Does Clicker Training Your Horse Leads to Confusion?

When you change your training approach, you step outside your comfort zone. You know you’ve stepped outside your comfort zone if you feel insecure or confused. Another sign is that you get different results, hopefully BETTER ones!

What you need is to replace your confusion with clarity. How you do that, I’ll explain in this blog.

Lets see how you can recognize confusion. You might think right away: ‘I am never confused!‘ I understand how you feel and that’s a normal reaction. This is what confusion looks like:

• When can I stop clicking?
• Should I stop riding now I’ve started clicker training?
• How do I start?
• Should I click more often?
• Should I always end with a jackpot?
• When should I raise my criterion?
• Am I using the right treats?
• Can I still use my training stick?
• Does my horse understand the cue?
• How can I know if my horse really knows my cues?
• Do I need to keep clicking for trained behaviours?
• Shall I use different treats for different behaviour?
• Is it a coincidence my horse did so well right away?

3 Steps to deal with confusion

1. Information
2. Decide
3. Action

More information

Where can you get more information?

Contact me (see below) and watch the webinar about 4 Main Road Blocks almost All Clicker Trainers Hit and subscribe to my YouTube channel.

Decide what you want

Do you want to learn more about how you can teach your horse to listen to you? Feel confident? Get results? What do you need, in order to get that? Who can help you? If you don’t know someone at the top of your head, what else is possible? What about an online course or coaching?

Decide what you want and make a decision.

Decide to say ‘No’ to what doesn’t serve you, to focus on the top priorities (which can bring you back to #1: More information). The more clarity you have the sooner you accomplish what you want. It saves time and money, too. How?

If you’re being vague and say things like ‘I just want to ride better‘ you can find any instructor that will help you. But are you getting better? Depends in what…. If you say ‘I want to learn lateral gaits‘ or want to ride with positive reinforcement, you’ll notice that suddenly most coaches you ask are not qualified to fit your goals. Choosing the an instructor that help you reach your goals, saves time and money spent elsewhere. It’s a lot of fun working on what you really want!

Action!

Once you made a decision about what it is you want and need, need have to take action! Otherwise nothing will change!

Only Action leads to Accomplishments ~ HippoLogic

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How can you take action? You can start to book a free discovery call with me and I will give you clarity. Take action and book your appointment now.

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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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Best Basics: House-training for Horses

When I put a picture on Facebook of Kyra pooping next to the poop bin in the indoor arena, a lot of people asked me how I potty trained my pony.

Clicker training

Kyra was already clicker savvy, so she knows really well that after a click of my clicker, she will get a reward. The click pinpoints the behaviour. In order to get more of the wanted behaviour, the best results are obtained by rewarding the animal while (s)he is doing the wanted behaviour or within 3 seconds after the wanted behaviour.

A clicker acts as a bridge between the wanted behaviour and the moment of giving the reward. So I didn’t have to reward her within or during the wanted behaviour, I only had to ‘bridge’ (click) during the behaviour that I wanted to capture and then bring her the reward. That came in handy at liberty.

Start easy

In the beginning my criterion was really low. In my mind I divided the indoor arena in two halves: the half with the poop bin (light green rectangle) in it and the other half.

Every time she needed to poop I asked her very gently to maintain gait until she was in the “proper half” of the arena if possible. Often we didn’t reach that half. Maintaining a trot was never possible, but at least she kept walking. A few steps.

It wasn’t really about maintaining gait, but more about making the wanted behaviour easy.

If she needed to go poop and we were in the half of the arena where the poop bin is located (green striped area), she was allowed to stand still to take her washroom break. Why? Because pooping while walking, trotting or cantering leaves a long trail of poop.

Like I said, I don’t like to waste time on poop scooping in the arena. On top of that I clicked and rewarded her with a handful of treats during pooping. She learned that pooping was rewarded sometimes, whereas other times it was not. It was up to Kyra to figure this out. And she did!

Raising my criteria

After a certain period I realized that Kyra was 100% of the time pooping in the half of the arena where the bin is located. That was a sign for me to raise my criterion.

I divided the “designated poop area” in half again (pink striped area). So now the space where I let her stand still to poop and click and reward her for pooping was about a quarter of the arena size.

After a while she discovered that the had to go poop in a certain corner of the arena. Every time I had the feeling that she “got it”, I raised the criterion and made the “allowed area” a bit smaller in my mind (dark blue striped area).

Correcting my mistake

The poop bin is located in the same corner where the shavings are stored. Kyra thought she had to poop in the shavings, which was an obvious mistake (yellow/orange area). After all, her stall is full of shavings where she poops in. So I began to watch her closely, because she usually pooped in the shavings when she was in the arena all by herself. This was a learning point and failure is the best way to success (I decided to ‘fail forward’ and adjusted my training).

Under saddle I could catch her going in the shavings one time and gently let her out of it. She only had to take one or two steps (towards the bin). Then she pooped next to the bin and not in the shavings. She had earned herself a jackpot. [read here more about -> “rewards and jackpots“<-] After a few times she learned that “in the shavings” wouldn’t get her a reward.

