6 Things You Might Not Know About Clicker Training (6/6)

In this series I will be sharing 6 interesting facts I didn’t know about when I started using positive reinforcement in training animals. This is part 6. This one is really an eye-opener! This is a phenomenon you only see in R+ training!

Some of these are common misunderstandings people have about clicker training while others are facts most equestrians don’t know at all.

The goal of this blog is to help more people understand how well positive reinforcement (R+) works in training our horses. I want every one to know that clicker training offers more great benefits besides training your goal behaviour. Positive side-effects you won’t get in negative reinforcement (R-) based training methods (traditional and natural horsemanship). I wish I had known these benefits earlier in life.

#6 Horses increase the criteria

Your horse will do more and more for one click, if you know how. He will raise the criteria of the behaviour on his own in order to ‘train you to click’.

That is very unconventional in horse training! And scary too: “What if you are being trained by your horse instead of the other way around?! That is outrageous! You will loose your leadership!”

To tell you the truth: horses are training us. From day 1. Now you realize this, you can use this knowledge and turn it into a mutual benefit! Since we- clicker trainers- are encouraging and reinforcing the animal’s initiative he will be very likely to show you what else he can do.

At first you click and reinforce every step towards the goal behaviour. Once a behaviour is consistent, you can change to a variable reward schedule. This is where the fun part start: the experimenting! I love this part! Once the behaviour will be on a more unpredictable reinforcement schedule your horse will figure out that the more effort he will put into the exercise the more likely it is to receive an appetitive.

Video of a horse increasing her own criteria

In this video you can see how this works: First Kyra gets clicks and reinforcers for ‘walking around each cone’. Soon she figures out that she can influence the click and getting it sooner by getting to the cone faster! Now my more-whoa-than-go-horse offers a trot! By herself!

I reinforce this with clicks and treats. Now the criterion is raised. By Kyra! I  click less often (variable reward schedule) and I got a canter! Bingo! Kyra raised her criteria again! This is how you can work together with your horse in training.

The behaviours trot and canter are put on cue. Then I click only for cued behaviour. Final step in training is to fade out the clicks (but not completely appetitive reinforcers). How you can use this is in your own training is what I teach in the 8 week online Ultimate Horse Training Formula course.

Influencing the clicks and reinforcers will keep your horse very much engaged and enthusiast in training. He will offer better quality behaviour or longer duration by himself. As trainer you can easily capture this with a click and reinforcer. Tadaa, now the criterion has been raised. By the horse!

Something I have never seen in negative reinforcement (traditional/NH) training methods. Yes, I have seen horses run faster because the threat of the aversive increased (e.g. giving a second leg aid and then a ‘tap’ with the whip), but that only lasted for a short period of time. It wasn’t the lasting change that we see in R+ training.

Soon the horse will figure out how to offer a minimum of behaviour: just enough to avoid the aversive.

Think back or look around you: How often did you have to give a leg aid twice or three times because you thought your horse ‘didn’t pay attention’? How many horses do you know that get ‘deaf’ for light leg aids and even spurs? Maybe horses know us better than we know ourselves…

Read the other articles in this series:

part 1 of 6 Things You Might Not Know About Clicker Training
part 2
part 3
part 4
part 5
part 6

Sandra Poppema, BSc
Founder of HippoLogic
Enhancing Horse-Human connections through clicker training

***NEW***

Have you heard of the HippoLogic Clicker Challenge Community?

Register today for our Online Equine Clicker Challenge Community
Each month a new Clicker Challenge
Goal: Develop your clicker skills in a fun & supportive community
Discover your strengths and boost your confidence in your Clicker Skills each month. I guarantee you that you will walk away with practical tweaks that you can apply to all your other training and that your horse loves to work with YOU!

Follow my blog  on Bloglovin

 

6 Things That You Might Not Know About Clicker Training (5/6)

In this series I will be sharing 6 interesting facts I didn’t know about when I started using positive reinforcement in training animals. This is part 5. I like this one!

Some of these are common misunderstandings people have about clicker training while others are facts most equestrians don’t know at all.

The goal of this blog is to help more people understand how well positive reinforcement (R+) works in training our horses. I want every one to know that clicker training offers more great benefits besides training your goal behaviour. Positive side-effects you won’t get in negative reinforcement (R-) based training methods (traditional and natural horsemanship). I wish I had known these benefits earlier in life.

#5 Positive reinforcement has many smart training strategies that I haven’t found in other training methods

In the decades that I have been using positive reinforcement training I have discovered so many smart training strategies that I haven’t heard of in other methods.

This is what I learned in the first 20 years in horses

In traditional and natural horsemanship training the aim was to create more of the desired behaviour by taking away something the horse dislikes (an aversive). Therefor, the solution I was offered ,when a horse wouldn’t obey, was to ‘ask again but increase the pressure’ (the aversive): eg more leg! If that didn’t work: a tap with the whip. Increasing the command until my horse would go. The myth I learned was: ‘He (your horse) knows what to do.’

