6 Things You Might Not Know About Clicker Training (2/6)

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 2. Read also part 1 and part 3.

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.

# 2: Clicker training will make you more resourceful

When using pressure-release in training and the horse doesn’t cooperate, the go-to strategy is to increase pressure until the horse does what you want. This is actually the only strategy I they taught me, when I was learning traditional and later on natural horsemanship training.

When you decide to use less pressure-release in training and focus more on positive reinforcement, you give your horse a voice and a choice in training. Therefor you have to learn to listen what your horse is communicating to you if things don’t go as planned.

If you know the reason your horse does not follow your cue, you need to come up with a way to address his feelings or concerns first. It helps if you have knowledge about (natural) horse behaviour and natural needs horses have.

What if my horse doesn’t want to do what I want?

Depending to the cause of saying ‘No’ you can come up with another way, a new strategy to make it easier for your horse to say ‘Yes’ (without making something else more difficult!).

Possible causes of NOT cooperating are:

• fear
• something else is more reinforcing
• something else is more urgent (e.g danger, internal processes like hunger, pain)
• your horse doesn’t understand what he has to do
• and so on.

Become resourceful

You have to come up with strategies that will be:

1. Addressing the reason your horse said ‘No’ so he gets into learning mode again.
2. Easier to understand (splitting behaviour and making a shaping plan)
3. Worthwhile for your horse to participate (it’s the receiver that determines the reward, not the trainer!). You don’t want him to ‘zone out’ (and go into learned helplessness)
4. Interesting and fun for your horse, so he will stay engaged

So you have to become very creative! That is the fun part of training horses!

When you allow your horse to say ‘no’ in training, you have to accept that ‘no’. Treat the ‘no’ for what it is: valuable feedback from your horse. It is ‘just information’. Information you can use to benefit you and your horse!

You have to find out why: What is causing your horse to say ‘No’?

If you figure that out, you listened to your horse. This helps you come up with a strategy to entice him to say ‘yes’, without forcing him.

This skill -to think out of the box -is a very useful skill in all other situations in life. Get creative!

Read his body language

It can be as easy as recognizing that he is just tired. Simply ending the training session will give you more of the desired behaviour next time.

If it is mental fatigue, you can focus on a well known and established behaviour that take no thinking effort. And so on.

Tell me your story

Share your story (use the comment section at the bottom) about one time you had to come up with an alternative strategy. What did you do differently than you would have done traditionally?

What was the situation and what do you think caused your horses to say ‘No’ ? What solution did you come up with and what was the result? Do you think it benefited your relationship with your horse?

Read the other articles in this series:

part 1
part 2
part 3
part 4
part 5
part 6

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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.

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

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What is so exciting about the boring ‘basics’ in horse training?

When I started horse riding I started like all novice riders. My instructor taught me The Basics. I learned how to adjust the stirrup leathers and get in the saddle, to sit straight and what I had to do to transition from a halt to a walk and how to turn. Later on I learned how to do a raising trot and how to canter without falling off.

The ‘Basics’ in the past

I remember one of the standard phrases in the riding school was that the ‘basics are the most important things in riding’.

The ‘basics’ in my riding school contained: halt, walk, trot, canter, riding a circle, change reins over the diagonal and 30 cm high jumps. After 5 years of riding lessons I started wondering if I could learn something else than those ‘bloody boring basics’?

I felt really stuck at the level I was at. Lateral gaits were considered ‘advanced’ and they only taught those things if you paid extra and became member of their pony club. My parents refused to pay extra for the already very expensive riding lessons and I don’t blame them.

I developed a little resentment towards ‘basics’ because of that: basics were boring because I couldn’t do anything with them.

The ‘Basics’ now

We fast forward twenty years, to the nineties when I started clicker training my pony Sholto. The Internet wasn’t  well developed and I couldn’t find anything about horse training on The Net at that time.

There was nobody who taught me a broad, solid foundation that I could use to base my horse training on. I just learned to clicker train Sholto with lots of trial and error.

With every step forward, I probably took two (or more steps) back and it was due to my determination that I stuck with that method. There was something about clicker training…

I saw how it changed Sholto’s attitude in training. He looked forward to interacting with me and I could see he was doing his best to figure out what it was I wanted. It challenged me to listen to him and follow his lead too: to change my criteria if he got bored or frustrated. I discovered how important my timing was and I learned to think more about the setup of my training so it was easy to figure out what I expected from Sholto. It was a really difficult journey, but very rewarding.

I also studied Natural Horsemanship at the same time and I really loved the methodology that was used. It was taught in a clear and straight forward way: step 1, step 2, step 3 and so on. It was the opposite of the struggle I had with clicker training.

This Natural Horsemanship method was so well developed it even described in detail what went wrong if you encountered a problem. ‘Go back to the basics and practise A, B or C in order to solve X, Y or Z’.

