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If you have not yet started clicker training your horse, here is a good way to start. Start with Key Lesson (your key to success) Table Manners.
Table Manners for Horses is similar to etiquette for people: we don’t use manners naturally, they are learned behaviours. Just like we teach children to use knife and fork and sit with our feet below the table and wait our turn, we can teach our horses safe behaviours around food and treats. We also don’t walk into other peoples houses (strangers) to see what’s in the fridge, right? Our horses are not suppose to check what’s in our pockets either.
In order to start clicker training well, you need to have clear criteria in your head. What do you want to reinforce and see more off? What behaviour would you like to eliminate from your relationship (biting, mugging, being pushed etc)?
Focus on what you want, is the most important in equine clicker training. That’s what you want to see more of and that why you need to be prepared to click for ~ HippoLogic
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Here are the criteria I like to teach horses who are new to positive reinforcement training:
✅ The horse needs to take the food off of the hand gently and calm: lips only and no teeth. No grabbing or moving super fast towards the food as if there’s a fear to miss out. That could be dangerous.
✅ The horse must learn to wait until the food (treat) is served to the lips and don’t move towards the food (the pocket with treats or hand that’s feeding the horse).
We -people- don’t go to the kitchen in a restaurant either so see where our food is. No, we wait patiently until it’s brought to us. We don’t start eating or grabbing the bread when the waitress still holds your plate. We wait until the plate is put in front of us before we start eating calmly.
✅ Only expect a treat after the bridge (click) and not at random.
Just like not every plate the waitress carries is for you. Only after you ordered you can expert food.
✅ The horse must be relaxed and in a calm state. Ears forward or relaxed to the side. This in combination with a closed muzzle and relaxed lips makes a friendly face. His must learn to trust the treat will come.
Just like in a restaurant you are polite and friendly to the waitress, not looking angry at the waitress when she bring the food to the table. You say ‘Thank you’ and smile.
✅ Make sure your horse is not hungry. In many restaurants you get or can order some bread and butter to change your hangry-ness into a better mood. Do the same for your horse: provide hay during training or train after a meal.
Horses are different than us. They are designed to eat 16 hours a day, so they will eat after a meal. If train when your horse is hungry, you’ll create problems that can be very hard to un-train, like grabbing the food and even biting.
Make sure positive reinforcement is a real win-win: win for you and win for your horse. Treat well ~ HippoLogic
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;Read more about starting clicker training here.
The criteria above mean also that the trainer also needs to have a few good habits.
Clicker training is not only about training your horse. You-as trainer- need to develop good habits, too. ~ HippoLogic
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Horse owners (I call them horse trainers) who use food reinforcers are frequently confronted with a lot of misunderstanding about how treats or rewards can be effectively used as reinforcers. Some people don’t realize that you can use treats to your benefit: to help you train your horse.
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:
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 this blog I will debunk objection #3.
This can happen, but it is easily preventable:
overweight easily.If you want to learn more about using food to your benefit in training, sign up today for the next course Ultimate Horse Training Formula. One of the 8 modules will be about how to use food reinforcers best, the difference between ‘high value’ and ‘low value’ reinforcers and when to use which. You also learn how to fade out the reinforcer and keep the behaviour!
Stay tuned for my next blog. I will give solutions to objection #6 They get Treat Crazy, and will not be able to think or focus on what they are doing.
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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 4.
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.
While it might look like clicker training or positive reinforcement training is all about food (see part 1), that’s not the case.
People who don’t know the principles of learning and how animals make associations, can only ‘see’ what they know, if they watch positive reinforcement training.
They only see the differences compared to their own training.
Since they can’t ‘make’ anything out of the bridge signal (the click), their brains usually ignore it. They don’t ‘see’ it, because it has no meaning to them.
Instead they they focus on what they can see. What is different compared to what they know? The food! Therefor it is easy to think ‘Clicker training is all about the food’.
People try to find associations with ‘treats’ and ‘horses’. Usually that leads they to the association of mugging, pushy horses (kicking doors at feeding time, horses that put their nose into pockets with food), horses that will bite if hand-fed and other negative associations or myths.
The other thing they ‘see’ is what goes wrong in training. Their mind is focused on the mistakes the horse makes. We all know that what you focus on grows. Positive reinforcement training focuses on what goes well, so we create more of the good things we want.
In the beginning stages (introducing the click and teaching the association ‘click means an appetitive is coming’), the horse doesn’t yet understand the bridge signal and he will focus on the food.
That will only take a few short sessions. Soon they will figure out what lead to the appetitive: their own behaviour!
Right from the start I will teach horses that ‘moving away from the food’ leads to food. That improves the safety and it is called the HippoLogic Key Lesson Table Manners. Horses are very much like humans; we too have to be taught how to behave according to the etiquette.
