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In July of 1996 Karen Pryor asked me if I would like to write a book on clicker training for her publishing company, Sunshine Books. I of course said yes, and the floodgates opened. “Clicker Training For Your Horse” was the result. That book was part of what began as a 500 page manuscript and has now grown to closer to 700 pages. We split the text into two parts. The second half contains most of the riding and will be published hopefully this coming year. Also due out in 2003 will be “Clicking With Your Horse, A Step-By-Step Guide in Pictures.” The Step-By-Step guide was the major project for 2002. It is 100 exercises, all of which will be illustrated with photos. So what has kept me glued to my computer instead of out in the barn enjoying my horses? Why have I spent all this time and energy answering email, writing books, producing videos? The answer goes back to four things that happened in the early stages of clicker training.
When I first started clicker training, my thoroughbred Peregrine was laid up with abscesses in both front feet. My farrier had put snowball pads on him which had bruised his soles. The poor horse could not walk even a step or two in his stall. At that time he was living in a run-in, run-out situation with two other horses. He wasn’t used to the confinement the abscesses imposed on him. So clicker training was simply something I experimented with to keep us both amused. It was something I was curious about. I had no sense that it would develop any further beyond just a simple game to play with my horse. It has become instead the organizing structure for all my training.
The first thing I taught Peregrine was to touch a target, mainly because that was about all he could do. He caught on fast, and seemed to enjoy the game, so as he became more mobile I added more elements and layers of complexity to the game. As he came back into work, I reviewed all his ground work using the clicker. Now at that time Peregrine was already a well-educated horse. I love ground work so he had an extensive repetroire which included, beyond the usual lunging and ground driving, an understanding of piaffe and shoulder-in in hand. As I reviewed his basic training, Peregrine seemed to be even lighter and better balanced than he had been before his lay-up. Everything was easier. The clicker was removing the layers of tension, resistance and protectiveness that had built up over the years.
I should mention here that Peregrine had always been a challenging horse to work. He had been born with stifles that lock so even the most basic of lessons were a challenge for him. The fact that he had managed to work at all much less achieve the riding success that we had was a testament to the good training I had received from my mentor, Bettina Drummond. But still, everything was a struggle. We were always fighting a body that didn’t work. I could get Peregrine to balance and carry himself so that under saddle his stifles didn’t lock, but as soon as he disengaged, the joints froze up on him and he became a pushy, bargy, difficult to handle, and at times frustrated horse.
That was the horse I was working with as I began my exploration of clicker training. We were both enjoying the game of it, but what hooked me and kept me going was my first ride after his lay-up. He’d been off work for seven weeks, and I had just moved him to the indoor arena we now call home, so that first ride was an easy one, just walk work with simple turns. As he answered each of these so basic requests to turn left or to turn right, I clicked him, reached forward from the saddle and gave him a treat. Then I would pick up the reins and ask again. I could almost feel him say: “Ooh, that’s what you wanted!! Why didn’t you say so before!?”
That’s what hooked me. All of a sudden my horse was paying attention to me, listening to me, understanding me. He wasn’t thinking about how hard everything was. He was saying: “That’s clear. I get what you want. I can do that. That’s easy”
Peregrine was eight years old. Up to that point nothing had been easy. Nothing had been clear because always in the way of everything were his stifles garbling even the most basic of requests. So to feel him say: “Yes I can do that.” was a huge experience.
So that was the first thing that hooked me.
The second happened shortly after this. Peregrine used to have what I referred euphemistically as “thoroughbred moments” in his stall. If the number of horses in the barn fell below a certain critical number, he would panic and start screaming and spinning in his stall. Well, he did this one day while I was in the barn. He was whirling in a circle, completely in a panic, trampling his bedding underfoot. Which was the problem, because I am a compulsive stall cleaner, and there was a pile of manure in his stall. I was determined to get it out before he ground it into his freshly cleaned shavings.
I went into his stall with a pitchfork, but he was spinning so much I couldn’t lift out the pile. Peregrine had that look in his eye that horses get when they are in complete flight reaction. There was no deliberate thinking going on. He was just in a blind panic. The herd had left without him.
I don’t know what made me think to do it. I certainly had no clue that Peregrine had generalized targeting beyond touching the end of a dressage whip which is what I had started him out on. But I held the handle of the pitchfork out to him and said “touch”.
