Month: March 2016

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JOY Full Horses: Ten Things You Should Know About Cues

Number 3: The Environment can be a Cue
Chapter 1:  Emotions and Environmental Triggers

The previous section began a discussion of environmental cues.

Panda environmental cues

Panda, the miniature horse I trained to be a guide, provides us with lots of examples of environmental cues.  In this photo there’s no real curb to mark where the sidewalk ends and the driveway begins,  but Panda has stopped exactly where she should.  This section of their daily walk had been under construction for months.  Every day the landscape was different.  In this photo the pavement has been newly patched.  The appearance of the intersection has changed dramatically from it’s previous state, but Panda still knows what to do at this intersection.

Looking ahead to the opposite side of the driveway we see another place where the environment will cue a stop.  Stopping at the far side of the driveway helps her blind handler stay oriented.  The stop on the up-curb side of the driveway lets her know when they have come to the beginning of the next section of sidewalk.

The sidewalk itself is another environmental cue, one which overrides the pull of the grass to the side.  Panda will guide her handler straight along the sidewalk to the next curb crossing.  There are lots of cues being exchanged between Panda and her handler, but it is Panda’s responsibility to respond correctly to the environmental cues which her handler cannot see, and to alert her to any changes or obstacles in their path.

I ended the previous installment by promising you some more Panda stories and here they are:

Goose Neck Trailers
I can’t resist telling one of my favorite Panda stories.  When Panda was first being paired up with Ann, we spent a day at the Equine Affaire, a giant horse expo and trade show that is held every year in western Massachusetts.  It’s a wonderful place to take a guide-in-training.  The concentration of challenging obstacles is a trainer’s delight.  We had loading ramps that could substitute for railway platforms, and garage doors that gave us lots of practice with overhead obstacles, not to mention the crowds of people in the trade show to navigate through.

Panda handled it all with ease.  Late in the day as we were walking through the back parking lot area, we passed a goose neck trailer that was parked alongside the sidewalk.  I decided to put Panda through one more challenge.  I instructed Ann to stop at this point and cross the street.  This would take them directly under the front of the trailer.

gooseneck trailer

The goose neck portion was right at forehead-hitting height, but I had no worries.  Of course, Panda would stop.  Except she didn’t.  I was about to cry out an alarm.  It looked as though Panda was going to crash Ann straight into trailer. But before I could get the words out to say STOP! Panda slammed on the brakes, looked up at the trailer hitch and hastily backed Ann away.

The double take she did was priceless. It was as if she was saying: “Where did that come from! How could I have missed that?!”

It reminded me of those times when I’m driving, and I’ve been so focused on the road ahead that I have completely failed to see a car coming up alongside me.  “How could I have missed that!?” I’ll exclaim as the car comes into view.  I could sympathize with Panda’s surprised reaction to the goose neck.

Now for Panda the goose neck trailer was not a hazard.  She could easily fit under the hitch, but Ann would most certainly have hit her head.  When Panda looked up, it was clear to me that she had seen the overhead obstacle and was backing up to avoid it.

Every class of obstacle requires a different type of response.  Find an empty chair means Panda scans the available seats and takes Ann to an empty one.  She alerts her to the presence of the chair by putting her nose on it.

For doors Panda finds the door and then orients her body sideways towards it so it is easy for Ann to reach out and find the handle.

A Trainer’s Play Ground

Panda descending museum stairs
Stairs present a special hazard.  It’s important that the handler understands that the guide is stopping at a flight of stairs and not at a single curb.  Towards the end of Panda’s training we spent a fun day practicing stairs during a visit to Albany, the capital of New York State.

concourse

A photo of the Empire State Plaza taken from the steps of the State Museum. The State Capital is straight ahead. To the right is The Egg, the Center for Performing Arts.

