour

If you can excite them with food, you can calm them down with food. I have to say that before I used positive reinforcement I didn’t believe it could be done: teaching your horse to relax. On cue.

The only tool I had to calm down my pony was my voice. That’s what people told me to do. Oh, and to restrict his movement. How many times I’ve heard instructors shout: ‘Shorten your lead rope/reins/lung line!!’

When I was in a clinic with Shawna Karrash Kyra was very nervous, I was nervous and it was hard to calm myself down, let alone my horse. Shawna helped me to teach Kyra to calm down. That’s what we did for two days. I was looking forward to learn very advanced things and at first I was a bit disappointment we mainly focussed on calm and relaxed. I was looking forward to ride Kyra in this special occasion.

Key Lesson Patience promotes relaxation

Shortly after the clinic I moved Kyra to another property. It had a huge automatic metal gate at the driveway, which slides open with quite some noise and rattling sounds. It was there that most horses and dogs always spooked.

I decided to use my newly acquired relaxation skills to calm Kyra down when the gated opened and closed. I was glad I filmed the whole process because it only took 3 sessions to associate the rattling and moving of the gate with calmness!

It was then that the full potential of calming my horse really sank in! This was a powerful tool I now had, like a safety device!

Power of Key Lesson Mat training and Head lowering

Other examples are the self soothing power of mats (Key Lesson Mat Training) and Head lowering. I’ve seen that when clicker trained horses spook they often run to their mat. As if it’s a safety blanket. I’ve seen that they immediately calm down.

Key Lesson Head lowering also helps to calm your horse down and is an excellent way of measuring your horse’s state of mind. If he won’t lower his head, he’s might not be able to due to his state of mind.

Look what happens at 1:18 when Kyra spooks. Where’s she’s going! Now I use training deliberately to teach relaxation.

You can also help your horse to calm down by clicking and reinforcing calm behaviour and associate it with the object that scares them.
Watch these videos:
Kyra spooks at the giant ball
Kyra overcomes her fear for the mega ball (part II)
Fun and Games with the mega ball

4 Ways to use clicker training to teach your horse to relax

1. Bridging and reinforcing calm behaviour
2. Key Lesson Patience
3. Key Lesson Mat training
4. Key Lesson Head lowering

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Sandra Poppema, B.Sc.

Helping horse people to bond with their horse and get the results they want.

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How to Prevent Your Horse from Spooking

We all know this scenario. There is something new in the arena, but only the third or maybe the fourth time you ride past it, your horse spooks. “What a poseur,” you think.”He just walked past it several times!” What is going on here?

If you know it, the next question is: Do you know what to do about it?  In animal training we call it ‘trigger stacking’. That is what this blog is about.

What is Trigger Stacking?

Trigger stacking is when too many stimuli occur in a short period of time that the horse can’t coop with. In other words: tension builds up. If you can’t recognize triggers and trigger stacking your horse can go over threshold.

When your horse goes ‘over threshold’

When we talk about a threshold in animal training we talk about ‘a level at which the animal goes into another emotional state which causes a negative (undesired) reaction.’

If your horse goes ‘over threshold’ due to trigger stacking it means the horse can’t coop with the stimuli (the unfamiliar or new thing in the arena, the fact that he can’t investigate, that he is forced to approach it and so on) and he goes into flight (sometimes fight) response in order to release the tension.

That is why the horse doesn’t spook the first time, but only after he has to approach the scary thing several times in a short period of time without releasing the tension that the anxiety causes.

How to keep your horse under threshold

Make sure you read your horse. Get rid of the myths that prevent you from being creative. I am talking about the  “He is a poseur” or “He is out there to get me” statements. Those statements don’t help you find solutions, they keep you stuck (the “It’s the horses’ fault”- attitude).

I help my students keeping an open mind and treat everything the horse does as ‘information’. Is he getting tense going near that new flower pot in the arena? Is he hesitating to go past it? Did he slow down a bit? That is your information! That could be a trigger.

Pay attention to your horse and to everything he does. Even the ordinary things like pinning his ears when being saddled. Something like that could be the first trigger already.

If you feel your horse is tense about something, make sure you pay attention and let him know you care by letting him look and investigate. Or move away to a safer distance if that is what he needs. Don’t force him to stay and investigate. That will only increase the triggers that are already stacking.

Doesn’t that take a lot of time?

Giving your horse the opportunity to take a look at scary things, even though he has seen already hundreds of flower pots is only the first step in ‘despooking training’. The next step is reinforce walking by scary things, but before you are ready to do so, your horse needs to know he can trust you first.

You do that by giving him the time to explore on his own terms. Not giving him 3 seconds and “now you’re done” because 3 seconds seems enough to you. Let the horse explore for as long as he needs to decide it is safe. It can take up until 15 seconds (in the second video it takes 20 seconds for Kyra). Believe me that everything after counting slowly to 5 already feels like eternity!

Try it out, it will change your training and the relationship with your horse. Kyra almost never needs more than 8 seconds. Then she is done, tension is released and I know that keeps us both safe.

In this video, with the horse ball she needs 24 seconds (0:49-1:13) to decide she wants to approach me, standing near the ball. After the session in the videos she was never afraid of the ball again. Where other horses kept spooking because the ball had moved to another corner, Kyra was OK where ever the ball was of whomever was playing with it. Well worth my few minutes of training.

More ways to keep your horse under threshold

Another way to keep your horse under threshold is to do exercises that make him calm or offer exercises that release tension from his body.

Calming exercises are things that has been positively been reinforced in the past like touching a target or mat training.

In some situations  you can calm your horse by exercise so if they can ‘walk it off’, in some situations movement increases the adrenaline. Watch the video again and see what Kyra needs.

Sometimes you need to dismount in order to break that negative spiral of trigger stacking and tension building up. That is OK, because you are doing the sane thing, which is the safe thing. When you and your horse are calm you can mount again. You might only have to do this once or twice before you find other ways to deal with it under saddle.

This blog doesn’t have enough room to tell you everything I know about trigger stacking, preventing it and dealing with it. Do you want to learn more about ‘Emotions in Training’ and how to coop with them? Join HippoLogic’s online course Ultimate Horse Training Formula. In this course is a whole module about Emotions in Training. Not only equine emotions and how you can recognize them, but also human emotions, like dealing with frustration, feeling like a failure, fear and more.

Here is another blog about it.

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Happy Horse training!

Sandra Poppema, B.Sc.

I help horse owners get results in training they really, really want. Getting results with ease and lots of fun for both horse and human is important to me. Win-win!

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