Peregrine did a double take. He stopped in his tracks, and looked around for something to touch. The pitchfork came into focus. He reached out, tentatively at first, and touched it. I clicked, handed him a bite of grain, and held the pitchfork out again. Peregrine’s eyes had lost that frantic look. He was back.
The spinning, whirling, frantic behavior was gone. That simple act of touching the pitchfork handle had snapped him out of his primitive flight response. The thought process involved in clicker training must have activated a different part of his brain, and blocked out the more primitive emotional responses. That by itself was interesting. But what was profoundly even more interesting was that Peregrine stopped having these severe panic attacks. His “thoroughbred moments” simple disappeared.
So if I was hooked before, now it was with “hook, line and sinker”. I was fascinated. This went beyond anything I would have expected from clicker training. I was beginning to experience the real power of this training.
The third thing that hooked me was something that happened over the winter. I was so intrigued with clicker training that I was going through all of Peregrine’s previous training, reshaping it with the clicker. By mid-winter we had gone through all the basics and I was working on Spanish walk. Again I had that same “Oh why didn’t you just say that’s what you wanted!” response from him.
One of the challenges I faced with Peregrine was getting him to engage his hindend so he could lift his shoulders. His tendency was to pull down on his shoulders. This was particularly evident in transitions from canter to trot. The drop in his shoulders as he changed gaits felt like being in an elevator that has suddenly fallen three floors. This came out of the inherent weakness in his back which was the cause of his stifle problems.
So Spanish walk was not a trick behavior, but one of many exercises I used to help him rebalance and use his body better. I had originally taught it out of piaffe in-hand to ensure that he performed the movement with an engaged hindend. Now as I reviewed the exercise, the “lightbulb went on”. Peregrine got it. He’s never been great at Spanish walk. He doesn’t have the lifting power of a Lusitano to present a really fluid, pretty movement. But something geled for him. He got his hips up underneath his body and elevated his front end just as nice as you please. Click and jackpot. I gave him his favorite treat, a peppermint.
Now this alone would not have been a major event in Peregrine’s life, except for one thing. Retraining the Spanish walk, layer by layer meant that Peregrine really understood what I was asking him to do. He began offering me Spanish walk on his own, and it wasn’t just that he was lifting his front legs. He was engaging his back, on his own, without my having to mold and shape him there with the reins.
And the result of that was that Peregrine stopped locking in his stifles. He was eight years old. He had locked in his stifles since he was a young foal. They had been the nightmare resistance hanging over all his training. They were caused by damage to his pelvis sustained during his foaling. I had been fighting them, puzzling over them, for years. We had explored every shoeing and trimming option in the book, and then some. We had done everything except cut the tendons holding the joint in place, and now this simple little training tool, the clicker, had resolved the problem. As I write this, Peregrine is now seventeen, and he has not locked in his stifles even once in the past nine years.
So that’s why for me it is important to share clicker training, and to bring it into the horse community. It isn’t because we can teach tricks, or get our horses onto trailers, or solve behavior problems. There are lots of training methods out there that can get those individual jobs done. After all we’ve been training horses for thousands of years. There are lots of talented trainers out there who can do amazing things with horses. I’ve been privileged to be able to learn directly from some of them. But for me what was missing was this deeper connection to my horse’s mind. Peregrine knows what I want so profoundly that he was able to stop his own stifles from locking up. That’s not training. That’s communication.
So why am I sitting here at the computer spending even more time away from the barn writing about clicker training? Because it is so good for horses. And it is so empowering for people. Which brings us to the fourth reason I’m hooked on clicker training: the response of my clients as I started to share the work with them. They had similar stories to mine of “lightbulb moments”. And they all said the same thing, that out of all the work I had shared with them over the years, this is what they most enjoyed because it brought them a deeper connection with their horses.
As I’ve shared clicker training with the broader horse community, that is the answer that comes back, over and over again, the connection, the communication, the “look in the horse’s eye.” So let me share with you now some of the responses people wrote when I asked the question: “What got you started?” Their answers are an amazing tribute to this communication tool we call clicker training.
Alexandra Kurland written Nov. 2002
Note: Peregrine is featured in the riding section of “The Click That Teaches: Lesson 4 Stimulus Control: Putting Behavior on Cue” video.
Part Five: What's New/Special Events/Articles
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