Did “they” tell you: ->> your horse would become dangerous by feeding treats? ->> you’ll turn your hores into a mugger? ->> it doesn’t work for all horses, all people, all breeds? ->> your horse will never work for you again without treats? ->> it’s all about the treats and not about YOU? ->> you’ll spoil your horse? ->> that you can’t train everything with R+?
What did THEY tell you?
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What do you say?
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Sandra Poppema, B.Sc.
Helping horse people to bond with their horse and get the results they want.
I like to call all horse people who use treats as reinforcers in training (to get behaviour) horse trainers. They are deliberately influencing their horses’ behaviour. I love that!
When they talk about using treats in training often lots of objections are raised. In this series I give solutions for these common objections and beliefs.
Common beliefs about Treats in Training
I asked my Facebook friends to help me out with some common believes that live in the equine world about treats in training. Thank you all for helping me. I will quote the answers:
Hand-feeding creates mugging horses
Hand feeding makes them bite.
That it instantly makes them fat.
Hand feeding horses is bad because it turns them into monsters, they get rude, pushy and bite everyone.
They get Treat Crazy, and will not be able to think or focus on what they are doing.
It will make your horse aggressive pushy and mouthy.
Hand-feeding makes them spoiled and they will refuse to eat out of a bucket and you will have to exchange it for a gilded bowl.
It makes them nippy, aggressive, pushy, space invading.
You can only hand-feed your horse twice.
They’ll kill you if you forget your treat bag once upon a time in the future.
It’s unnatural (as opposed to using carrot sticks and spurs and what not), since horses don’t feed one another in reward for tasks.
It’s super dangerous, for when done incorrectly it turns them into raging killing machines that can never be re-educated.
Only hand-feed grain and hay but not treats because it will send the wrong message to the horse.
Let’s see how we can prevent these objections from happening. In this blog I gave solutions for objections 1, 2, 4, 7, 9 and 13. In my this blog I tackled objection #3.
Today I will share with you how I handle ‘Treat Crazy Horses’. I love that expression! I think it’s expressing exactly how eager that horse is! You can use that into your advantage in training!
Solutions for Horses that became ‘Treat Crazy’
How to deal with a horse that is treat crazy is really simple in fact. It is often not only the high value of the treat that causes frustration in the horse, it’s also the lack of clarity that makes horses behave this way. Part of the solution is to change to lower value reinforcers.
If you can give your treat crazy horse clarity when to expect a treat and when he can’t, he will become way calmer around food and food reinforcers. That is the other part of the solution: clarity.
The way you teach him is by using a ‘bridge signal’ or ‘marker signal’ in your training. You can use a specific word you never use for something else or a specific sound like a click from a box clicker.
Stop feeding (from your horses’ perspective) ‘random treats’.
When you start using a marker signal, that marks the exact behaviour your horse got the reward for, the reward will turn into a reinforcer. It will strengthen the clicked behaviour. This is how positive reinforcement trainers use treats to train behaviours.
Horses are smart and they figure out quickly to ‘get you to click and reinforce’ them! When they start to offer the new behaviour consistently it is time for your next step in training. Teaching your horse to pay attention to the click is only the first step. In the Ultimate Horse Training Formula I explain how you start green horses with clicker training and how to avoid pitfalls.
This is how you can turn a Treat Crazy horse into a horse that loves your training!
If you want give your horse even more clarity start using a start session-signal and most importantly: an end session-signal. That is a simple way to teach your horse now your lesson starts and you can expect to earn treats. With your end of session/end of training-signal you tell your horse ‘Sorry, no more treats to be earned. Lesson is over.‘
The third piece of advice is to teach your horse the HippoLogic Key Lesson Table Manners forHorses (safe hand-feeding) with clicker training. This is the Key to Your Success to train with food reinforcers. This and more is covered in the complete home-study program Ultimate Horse Training Formula.
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 in training in order to enhance the bond between horses and humans!
Join my mailing list to get more positive reinforcement training: HippoLogic’s website.
One of the key lessons I like to promote as a really good foundation to start with and to keep working on, is safe behaviour around food, ‘table manners for horses’ so to say.
