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December 2008
Tenth Anniversary Message
Happy Holidays Everyone!
This Holiday season marks the Tenth Anniversary of the publication of my first horse book, "Clicker Training for Your Horse."
As I was writing the book, I kept thinking about the space beacons Nasa sends out. You know the ones that say: "We're here. Is anyone else out there?"
"Clicker Training for Your Horse" was my space beacon. I was one horse person saying: "I'm here. Is anyone else out there?"
It turns out there were a lot of you out there looking for the same sort of things that I was. We were looking for effective training methods. We wanted problem solving tools that were fair and kind. We wanted clear communication. We wanted to talk to our horses, and we wanted our horses to be able to answer back. We wanted story book relationships, and we found all that and more through clicker training.
Over the past ten years I've been blessed with many wonderful opportunities to share clicker training. Through clinics, through emails, and through the on-line clicker community I've been able to meet many of you. It turns out we're an extraordinary group of people. Either that or clicker training just brings out the best in everyone. Either way, my "space beacon" has brought me ten years filled with wonderful friendships.
We started out together, ten plus years ago, teaching simple things. We taught horses to touch targets and that grew into some pretty fancy tricks.
We taught basic leading and that evolved into sophisticated in-hand work, riding for a sound spine, guide work, and liberty work extraordinaire!
We started out needing to tidy up food delivery and to create polite manners and that morphed into the pose which then morphed into poetry in motion. And that in turn grew into microshaping, equine "pilates", and microriding.
It's been an extraordinary ten years. What started out as an easy to describe concept - if you like it, click and reinforce it - has evolved into a detailed, powerful and many layered-training system.
I first started experimenting with clicker training in 1993. In 1996 I set up my web site and produced a simple set of training articles describing the basics of clicker training. In 1998 Karen Pryor's company, Sunshine Books, published my first book, "Clicker Training for your Horse", and the rest as they say is history.
During the past ten years I've been traveling both in the US and abroad teaching clicker training clinics. I've written two more books, "The Click That Teaches: A Step-By-Step Guide in Picture" and "The Click That Teaches: Riding with the Clicker." And I've produced The Click That Teaches DVD lesson series. There are to date fourteen titles in that series.
This year alone I've added five new titles, including most recently, "Capture the Saddle", "Riding on a Triangle" and "Helen House Horse".
While I've been doing all of that, you've been out with your horses experimenting with clicker training. Many of you have written on-line posts about your experiences. You've been asking questions, sharing your clicker successes, helping newcomers figure out the basics. It's been fun eavesdropping in on your discoveries as you've shared them with the on-line clicker community.
Some of you have been on this journey of discovery since the early days of clicker training. Some of you have come to clicker training only recently. I'd love to hear from all of you as you look back over your experiences with clicker training. What has it meant to you? What have you done with it? How has it helped your horses? How has it affected your life?
We're all pioneers in this work, and that's part of the fun. It isn't a set-in-stone training method. Everyone who experiments with clicker training is contributing to its development. When I was writing my first book, I remember saying - "in ten years we're not going to recognize the horse world." Now that was a bit of an overstatement. I must say the horse world, in general, looks pretty much way it always has. But the clicker training world - now that has changed and dramatically so!
We've been learning. We've been problem solving. We've been having fun. So on this tenth anniversary of "Clicker Training for your Horse", I will say again - in ten years we aren't going to recognize the equine clicker training world. It's going to be amazing fun in 2018 to look back at twenty years of clicker training and see what we've created!
I know how much we've done in the first ten years. I'm looking forward to seeing what we're going to be doing in the next ten.
Happy Holidays Everyone!
Alexandra Kurland
theclickercenter.com
New DVDs in 2008:
Overcoming Fear and the Power of Cues
Microshaping: Learning to See the Smallest Try
Capture the Saddle: The Mounting Block Lesson
Riding on a Triangle: From Capture the Saddle to Three-Flip-Three
Helen House Horse: The Mechanics of Singe rein Riding
For a full listing of the books and DVDs, please visit the clicker store.