We turned the state plaza into our personal playground.  We were in a huge concourse that serves as a public park.  Underneath the plaza is a maze of offices and shops.  At one end is the state library and museum.  At the other end the State Capital.

state museum

The State Museum with its imposing flight of steps leading up to the entrance.

state capital building

The State Capital Building at stands at the opposite end of the Concourse

These are beautiful buildings, but we were not there for the sight seeing.  The plaza provided us with a wonderful array of training obstacles.  There were stairs everywhere – stairs going up, stairs going down, stairs in all sorts of unexpected places.

Ann wasn’t familiar with the area, so she never knew for certain what was coming up next. I was having a grand time directing her towards every unexpected obstacle I could find, the more challenging, the better.  If you’re given a playground, you should play in it!

Stairs cue a distinct set of responses from Panda.  When she comes to a set of stairs, she will stop before the first step.  At this point Ann will not know what is in front of them.  She will tell Panda to go forward.  In response Panda will put one foot on the first step – either up or down – and again stop.  She will not go forward until Ann has also placed her foot on the step and given her the verbal cue to go. Panda is not to proceed until both of these things have happened.  It’s important that Ann not only knows there’s a set of stairs in front of her, but that she also has time to prepare herself for them.  Panda is not to go forward until Ann tells her she’s ready.

I think we found every set of stairs in the concourse that day, including the long flight that takes you up to the State Library.  I especially liked pointing Ann and Panda towards the stairs that led down into the underground concourse.  Up stairs are more expected.  It’s the ones that took them down below the Plaza that really tested them as a team.

The Herd Horse Advantage
Pedestrians, bikes in motion, dogs being walked, baby carriages, parked cars are all obstacles that cue specific responses.  One of the things that I most enjoy is watching Panda maneuver Ann through a crowd of people.  I will sometimes position myself far enough ahead so that I can see Panda and Ann approaching.

Panda will be scanning what is in front of her.  You can see her eyes moving, taking in all the activity that’s coming up.  She’ll make little course adjustments so there is never a collision.  As a herd animal, she is superb at being able to judge where she is going to be relative to people who are moving towards her from the opposite direction.  The course corrections are seamless.  The only ones swerving abruptly are the people doing double takes when they realize what has just passed them!

Coming Next: Intelligent Disobedience   This is the name given for those times when a guide does not respond to a cue the handler has given, but instead responds to environmental cues.  It might be ignoring the cue to go forward and instead backing up out of the path of an approaching car.  Intelligent disobedience is an important part of every guide’s training.  It is also something we would do well to be aware of in the training of our full-sized horses.

Remember, if you are new to the JOY Full Horse blog, click on the JOY Full Horses tab at the top of this page to find the full table of contents and links to each of the articles I have published so far.

You can read about Panda’s early training on my web site: theclickercenter.com. Visit: http://www.theclickercenter.com/ThePandaProject.html

I hope you will want to share these articles by sending links to this blog to your friends.  But please remember this is copyrighted material.  All rights are reserved. Please do not copy any of the “Joyful Horses” articles without first getting written permission from Alexandra  Kurland, via theclickercenter.com

Also note: these articles are not intended as an instruction guide for introducing your horse to clicker training.  If you are new to clicker training and you are looking for how-to instructions, you will find what you need at my web sites:

theclickercenter.com                    theclickercentercourse.com

 

 

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JOY Full Horses: Ten Things You Should Know About Cues

Today’s installment begins a new unit.  So far in my list of ten things you should know about cues I have: 1.) Cues are not commands. 2.) Cues can be non-verbal

This brings us to:

Number 3: The Environment is a Cue

Panda zebra crossing

This mini is a guide horse for the blind.  She’s just done a beautiful stop at the curb, and now she’s guiding her handler across the entrance to a busy parking lot.  Just to add to the complexity of the task, the parking lot is under construction.

 

Chapter 1:  Emotions and Environmental Triggers

Environmental Cues
We seem to have wandered a long way from the ten things I would want a beginner to know about cues.  So let me pull us back to that list for a moment.