If a horse didn’t cooperated in taking an oral de-wormer, you just tied him up so he couldn’t pull his head away. Which most of the time resulted in a bigger struggle next time. The myth I was told (and I believed) was: ‘He will soon learn that this doesn’t kill him’.

Sounds familiar?

In general the ‘solution’ was often the same (more ‘pressure’) and only aimed to short-term success (the now). Basically the go-to solution was using more coercion, often painful. Rewards must be ‘only sparingly used’ otherwise ‘I would spoil the horse’.

Positive reinforcement expands your horizon

In positive reinforcement the aim is to train the horse by reinforcing the desired behaviour with something the horse wants to receive/have (appetitive). You focus on the good things!

So, when my horse doesn’t offer the desired behaviour I immediately start asking questions. Not the “How can I make the good thing easy and the bad thing difficult?”-question (which often means “How can I -the trainer- get to my goals ASAP?), but many questions. Horse-centered questions:

• Why does my horse not cooperate?
• Has my reinforcer (my reward) lost it’s value?
• Is something else more reinforcing or urgent?
• Am I clear in what I want my horse to do?
• How can I make it easier and more fun (!) for my horse?
• Does my horse understands what I want (Am I lumping? Is there a context shift? Is he distracted? Bored? Anxious or in flight mode?)
• and so on

Training strategies

Then you have those smart training strategies that really help achieving your goals and goal behaviour, like:

• positive reinforcement: reinforcing with appetitives (something the horse really wants to have and want to make an effort for to get it)
• 5 strategies to get your goal behaviour with R+
• writing a shaping plan (detailed step-by-step approach of training your goal behaviour)
• the use of a bridge/marker signal to pinpoint exactly what you want to see more of
• the use of high and low value reinforcers to increase engagement, decrease stress levels, prevent boredom and predictability in training and so on
• ‘jackpots’
• chaining behaviour
• back chaining behaviour

Except for the use of rewards I never heard of any of the above strategies until I learned more about positive reinforcement. A few of these are really your Key to Success in Equine Clicker Training. If you want to learn more join my Clicker Training Academy where you learn all 12 Keys to Success in Clicker Training.

It makes life so much easier that I can’t picture training horses or coaching people without these strategies.

Read the other articles in this series:

part 1 of 6 Things You Might Not Know About Clicker Training
part 2
part 3
part 4
part 5
part 6

Sandra Poppema, BSc
Founder of HippoLogic
Enhancing Horse-Human connections through clicker training

***NEW***

Have you heard of the HippoLogic Clicker Challenge Community?

Register today for our Online Equine Clicker Challenge Community
Each month a new Clicker Challenge
Goal: Develop your clicker skills in a fun & supportive community
Discover your strengths and boost your confidence in your Clicker Skills each month. I guarantee you that you will walk away with practical tweaks that you can apply to all your other training and that your horse loves to work with YOU!

Follow my blog  on Bloglovin

 

Debunking Myths: ‘The Whip is only an Extension of my Arm’

The Whip is Only an Extension Of My Arm

Click the link to go to the blog and read what I have to say about the myth ‘The Whip is only an extension of my arm’.

Join HippoLogic’s Facebook group

Become a member of our Happy Herd on Facebook and get access to my Facebook LIVE’s.

Sandra Poppema, BSc

Teaching horse people to make training a win-win and bond with their horse so they can enjoy their time together.

Visit my website

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

 

Natural Horsemanship vs Clicker Training

What I really liked about the Natural Horsemanship method I followed in the late nineties, was the step-by-step program I bought. It was very practical because it described the horse behaviour in advance: I could expect this, this and this. Fan-tas-tic! I just had to follow the steps and boom! “Friendship” and “Partnership” where delivered.

Step-by-step program
When things didn’t work out the way the book described you could look up “pitfalls” and read where you skipped a step and what you had to work on. Great. It worked. Best thing of all, I didn’t have to think for myself anymore. It was all in the levels. If it really didn’t work out “I was just not ready for the next level”.

A new way
The biggest struggle when I started clicker training in the late nineties was that there was no “method”, no step-by-step program to follow and few people to turn to for advice. There were only a few rules to follow: pinpoint the wanted behaviour with a bridge signal and let the bridge always be followed by a reward. The receiver determines the reward.

Not many experts available
The only source of knowledge that I had in the late nineties was an Yahoo email group. It was in English and this is not my first language, so that was a huge threshold to turn to for questions and advice. I was lucky to learn from someone who had followed a course about training sea mammals with positive reinforcement and that I had studied Learning theory during my bachelors in Animal Management. This made it much easier for me to understand the whole science behind positive reinforcement.

