What is grass training? Teaching your horse with positive reinforcement to ignore grass in training, leading and riding. In Grass Training you teach your horse to leave grass with a Stop Grazing-cue, and a Grazing-cue. It’s easier than you think, as long as you’ll use the right approach and don’t use R- or P.
Benefits Grass Training
Yummiest training ever for your horse! He will immediately pay attention to you when he understands there is a Start Grazing -cue. This will be the quickest learning of a cue.
By giving your horse something she wants, you immediately have her positiveattention!
No more unsolicited grazing on trails! You can ride, lunge and train at liberty on grass without losing your horses attention!
If you do fun stuff, your horse will trust you, looking out for your next visit. It’s a great foundation for friendship between you and your horse
It will give you incredible results. You’ll notice how annoying and frustrating it was, once you’ve solve it.
Your horse won’t snack on grass during at liberty work, leading or riding!
Your horse will become easy to get of out of the pasture. Simply call his name.
You both stop being frustrated while grass is available during riding or training
It will improve your communication
It will enhance to bond with your horse
Join the HippoLogic’s DIY Grass Training and get some fun and useful training time done. Happy Horse training!
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.
PS if you’re going to visit my site, why don’t you join my FREE Clicker Training course!
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.
A step-by-step training guide can you find in my article that’s published on Horse Rookie.
One day I realized that my horse kept pulling me toward grass and it made me feel like an inadequate horse owner. Here I was, with over 30 years on horse experience and still I was pulled towards juicy patches of grass. Sound familiar?
I decided to make a training out or it, but whatever I did nothing worked long-term. Next day it all seemed forgotten. Which it wasn’t really, it was just the pull of the grass that was so much stronger than my pull on the lead rope. So the behaviour was very much self-rewarding.
Only one thing to do: become more enticing than the grass! The only way to do this is with 100% positive reinforcement.
In the article I wrote for Horse Rookie I describe two ways of approach, depending of the level of clicker training your horse had before.
All horses like ‘grass training’ because it’s a win-win: either grazing or not grazing is rewarded. READ THE ARTICLE HERE
Imagine how much frustration you’ll avoid!
Join our group on Facebook where you can ask questions, interact with like-minded people and get support on your clicker journey. In the last quarter of 2019 I will do weekly LIVE videos in the Happy Herd. Don’t miss out!
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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What is the HippoLogic Clicker Training Academy? It’s an online place where you can learn to train every behaviour you have in mind with R+. We have a small, all-inclusive community in which students can thrive and develop.
Professional, personal positive reinforcement advice on your training videos
Super affordable
Student levels are novice to very advanced clicker trainers
Join the HippoLogic Clicker Training Academy and become one of the 25 ‘founding members’ (those who receive extra
The first 25 founding members get an additional 90-minute coaching session with me for free (value $150 CAD).
Haven’t we all experienced that a horse pulled you towards some grass in order to grab a few bites? Isn’t that annoying? I think it is!
I didn’t want to be pushed around anymore by my horse every time there was some juicy patch of grass growing around. Grass is everywhere! I decided to look for a proper, force-free way to teach my horse more desired behaviour around grass.
I tried a few different approaches, before I found one that works well, gave me a solid result and is totally force-free. I would like to share it with you.
Define ‘proper behaviour around grass’
It took me a while to teach Kyra to behave ‘properly’ around grass. With ‘properly’ I mean: no more pulling me towards grass, wait until I give the ‘graze’ cue and ‘stop grazing and come along’ if I ask her to. I was tired of pulling Kyra off the grass.
Preparation
I must say before you can start training this you need a bit of preparation and… lots of practice time. After all, what is more enticing than grass? Well, a click can be…
What really helps is already have a solid history of click & reinforce. Secondly a horse that walks with you properly and the key lessons ‘head lowering’, ‘patience’ and ‘targeting’ are required to make this challenge most likely to succeed.
I started to reinforce lifting Kyra’s head while grazing. Why? Because this is the first step to move away from the grass. I began with leading her to grass and I would cue her to graze. Then I just waited (very, very patiently) until she lifted her head by herself. That is the moment I wanted to capture and reinforce.
I can’t stress how important it is to wait until the horse moves (his head) away himself. I tried other methods like pulling the head up/preventing the head from going down or asking Kyra to target while grazing in order to lift her head, but reinforcing her own head raise worked best.
High value treats
Every time she would lift her head , I clicked and reinforced Kyra with a very high value treat. One that could compete with grass. After she ate the treat I immediately gave her the cue to ‘graze’. Here is when the key lesson ‘head lowering’ comes is really handy.
I also clicked and reinforced the ‘graze’ cue. But instead of offering a treat off of my hand, the reward was to graze as long as she wanted.
Every time she would lift her head again, I clicked, reinforced and would then give her the ‘graze’ cue.
Next step
After a certain amount of training sessions, which Kyra enjoyed very much (!), I noticed that she started to lift her head more often during grazing sessions. This is a perfect time to add a ‘lift head up’ cue. The key lesson targeting helped me a lot.
So my next clicker session looked like this:
walk to the grass
give the cue ‘graze’
wait until Kyra lifts her head
click and reinforce
give her the cue ‘graze’
let her graze until I thought she was likely to lift her head up again, ask ‘touch’ target stick
click and reinforce
cue ‘graze’
et cetera.
In this way she is always reinforced for whatever I ask.
Raising the criterion
After several sessions I noticed that Kyra didn’t seem to mind lifting her head up anymore. She was eager to see what I had to offer her. The ‘diving into the grass’ behaviour was gone. She seemed so much more relaxed on grass.
I thought this would be the perfect time to raise a criterion. Now I wanted to lift her head and take one step forward before I gave the ‘graze’ cue again. I literally built this behaviour step-by-step.
The final step in this process was to teach her to wait for the ‘graze’ cue when we would walk on or approach grass.
Result
Now I can ask Kyra to leave grass at any time. She is very willing to come with me. She never pulls me towards a patch of grass and I never have to pull her off of the grass. Win-win, for her and for me.
Kyra turned from a I-need-to-graze-now-and-store-fat-before-winter-comes-horse into a I-see-grass-so-what-horse. She knows she can trust me and is allowed to have her share… only when I say so.
Today I wanted to make a video for the FB Grass Training FB Group. Kyra didn’t want to graze, so I couldn’t show how to start walking on grass when all your horse wants to do is graze. Never thought I could be in that position: a horse that doesn’t want to graze because training is way more valuable.
Sandra Poppema, B.Sc.
HippoLogic helps establish, enhance and excel horse-human relationships
Buy the HippoLogic Grass Training for Horses that leads to a well behaved horse on grass.
It took me a while to teach Kyra to behave ‘properly’ around grass. With ‘properly’ I mean: no more pulling me towards grass, wait until I give the ‘graze’ cue and ‘stop grazing and come along’ if I ask her to. I was tired of pulling Kyra off the grass.
HippoLogic -> Clickertraining.ca 
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