Once the horse understands that, he will focus on the bridge signal, the click that marks the behaviour that lead to the food-reinforcer, and his own behaviour.
In that moment the horse understand that he has to pay attention to the click (not the food) in order to get the treat.
That is when the horse shifts his attention from the food to the marker signal. That is also when the food stops to be a distracting factor. That usually all happens in day 1.
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
Share the passion!
Sandra Poppema, BSc
Founder of HippoLogic
Enhancing Horse-Human connections through clicker training
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!
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 1.
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.
People often get the wrong impression about equine clicker training. They think you need to keep clicking and feeding for ever. That’s not true at all!
I think it is because there are so many videos out there about teaching our horses new behaviours. If you see a lot of those videos you indeed can get the wrong impression and could be mistakenly thinking that we clicker trainers never stop clicking and are always giving treats.
Once the horse understands the new or more desirable behaviour, the marker (click) and food are faded out.
We still reinforce the behaviour once in a while with an appetitive (treat, praise, scratches or with other reinforcing behaviour), but we don’t keep clicking and feeding treats for the same behaviour over and over.
If we would do that, it would decrease the goal behaviour rather than it would keep it’s quality or increase it.
Part of the power of positive reinforcement is that there is a chance of getting a reward once the behaviour is trained. That chance can also involve to do other behaviour (one that they really like to do). That will make the horse always want to perform his best.
After the first few sessions of clicker training the horse starts to pay attention to the click and his behaviour at the the time of the click.
In clicker training he focus shifts pretty quickly from the food to the click and their own behaviour.
If people make videos about clicker training their horse, they are usually filming behaviour that is in the process of being taught, not behaviours that are already well trained and established. Therefor the horse is clicked and reinforced a lot in those videos.
When you want to learn to click less and get more behaviour, join my online clicker learning community, and I’ll will guide you to become the best trainer for your horse.
The clicks and treats are faded out after the goal behaviour is trained.
Read the other articles in this series:
part 1
part 2
part 3
part 4
part 5
part 6
Share the passion!
If you want to share this blog on your social media, use one of the share buttons below. It’s very much appreciated!
Sandra Poppema, BSc
Founder of HippoLogic
Enhancing Horse-Human connections through clicker training
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!
Let me start by telling you that there are many ‘wrong’ ways and many right ways to rehabilitate a horse that has a halter or bridle trauma. Here is my story in which I share the wrong and the right strategy.
This is Punky. His problem was that no one, except the owner, could halter him.
You can see how that can be a daily stress for both horse and humans in a boarding facility, right?
The wrong way is to go straight to problem solving. That is what we humans like to do, it is natural to us and it has been reinforced all our lives that this is the way to do it.
That is exactly what I did…
I started the ‘wrong’ way, which was pretty much what most horse trainers would do.
When I was training Punky, I thought I could skip my own Key Lessons and ‘just teach the horse to be OK with a halter’.
I thought just teaching Punky to target the halter would be the one and only step to desensitize him. I envisioned that the next step could be the haltering. Easy-peasy.
It was a bit more complex than that and I learned how valuable the HippoLogic Key Lessons really are. For all trainers.
We can’t skip steps because it is the horse who determines how many steps are needed, not the trainer.
When I started out teaching Punky to target his halter, he became really excited about all the treats he was (in his mind!) ‘suddenly’ receiving.
I needed to teach him Key Lesson ‘Table Manners for Horses’ in order to keep my fingers safe and to teach him that a food reward only can be expected after the click.
He started to mug me more and more. Again, I had to lower my criteria about his learning curve. I realized that I should have taught him Key Lesson ‘Patience’ (move his head out of my space in order not to mug me) before I taught him anything else.
Then, when I thought I was ready to work on ‘desensitization of the halter’ I noticed that he wouldn’t even wanted to come near a halter. Every time I wanted to halter him he put his head up to prevent me from haltering him.
I decided to teach him Key Lesson ‘Targeting’ (nose and ears) so I could bring the halter near his body and ask him to touch the halter with his nose.
This wasn’t enough to halter him. Now he was OK with touching the halter with his nose and even putting his nose into the nose band, but he was still putting his head up and backing up when I wanted to pull the halter over his ears.
Therefor I needed to teach Punky Key Lesson ‘Head lowering’. Asking him to lower his head on cue turned out to be super helpful in giving Punky clarity about all I wanted from him:
In other words: I was lumping instead of splitting the goal behaviour. A pitfall all trainers need to beware of.
This was a valuable experience for me. Now I start all horses I train, teaching them my Key Lessons. No matter what I think they already can do or what I ‘think I can skip’. Building a solid foundation first, speeds up training instead of slowing it down!