Outside the box
Not only did my clicker training journey come without a map and a clear road to follow, I had to learn to think outside the box. It was so completely different from all the things I had learned about horses in the previous 25 years and at the same time it made so much sense emotionally: looking forward to earning a reward versus avoiding an aversive.

Times changed
I am glad to see that there is so much information available for passionate horse owners and riders who like to start training their horses with rewards. There are books, clinics and also a lot of instructors and horse trainers who are available all over the world. It is still a minority but who knows what happens in a few more years. Internet is one of the blessings in spreading information these days.

Sandra Poppema

What a relief: training horses without ‘leadership’ and ‘dominance’

Positive reinforcement training or clicker training. This was not just “another method” to me. To me it was a completely different approach to training horses. I was told, and I believed, that I had to “dominate” the horse otherwise he would dominate me, I had to be the “leader” to my horse and that horses “had to respect me” and I never could “let the horse win”, whatever that meant.

A step-by-step program
Then a  Natural Horsemanship method came along in my world. I was thrilled: finally a step-by-step- program that taught me “games” I could play with my horse, that sounded like fun. Yeey!

The voice in my heart
I wasn’t too happy with building up the “phases” and building more and more pressure on my pony until he moved away like it was described in the pocket books. I think I confused Sholto by starting with this NH method and clicker training tricks at the same time. Sholto tried to tell me in many ways that he didn’t agree with this “natural” training method, but the books said: “Don’t let him win“. So I kept going. I heard a little voice in my heart that said: “I don’t like this accumulating pressure thing“. I ignored that voice.

I practised my new Natural Horsemanship method with a many horses. I didn’t have a real passionate connection with these horses because I hardly knew them. I found it a lot easier to apply accumulating pressure on them, but this voice in my heart kept telling me that this wasn’t really “partnership” nor “friendship” and I didn’t create “harmony“.

Clicker training changed my pony’s attitude completely
Since my pony was about 20 years old, I decided to let the NH method go and take a lot more effort in researching information about the clicker training/positive reinforcement training. After all: he was already ‘old’ and he was not suppose to learn new tricks anyway. He surprised me by learning new things so much quicker as I added a marker signal wit reinforcements of his choice instead of pressure. Wow, my old pony got really engaged in my training.He started to greet me with loud whinny’s and started cantering towards me in the pasture! What a difference!

Instead of “dominating” my pony and what just felt to me as forcing him into new behaviours with accumulating pressure I had to outsmart him with clicker training. Set it up for success, was very useful advice from the NH method. I still use that one, but now I set us up for success, both of us. Notonly me.

Learning another jargon
It was really difficult to “Set Sholto up for Success” because I hardly knew what I wanted and I didn’t have a training plan to follow. So I struggled along for a few years and gained lots of knowledge during this process. I didn’t know at that time that I could let go of terms regarding “dominance”, which apparently doesn’t even exist, inter species wise speaking. New studies have proven that horses make a lot of herd decisions in a democratic way. Which makes total sense.

I don’t want other people to struggle as much as I did, so I developed a step by step  training program over the past 15 years. I call it the Key Lessons, your key to Success in Positive Reinforcement training. Click on “Key Lessons” at the top of this page or put them into the search engine in the right to find out more about the Key Lessons.

I am so relieved that I now can be my horses teacher instead of his “herd leader”, be his friend instead of being “the dominant one” and just be his “human” instead of being his “alpha mare/stallion”.

Positive reinforcement training has been truly a wonderful journey. It is not “just another training method” it became a “life style”. It is truly the journey that counts, not the destination.

Read more: 5 Tips for Starting Clicker Training

Read more: Clicker Training 101: How to introduce Your Horse to the Click

 

Join our Community!

• Are you looking for professional positive reinforcement advice?
• Do you want an affordable program?
• Do you want to turn your equestrian dreams into reality, but you don’t know where to start?

If you have answered ‘Yes’ to one or more of the above questions look into one of the online programs HippoLogic has to offer.

Join our community for online positive reinforcement training tips, personal advice and support in training your horse.

Shape the community

If you’re interested to become a member of the HippoLogic tribe, please tell me what you want in this short questionnaire. Thanks a lot!

Sandra Poppema, B.Sc.

I help horse owners get the results in training they really, really want with joy and easy for both horse and human. I always aim for win-win!

Sign up for my newsletter (it comes with a gift) here: HippoLogic’s website.

Take action. Start for free!

Book a free 60 minute Training Assessment to get a glimpse of a new future with your horse. In this conversation we’ll explore:

• Your hopes and dreams and goals so that we can see what’s possible for you and your horse

Where you’re now, where you want to go and which path is right for you

What’s holding you back so you can make a plan to get these hurdles out of your way.

At the end of the call I’ll give you some ideas and advice for your next step and if it looks like a fit, we can explore what it looks like to work together.

Simply check the best time for you in my online calendar and click to reserve your free call today.

Follow my blog  on Bloglovin