Beginners tend to think of cues as something they present to the animal, but cues can also come from inanimate objects.  In fact much more than we may be aware of these environmental cues move us through our day from one habit pattern to the next.

Many of us have experienced this with our horses.  If you work in an arena, you may have found that there is one corner where your horse’s balance makes it easiest to ask for a canter.  Maybe you’re starting a youngster, so setting up the canter out of the short side makes sense.  He pops up nicely into the canter which is reinforcing for both of you.  It gets easier and easier to ask for the canter out of that corner, except now, even when you aren’t wanting to canter, that’s what he’s offering.  That corner has become the cue, not your riding aids.

We often experience the same thing riding out.  The stretch of trail where the path widens out into a gently rising slope over good footing just invites a canter.  Both you and your horse enjoy a good run up the hill.  You don’t even notice that the trail has taken over control of your horse – until you are riding out with a friend who is on a young horse that she doesn’t yet want to canter.  You get to the bottom of that hill, and your horse is off and running – following instructions that you helped to write.

Here’s the mantra to remember:

“Never make your horse wrong for something you have taught him.”

Punishing the canter isn’t the solution.  That may squash the behavior for the moment, but it will have fallout.  For one thing punishment takes you a long way from play.  You may stop the canter in that moment, but the damage you do to your relationship is a price you may not want to pay.

In a later section I’ll describe how you can manage these environmental cues by teaching cues in pairs.  But before I get to the solution to the problem, let’s first dig down a little deeper to see how environmental cues work.

Guide Horses

Panda sidewalk construction

The “Equine Poster Child” for environmental cues is Panda, the miniature horse I trained to be a guide for her blind owner, Ann Edie.

Guide work is dependent upon environmental cues.  It’s the job of the guide to spot changes in elevation, overhead obstacles, moving cars, other pedestrians; to find the door, the stairs, an empty chair; and to point out designated landmarks that the blind handler uses to navigate, such as driveways and street crossings.

The different triggers elicit different responses.  When Panda spots a section of sidewalk that’s been pushed up by a tree root and that might trip her person, she stops and waits for her handler to find it.

As Panda approaches a street crossing where there is no raised curb, she will pull her handler to the left hand edge of the sidewalk.

At the opposite side of the street if she encounters a raised  curb, Panda will stop and tap the curb with her hoof.

Out in the country where there is no sidewalk to follow, Panda will follow the curve of the road past a street crossing and then stop.  She will not go directly across or stop as she might at a driveway.  Following the curve of the corner lets her handler know that they have come to an intersection.

At street corners with traffic lights, her handler will direct Panda to “find the button”, and Panda will take her to the pole with the pedestrian crossing signals.

If they encounter an overhead obstacle such as a tree branch weighed down with snow that her handler won’t fit under, Panda will stop and look up.  The movement tells her handler what sort of obstacle is in front of them.

 

Coming next: More Panda stories.

IMG_1989 Panda Ann construction

Even when the familiar environmental cues are obscured by construction, Panda still finds the way from curb to curb.

 

You can read about Panda’s early training on my web site: theclickercenter.com. Visit: http://www.theclickercenter.com/ThePandaProject.html

Also, there is an excellent children’s book that was written about Panda:  Panda: A Guide for Ann written by Rosanna Hansen with photographs by Neil Soderstrom, published by Boyd Mills Press 2005.

Remember, if you are new to the JOY Full Horse blog, click on the JOY Full Horses tab at the top of this page to find the full table of contents and links to each of the articles I have published so far.

I hope you will want to share these articles by sending links to this blog to your friends.  But please remember this is copyrighted material.  All rights are reserved. Please do not copy any of the “Joyful Horses” articles without first getting written permission from Alexandra  Kurland, via theclickercenter.com

Also note: these articles are not intended as an instruction guide for introducing your horse to clicker training.  If you are new to clicker training and you are looking for how-to instructions, you will find what you need at my web sites:

theclickercenter.com                    theclickercentercourse.com

 

 

 

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Joy Full Horses: Tag Teaching and Keystone Habits

This is a continuation of Part 2 of my new book, “JOY Full Horses”.  If you are new to this series, go to the contents for links to the previous articles.

