Clicker Challenges for Fun!

***NEW** Clicker Challenge Community

Join our community for a new Clicker Challenge each month and develop the bond with your horse while having fun.

What’s a HippoLogic Clicker Challenge?

In a Clicker Challenge you’ll get a challenging assignment to train within two weeks. Each Challenge helps you teach your horse multiple behaviours that you have to chain together.

5 Skills that you’ll develop in the Clicker Challenges:

• Chaining behaviours together
• Putting behaviours on cue
• Building duration in exercises
• Teach your horse to listen, even from a large distance
• Fading out clicks & treats without losing behaviours

12 Challenges a Year

On the 1st of each month you’ll get access to a new Challenge! In our community you’ll work together to accomplish your challenge. We start February 1st, 2023 with the first challenge.

Each Challenge has 4 levels: from absolute beginner to expert and 2 levels in between. You can pick the level of your choice and when you’ve accomplished it, you can aim for a higher level. Each level builds upon the previous level, to help you move through the levels faster.

In the Challenge Community you’ll get Accountability to do fun stuff with your horse that helps you develop his skills, as well as your own.

All Challenges include one or more foundation behaviours and may include a husbandry skill or include a trick training aspect. What they all have in common is that you’ll learn advanced skills and training techniques to help build a better bond with your horse.

12 Challenges

1. Back Up Challenge
2. Farrier Challenge
3. Movement Challenge
4. Send Challenge
5. ‘Trailer’ Challenge
6. Movement Challenge
7. Stay Challenge
8. Spray bottle Challenge
9. Pick Up Challenge
10. Mounting Challenge
11. Recall Challenge
12. Jingle Bells Challenge

Rules of the Challenges

• Everything has to be taught with positive reinforcement only (that’s why it’s called a Clicker Challenge)
• You can use whatever bridge signal you prefer, it doesn’t have to be a clicker
• During the training phase you are allowed to click and reinforce/use keep-going signals/encourage your horse verbally as much as you need
• During the training phase you are allowed to use props (like a target stick, mat, cone) to help your horse understand your criteria. You can fade these out in the final stage and before you film your final video.
• Punishment and negative reinforcement are not allowed!
• Share videos of your results in our secret FB group  (not mandatory, but it’s very helpful to get feedback and coaching is included!)
• In your final video (last day to admit is on day 14) you are allowed to bridge and reinforce once
• The final video must be: one take, no editing (you may shorten the video)

Choose your level

There are 4 levels of difficulty:

1. Purple level for novice horses and/or trainers who just started clicker training
2. Green level for green horses (that have no previous clicker training XP) or trainers that are relatively new at clicker training
3. Blue level for advanced clicker horses and/or advanced trainers
4. Red level for expert clicker horses and/or expert clicker trainers

Join us today!

Contact me hippologic@gmail.com to join us!

Happy Horse training!
Sandra Poppema, B.Sc., founder of HippoLogic

Are you inspired and interested in personal coaching in a group or do you want to have access to online clicker training courses and a fabulous, supportive R+ community, then join our HippoLogic Clicker Training Academy. Apply today!

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

Is Your Horse Hard to Catch? How to reverse this

My heart breaks when I hear people talk about ‘catching their horse’ or worse: having a horse that is ‘hard to catch’. Why is this heartbreaking to hear?

The horse clearly doesn’t want to engage and that’s not a message we want to hear from the horse we love so much. The good thing is that’s pretty easy to reverse.

Catching vs Being Welcomed in the pasture

When you need to catch your horse, it implies that the horse is walking away… That he doesn’t want to be with you! That’s heartbreaking…

Not only for the owner (we have horses to love and we want them to love us!), but sad for the horse.

Walking away from you is a clear signal that should be addressed! The horse clearly has no intention of coming with you happily. If he would, he would be greeting you at the fence or walk up to you to say ‘Hello’.

Possible reasons for this behaviour

Many reasons can drive this behaviour. Think of:

• Horse is anticipating on what he has to do when he’s caught (riding, groundwork, driving, leaving his herd, being groomed) and wants to avoid it
• Maybe he has an unbalanced rider that’s really uncomfortable for him
• Poor fitting tack
• Facing lots of aversives in training and/or punishment
• Horse is unsure what’s expected
• Distrust of people
• Learned behaviour (playing tag with you and enjoys this game)

Choosing a solution

Depending on the cause of your horse’s behaviour of getting away from you and trying to avoid being caught, you choose a solution.

If he’s in pain (poor fitting tack) you could clicker train him to accept the aversive bridle or saddle, but it doesn’t revolve his discomfort, pain or fears.

Often it starts with offering your horse a choice and showing him that you’re listening! That’s when he’ll start telling you more. The more you know, the better you can address his issue and the sooner it will be resolved.

I have a hard to catch horse

Currently I’m riding a horse that is hard to catch. She’s walking away from me and when I follow her, she trots a big circle before you I can approach and halter her. This is how they catch her.

Interesting part is that she will let you halter her, but she clearly doesn’t want to.

I’ve been showing this horse, that she has a choice.

Now I gave her a voice she’s saying ‘No’ to me and won’t let me approach her with a halter. That’s to be expected. It tells me a lot!

I’m not worried. Soon I will have taught her to approach me and nothing bad will happen. Only good things!

I’m confident it won’t be long before I can halter her and investigate further what part of being caught/being with people she doesn’t like. That’s why I’m making a video of this behaviour before the problem goes away. 😉

Give your horse a choice and you’ll get answers!

Some people are afraid of giving their horse a choice or a voice in training. Yes, it’s possible that your horse will say NO. This will give you so much information, that you can use to make riding or training win-win.

Often horses are very willing to cooperate with you, once their problem is solved.

The problem can be anything: from fear of pain or punishment, insecurity, to learned (undesired) behaviours. Once you give your horse a voice, and start acting (!) on what he communicates, your relationship will become better!

Every time you listen to your horse, he is reinforced to communicate more with you. No more unexpected bolting, pulling away from you, spooking or biting will happen. It can take time, but the more you listen (and act on his message!!) the more he’ll tell you and the more he’ll trust you.

So, I’m not worried about my free lease horse trotting away from me. Before long, I can halter her and she’ll be at the fence greeting me. Looking forward spending time together.

Positive reinforcement is giving your horse something he wants, so he’ll give you something you want. It’s more fun working with a cooperative horse that’s eager to work with and for you!

Want to know how I do this? Read the related article (bottom of this one)

Need help clicker 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

Join us!

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

Related article:

How to get your horse out of the pasture effortlessly!