Goal

Now my goal is to let her poop in the bin, so I don’t have to clean up at all. Wouldn’t that be awesome? I’ll let you know when we get there.

UPDATE (Jan 2017)

Here is the sequence on this blog: I accomplished my shittiest goal ever! In which I tell you about how I taught Kyra to poop in the manure wheelbarrow. It even has a video! Go on and check it out!

What’s holding you back?

4 Main reasons people get stuck in training their horse (free training)

Need help training your horse?

Are you a compassionate horse owner who wants to build a strong friendship with your horse? Would you like to understand your horse better and help your horse to understand YOU better? Get access to many online clicker training courses and a fabulous, supportive R+ community in our HippoLogic Clicker Training Academy. Check out the link!

Not sure? Start with a free clicker training assessment to get taste of what it feels like to work with me. When you have a specific struggle that you want to overcome, don’t hesitate to contact me. In this assessment you’ll discover what’s holding you back from accomplishing the things you want with your horse. After our conversation you’ll know exactly what to do, in order to move forward towards your goals.

Book here

Happy Horse training!
Sandra Poppema, B.Sc., founder of HippoLogic & HippoLogic Clicker Training Academy

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https://mailchi.mp/5d676526ba5a/clicker-training-academy

Clicker training 101: Rewards and Jackpots

In the key lesson ‘Patience’ the horse learns that sniffing pockets will not be rewarded, looking away will!

Many people think that clicker training means you have to reward with food. And that rewarding with food equals a ‘mugging horses’ or that food rewards will turn their horse into a biting disaster.

To prevent mugging and biting behaviour we must teach the horse some rules. As I pointed out in my previous post [->CLICK HERE<-] the horse must understand that there is only a reward coming after the bridge signal (click) and clicks can only be earned during ‘class hours’. A class starts after a specific start signal and ends with a specific end-of-session-signal.

A lot of people think that clicker training is not their cup of tea ‘because their horse doesn’t like treats’ or they are not willing to use food as a training tool.

Rewards

My favourite topic! Reward-based training is NOT all about the food! It is about the REWARD.

The Most important rule is …

The receiver determines the reward.

If you want to use reward-based training effectively you must remember that it’s not the trainer who determines what the horse ‘must’ like or ‘must’ accept as a reward, it is the horse. I haven’t met one horse in my life that wouldn’t work for something they value. It is the challenge for the trainer to find the right reward that makes ‘the magic’ work.

I like money but Kyra, my horse, doesn’t care about it at all. I like food, but I wouldn’t work or even try to learn a new skill for a handful of grass.

Primary reinforcers

A primary reinforcer is a stimulus that does not require pairing to function as a reinforcer (reward). It is something they need for survival as a species. A horse doesn’t have to ‘learn’ that eating is necessary.

Examples of primary reinforcers are food, air, water, sleep, sex and social behaviours for herd animals. Food and scratches are the most practical in training.

Secondary reinforcers

A secondary reinforcer is a ‘learned reward’. For example once you have taught your horse that he will always be rewarded for standing on a mat, “standing on a mat” will become a reward in itself. The mat is associated to the message “good things happen here” in your horse’s brain.

So, food can be a reward, but a reward doesn’t have to be food.

In my career as horse trainer/clicker training instructor I have seen horses that didn’t valued food highly as a reward. Or they didn’t like the kind of treats that I had to offer. I bloopered once with chunks of apple in a demo. The horse spat it out in front of everybody to make his point. Luckily the owner of the horse helped me out by telling me what was rewarding to the horse (vitamin pellets).

Jackpot

A jackpot is a very special “bonus reward” and will only be given to the horse if he performed extremely well or showed a new behaviour on it’s own that you really want to capture. Like the first time Kyra nickered at me or the first time she laid down in my presence.

A jackpot can be a highly valued treat, maybe mints instead of pellets or carrots instead of grain.

Source: http://www.trendhunter.com/trends/iphone-jackpot-slots

If you don’t have a higher valued reward to offer, you can also increase the amount. If you normally reward with a little chunk of carrot, you can give a big handful as a jackpot or feed multiple chunks quickly after one another. Or if you are riding, you can dismount and unsaddle your horse immediately and take him to a nice patch of grass.

In order to let your horse know he has hit the jackpot you must give it while he is still doing the behaviour. Sometimes that’s not possible. What I do instead is I will extend my bridge signal with a lot of verbal praise when a jackpot is coming to let my horse know she’s doing an extremely good job. Like winning a jackpot from a slot machine: there will be bells and lights to let everybody know you’ve hit the jackpot.

So jackpots are not normal rewards and don’t have normal bridge signals. Jackpots are RARE!

After a jackpot you can best end the training of that day so the horse can let the newly learned knowledge sink in.

To be continued…

Read here the next article: Clicker training 101: Using and Introducing cues

Sandra Poppema

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