The previous section highlighted the importance of separating feedback from instruction.  We’re all teachers whether we give ourselves that label or not.  We give feedback and instruction all the time – and often we fall into the trap of combining them together:  “That was great, but . . .”  It’s easy to find yourself doing this since that’s what most of us have had modeled for us by our own teachers.

So suppose you notice that this is indeed your pattern.  You’re one of the legions of people who negate all the “that was great” with that irresistible “but . . . “.  You want to change.  In this section we’ll look at several key elements that help transform that good intention into a well-formed habit.

Tag Teaching and Keystone Habits
As you’ve seen, thinking about TAGpoints helps keep your training positive.  You don’t have to limit yourself to tagging other people. You can build great habits by tagging yourself.

Pick something you want to work on, and identify achievable, measurable, realistic goals for yourself.  Now be your own best coach.  When you meet your criterion, acknowledge it, then observe your own self-talk.  You want to move from: “Okay, you did it, but . . .” to “That was great! I just met that goal.  Now in this next round I’m going to monitor this criterion and tag myself for . . .”  That’s the good coaching habit you want to build.

Remember you are looking for the keystone habits and those small wins that begin to accumulate into transformative changes. One of the great values of TAGteaching is it focuses the spotlight on what you want.  As you go through the focus-funnel process looking for a way to say what you want in five words or less, you’ll find yourself discarding all the “yeah, buts” and “don’t wants”.  Instead your attention will be drawn to that one key behavior you can consistently change.

Suppose you are feeling guilty because work has been so crazy recently that you haven’t had much time for your horse.  Instead of beating yourself up because you feel that you are neglecting him, what could you tag yourself for?  Maybe instead of checking your personal emails over lunch, you decide to write a training plan for five minutes of clicker play later that day.  Tag for you!

When you spend those few minutes during the day thinking about your horse, you may find that you return to work feeling refreshed and ready for the rest of the day.  There’s the reward that is going to support this new habit!

When you concentrate on these tiny moments of success, they become mental triggers.  Instead of beating yourself up because you aren’t able to spend as much time with your horses as you’d like, you’re preparing yourself well for the time you do have.

With that training plan in mind, you’ll be more productive.  You and your horse will have a great time together.  You’ll leave the barn on a euphoric high feeling as though you have accomplished something. That provides you with more rewards for a routine that’s becoming filled with good habits.  Eventually these habits will take over, and you will discover that you are not only enjoying work more, you’re creating more and more barn time, as well.

Journals
Keeping a journal is a great way to track these changes – and to build even more good habits.  Journaling seems to be one of those world divides sorts of activities.  Either you are a record keeper, have stacks of diaries sitting in your bookshelf, or you have one notebook with half a page filled out and the rest is a blank testament to good intentions gone astray.

It’s probably no surprise that I’m a record keeper.  I have stacks of training journals.  They make dull as dishwater reading, but then they aren’t intended to be read.  They are there for record keeping only.

When I was first starting out with Peregrine’s mother, I kept a daily log of every one of our sessions.  I knew in the evening I would be recording whatever training choices I made.  If I got mad and whacked her with a whip, I knew I would have to write about it that night.  More than that I would have to explain my actions. Saying I got mad and vented my frustration on my horse wasn’t anything I ever wanted to be writing in my journal.  So just the knowledge that I was keeping this journal, kept me from reaching for those “knee-jerk solutions”.  It helped mold the pattern of thought that became a pattern of habit that turned into the foundation of clicker training.

It turns out there is plenty of evidence to support the value of journaling.  In “The Power of Habits”, Charles Duhigg cites a study in which 1600 people kept food journals.  At least one day per week they recorded everything that they ate during that day.

When they did this, they became much more aware of their patterns, and they were able to lose significantly more weight than people who used other methods.

