| In the booklet, “Getting Started, Clicker Training for Horses”, I describe three exercises, targeting, head lowering, and backing, which are the basic building blocks that I teach to all clicker-trained horses.
* Targeting introduces the horse to the basic concept of the clicker: behavior leads to click, click leads to rewards. Touch a cone, and all of a sudden your human turns into a giant vending machine! Targeting is the main focus of the first video.
* Backing expands the clicker concept for the horse, and helps put an end to mugging behavior. Nudging you is not the way to unlock the “vending machine”. Yielding to pressure and moving away from you is. That means that built into the foundation of clicker training is respect of space. You must have that for safety. You also need it for upper-level performance work. This is the focus of Lesson 2: Ground Manners.
* Head lowering is the third important building block because it creates trust and relaxation. This is the mental state in which your horse is going to do his best learning. This is the focus of Lesson 3: Head Lowering: Your Calm-Down Cue.
Lesson 2 begins with a discussion of negative reinforcement: what it is and what role it plays in horse training in general, and clicker training in particular. The video shows you how to take the horse training skills you already know and combine them with clicker training. That’s one of the great strengths of clicker training: it piggy backs so well onto other training methods. You don’t have to throw away everything you have already learned about horse training. You take the best of what you know and combine it with clicker training to make it even better.
Clicker training makes use of two powerful training shortcuts. The first is targeting. The second is negative reinforcement, or more simply put, pressure and release of pressure. This later is something that all horse training, no matter how gentle or harsh, has in common. Pressure and release of pressure is the way we communicate with horses. When you take the slack out of a lead or a rein to ask for a turn, you are using pressure. When you add leg, or shift your weight in the saddle to signal a change of gait, you are using pressure.
Pressure is our universal language. To be safe around horses, they need to learn to move away from pressure. The question is not whether we make this part of our training, but HOW we teach it to the horse. In clicker training pressure becomes information the horse uses to get to his reward faster. From his point of view he is just playing the children’s game of “hot and cold.” Pressure is not meant to intimidate or cause pain.
Lesson 2 shows you how to introduce the concept of moving away from pressure to your horse. It begins with a very simple exercise which is particularly useful for pushy, bargy horses: backing in a stall or small paddock.
The purpose of this lesson is twofold: to teach your horse to move away from pressure and to teach him how to maneuver his body in tight, trappy spaces. This later piece connects the turning of his hips to you and gives you control of his feet.
When a horse is first asked to back near a wall, many horses will feel stuck. They don’t realize that they can just swing their hindquarters over and continue to back. Instead the only options they see are either barging forward over their handler, or planting their feet and growing roots.
Through this very simple exercise we are teaching the horse to be more aware of his whole body. As he learns to swing his hips to the side and back out of your space, click!, good things happen. All the pressure goes away AND he gets a treat. In addition to learning an important physical skill, he’s also learning emotional control and relaxation.
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