Here is a video of haltering Punky, training day 4:
Here is a video of day 11, after I taught all the necessary Key Lessons:
How you can turn basic exercises as ‘Table Manners’ for Horses and ‘Patience’ into tools is discussed in part I. Read here part II where you can learn how to use Key Lessons Targeting and Mat training to train complex behaviours. Read part III to learn how you can use Key Lessons Head lowering and Backing for advanced training purposes.
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This is a question equine clicker trainers get asked often and is a really fascinating question for me as positive reinforcement horse trainer.
I get that it’s a concern for people who are interested in clicker training and those who are exploring the pros and cons. It seems like a hassle, right?
If you know the principles of training you’ll understand. Let me explain. Basically there are only two ways you can motivate a horse in training.
So if someone ask me ‘When can I stop using food in training?’ it sounds like the person wants to know ‘When can I stop reinforcing behaviour?’ or ‘When can I stop offering appetitives in training?’
I have never heard someone ask a riding instructor ‘When can I stop using my whip?’ or an employer that wants to know when he can stop paying his newly hired employees.
However, I do understand where this question is coming from. It comes from a fear of never, ever doing something with your horse without having a treat in your pocket. I get that, but a reinforcer isn’t a bribe that you have to use every time and also have to keep increasing.
Here is what happens if you start using positive reinforcement:
In positive reinforcement as well as in negative reinforcement training (traditional training and natural horsemanship methods) reinforcement never stops.
If the reinforcement stops the behaviour will go extinct (die out), unless it is ‘self 
rewarding behaviour’, behaviour that reinforces itself without external interference.
All behaviour must be reinforced in order to stay in the horses 'repertoire'.
Riders will never stop using leg aids (pressure-release) and if the horse fades out his response, he will get a reminder (the rider will use reinforcement) to ‘hurry up and respond quicker’ by the use of a stronger leg aid, the tap of the whip or the use of spurs.
Does a (well trained) horse need to be in pain every time you ride him? No, he will learn to anticipate on a light cue, that now is a reliable predictor of an aversive. It’s this principle that ‘keeps the horse in line’. The horse had learned how to avoid it.
Yes and No.
Yes, you will have to reinforce a learned (trained) behaviour once in a while after it is established. This will prevent extinction. This means you will have to remind your horse that there is ‘still a chance of getting something good’ (food) once in a while for good performance.
No, it doesn’t have to be food!
Once you get more experience as trainer you can use other reinforcers too that aren’t food. You can even reward behaviour with behaviour.
Yes, you will carry food almost every training, but it is not what you think. Once you have discovered how much fun it is (for you and your horse) to clicker train him and how easy you get new behaviours you can’t stop teaching him more and more.
Food is a powerful primary reinforcer and comes in handy when teaching new behaviours. That is why clicker trainers almost always carry food: they are busy training new behaviours!
No, you don’t have to reinforce well known behaviour every time with food.
It can take a long time before positively reinforced behaviour goes extinct. Your horse will learn that you equal fun and he is willing to do so much more for you even when you don’t carry food. Once your marker becomes valuable, you can replace food with other reinforcers, like scratches or other behaviours.
What is your answer to the question ‘When can I stop using food in training?’ Please share it in the comments.
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We all would like to treat our horses from time to time. Positive reinforcement trainers are always on the lookout to find a special treat for their horse which they can use in training.
Kyra is an extremely picky eater when it comes to treats and she won’t eat commercial horse treats. I was very exited when I tried this recipe and discovered that she liked these right away. For Kyra this is a high value treat, so it makes it worthwhile to make.
Healthy Cinnamon Horse Cookies
The molasses is optional. Without the molasses these are very low-sugar treats. I make them all the time without molasses. I have yet to encounter a horse that doesn’t like them! Sometimes I use turmeric instead of cinnamon.
Ingredients
1 ¾ cups uncooked (brown) rice / 6 cups cooked rice
1 cup ground stabilized flax
3 tablespoons cinnamon
½ cup flour
½ cup molasses (optional) or water
Directions
Pre-heat oven to 275 degrees Fahrenheit (135 degrees Celsius). Line two cookie sheets with parchment paper. Cook the rice and let cool down.
Mix all ingredients together. It will make a very sticky dough.
Wet your hands before making little balls of the dough. This is very time consuming. If you don’t have much time you can also roll the dough simply onto the 2 cookie sheets with a rolling pin. Make it half an inch thick. Pre-cut the cookies with a pizza cutter into little squares before baking.
Bake them for 60 minutes. Turn cookies and bake for another 60 minutes. They should be crisp and not squishy. Let them cool down for several hours to harden.I hope there is no need to keep them stored for weeks. My horse Kyra loves these!
These healthy cinnamon horse cookies make excellent gifts, too.
Here is the video with instructions:
Here is the connaisseur who did the tasting:
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