Why is this one of the key lessons? If you are working with horses you always want to be as safe as possible. You certainly don’t want to create problems, which can easily happen if you train with food as a reinforcer without having clear ‘rules’. Rules are alle about expectations:
When can your horse expect a treat: only after a click
When can’t he expect treats: no click, no glory, no treat
How he can earn clicks that lead to treats: paying attention to the cue and answer the question right
Your Key to Success in using food as reinforcer is to teach your horse safe hand-feeding or Key Lesson Table Manners.
Ground rules in clicker training
People who, in the horses’ eyes, reward randomly with food will have horses that are always expecting the unexpected: a random treat. That leads to impatient horses: they want it now!
Therefor you have to start making clear your horse has to know he has to do something in order to get a reward. He also has to know what it is he did, that made him earn the treat. He has to learn to pay attention to your marker (the click). No click, no (food) reward.
What to do if your horse is mugging you? Using a marker makes it easier for your horse to understand that ‘mugging’ is never reinforced. There is no click, so no food will come his way.
Mugging is annoying for the handler and can trigger frustration in the horse. Especially if he sometimes gets rewarded for this behaviour (with attention, a pet or even food) while other sometimes he gets punished for it or ignored. It is this various ‘reward’schedule that strengthen this undesired behaviour even more. How to handle this?
You want to reinforce the opposite behaviour of mugging. A behaviour that is incompatible with pushing your arm or sniffing your pockets. This will make your training sessions more safe.
Table-Manners for Horses
Teach your horse to move his head (read: mouth) away from you, your pocket with food or your ‘money belt’ full of goodies.
Teach your horse to keep his lips closed
Teach him to gently take the treat off of your hands
Table manners around dinner time If you want your horse to behave around feeding time, you have to communicate clearly what behaviour you expect from him:
standing with four feet on the floor while the food cart is coming
back up when the stall door is opened or when the hay is delivered and so on.
Use a marker signal to pinpoint the wanted behaviours. Read more here.
Polite behaviour With ‘polite’ behaviour I mean safebehaviour. The horse must wait ‘politely’ until the food is delivered to his lips, after the marker. He shouldn’t move towards the treat, he has to learn that the treat will come to him. The horse must (learn to) take the treat carefully off of my hand and only use his lips and no teeth.
When I click and when I deliver the food, I pay close attention to the horses state of mind. Those two moments (click and the delivery of the treat) are the reinforcing moments, and I do want to reinforce safe behaviour, so I pay attention to the horses state of mind.
Trainer Present the food in a safe way to the horse and ‘prove’ to your horse that you are trustworthy. You will always deliver a food reward after a click and you will deliver it (bring it to his mouth so he won’t have to ‘search’ for it). If you drop it on the ground,simply give another one.
People who are easily scared by a horse that moves towards the treat in their hand and proceed to drop the food, need to work on their food presenting skills. You want the horse to trust you on where the food is presented (to their mouth) and that it will arrive. Be consistent and reliable in the way you present treats.
Before you click, always check if you still have at least one more treat to offer. It doesn’t have to be food, but if you’re working with food, make sure you have something left in your pocket to give.
The value of the reward, the size and the chewiness can all influence (un)desired behaviours around food. If the size of the treat is too small, it can easily fall on the floor and get lost, if it is too big it can be hard to eat quickly. Is the reward a high value treat, the horse get frustrated if it’s not delivered quickly enough. If the horse has to chew very long it can distract him from the training.
There are many aspects to take into consideration when you reinforce your horse with food. Please don’t let this long list scare you away from working with food rewards.
Food is such a powerful reinforcer that once your horse understands how you want him to behave around food and treats in training, you can have a lot of fun with it!
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Do you struggle with a horse that mugs you for treats or attention?
Do you wish your horse would behave better but you want can use some help? Maybe your horse:
Paws for attention when he’s at the grooming place
Kicks his stall doors
Always is ‘in your pocket’ (and most often you wish he wasn’t like that)
Becomes pushy (or nibbles) when you have treats in your pockets
His mugging behaviours are holding you back from clicker training awesome, amazing or useful and safe behaviors
If you would like to learn where in your training you can improve so that you would get the results you want in clicker training, grap this opportunity to get a free Clicker Training Assessment!
After your assessment you know exactly what to improve and how you can avoid the pitfalls that keeps you stuck. You’ll know your next step and you’ll walk away with valuable insights about your training style.
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 in training in order to enhance the bond between horses and humans!
Join my mailing list to get more positive reinforcement training: HippoLogic’s website.
HippoLogic -> Clickertraining.ca 
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