For me the strength of that method was not only based on teaching the basics, but also on the fact that I could see where the basics could bring us. When I encountered a problem with Sholto it showed me where the hole in my training was. That made it really easy to fix it.

Eye-opener

This was when I realized that the ‘Basics’ that I resented so much were in fact golden nuggets in training! Without golden nuggets I can never make a beautiful necklace. If I don’t use my nuggets the nuggets stay what they are: small nuggets. Nice to have and to look at, but they can become so much more! Only if you melt them and use them together they can become something else, something new, something unique and valuable. That is what the ‘Basics’ mean to me today:

a broad foundation of exercises on which you can build a solid 
relationship with your horse. A relationship you both benefit from and
in which you trust each other and both have lots of fun.
If you master the [positive reinforcement] basics , you can not only 
teach your horse anything you want, you have build a solid friendship too.

 

Over the years I have developed my own basics, HippoLogic’s Key Lessons (Your Key to Success in Positive Reinforcement Horse Training). If you master those exercises you can teach your horse anything you want! The Key Lessons together form a broad solid foundation.

If you think this is a blog that someone can benefit from, please use one of the share buttons  below. Or post your comment, I read them all!

Or simply hit the like button so I know you appreciated this blog. Thank you!

Sandra Poppema, B.Sc.

My mission is to improve human-horse relationships. I reconnect horse women with their inner wisdom and teach them the principles of learning and motivation, so they become confident and skilled to train their horse in a safe and effective way that is a lot of FUN for both human and horse. Win-win.

Sign up for HippoLogic’s newsletter (it’s free and it comes with a reinforcer) or visit HippoLogic’s website and discover my online 8 week course Key Lessons, Your Key to Success in Positive Reinforcement Horse Training.

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The secret of success: find an accountability partner

Your comfort zone is where you feel good. You can feel like an expert in your comfort zone. That’s a wonderful feeling.

The downside is that you can’t grow inside the boundaries of your own comfort zone. Try something new, something scary. Achieve your equestrian goals, develop yourself as rider or horse trainer.

Accountability partner (AP)
Have you ever heard of an accountability partner (AP)? No? What can he/she do for you, you might ponder?

An AP is someone with who you can share your equestrian dreams, who helps you define your goals and who inspires you and helps you to accomplish them. I think we all need one.

Anyone can be your accountability partner: your instructor, a barn mate or a friend. The difference between a mentor and an AP is that you are mentoring each other. You are equals.

Qualifications
Choose someone who is just as passionate about horses as you are, someone who inspires you, someone who has knowledge and is honest. Honesty is very important because your partner has to tell you what you can do to improve and you have to listen and respect them enough to consider their advice.

There has to be mutual respect. You don’t have to follow his or her ideas all the time, but you do have to listen with an open mind and think his or her advice over. I always encourage people to ask skeptical questions (‘why’ questions), it tickles the mind. 

Choose a nice person, someone who can put things into perspective for you. Choose someone with who you can have a good laugh!

Keep your mind open
Ideas about horse behaviour or training with which you grew up with, might not be accurate anymore. Don’t take any information at face value, because ‘your instructor told you’ or someone ‘who has been in the horse business all their lives’.

Knowledge regarding horse behaviour, horse welfare and training has evolved in the last decades. Don’t be afraid to learn and take on new ideas! This can be a bit confronting sometimes, but the up-side is: the advice of your AP is meant to help you and to accomplish your goals.

Stepping outside your comfort zone (or being pushed outside it), can feel awkward in the beginning. But I promise you: it is worth it!

I can’t find someone!
If it is hard to find someone at your barn because there is nobody who shares your training method or way of thinking, find a person or a group on the internet. Use Facebook or Meetup.com to find like minded people who can challenge you, and with whom you can share your success stories too.

I created a platform for equine positive reinforcement trainers, a place where clicker trainers can share their goals, tips, feel-good stories and ask for advice. Click here for the link . Our R+ community also provides you with an accountability partner. You can share your training videos in our community to get feedback and advice so you stay on track with your own training and much more.

Work towards a goal
With an accountability partner your progress can double or even triple. Agree to visit each others horse once a month so you can show what you’ve been working on, ask questions and enjoy your time with someone who is really interested in your success.

With an accountability partner you have to work on your goals with your horse. You don’t want to disappoint him or her or tell them that you didn’t work on any of your goals, right?

Confession
I had an AP in The Netherlands and we visited each others barns once a month. Sometimes I only practiced a few days before my accountability partner was visiting me and Kyra.

It always surprised me how much progress I could accomplish in just a few clicker training sessions if I set my mind to it. Without her I wouldn’t have trained so much little things and wouldn’t have achieved so many small goals.

These small steps are now merged into big achievements, like a happy horse that trailers well, a horse that is started under saddle with clicker training, a horse that can perform almost all lateral gaits in walk and trot and so on.

Try it!

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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!

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