“It was hard at first.  The subjects forgot to carry their food journals, or would snack and not note it. Slowly, however, people started recording their meals once a week – and sometimes more often. . . . Eventually, it became a habit. Then something unexpected happened.  The participants started looking at their entries and finding patterns they didn’t know existed.  Some noticed they always seemed to snack at about 10:00 am so they began keeping an apple or a banana on their desk for mid-morning munchies.

The researchers hadn’t suggested any of these behaviors. They had simply asked everyone to write down what they ate once a week.  But this keystone habit – food journaling – created a structure that helped other habits to flourish. Six months into the study, people who kept daily food records had lost twice as much weight as everyone else.”

Forming The Record Keeping Habit
If you don’t already keep a journal, the next question would be how do you form that good habit?

What cue can you establish for yourself that will trigger journal writing?  It might be putting your training log on your bedside table so you write in it every evening before going to sleep.

white board for record keepingIt might be a white board that you keep in your barn aisle with a check list of things accomplished during the day.

Maybe you are less of a dinosaur than I am and you have an app on your computer that cues you first thing in the morning to open your journal.  Or maybe it is that first cup of coffee in the morning that you have associated with sitting down and writing.

When you pick up your journal and begin writing, remember to give yourself a mental “yes, I did it!” TAG.

You pick the cue that starts the behavior.  You also get to pick the reward.  It might be as simple as checking off boxes on your white board and seeing the board fill up.  It might be the pleasure you gain reliving the day’s successes.  Or you might give yourself a more concrete reward. Maybe you fill out your journal in the evening while you have a relaxing cup of tea.

Forming a Journaling Community
Earlier I wrote about the importance of community.  The dieters wrote a log of their food habits one day per week. Perhaps you might decide that one day a week you will write a summary of the week’s training and email it to a friend. What have you been working on? What discoveries did you make? What connections between the lessons did you see?  What successes did you have?  What questions arose out of all this?

Your friend can be enlisted as a training partner.  She doesn’t necessarily have to be another horse person, just someone you enjoy sharing with.  She might have a project of her own that she’d like to keep track of.  Together you can help each other build the good habit of journaling. Writing a quick email at the end of the day to a friend describing the day’s training can be a wonderful way to keep a record.  This is different from blogging. This is private.  It doesn’t need to be long or insightful.  You can keep it simple because it is just a quick note between friends.

Key Stone Habits for Life
Establishing the journal habit is a good way to learn how to deliberately build a good habit. Building that first habit prepares you to move on to other keystone habits.  You’ll begin to see how all these small wins contribute to good changes in your life.

The next time you’re feeling frustrated with your horse, your kids, your co-workers, your significant other – instead of reaching for the old knee-jerk reaction, you’ll catch yourself.  You’ll be asking: what do I want to be writing in my journal tonight? Do I want to say I lost my temper and yelled at my co-worker for misfiling a document?  Or do I want to be describing the TAG points I came up with to help her become more organized?

We’ll let Charles Duhigg have the last word in this chapter:

“Keystone habits transform us by creating cultures that make clear the values that, in the heat of a difficult decision or moment of uncertainty, we might otherwise forget”

Isn’t this exactly what we want for our horses?  Oops.  I got the last word in.  I couldn’t help myself, so I’ll add a couple more!  As I’ve said before, the advantage of presenting this book in small installments is it creates pauses. So in this pause, I hope you’ll consider your journaling habit.

If you’re already a record keeper, how could you use it to help create other good training habits?  And if you aren’t yet a record keeper, what routine could you begin today to get that habit loop going?  One thing good trainers have in common is they value record keeping.  So give journaling a try.  You may be surprised by all the good things that come from this one keystone habit.

This ends the section on Non-verbal Cues.  Up next is the third in my list of ten things you should know about cues.

 

Remember, if you are new to the JOY Full Horse blog, click on the JOY Full Horses tab at the top of this page to find the full table of contents and links to each of the articles I have published so far.

I hope you will want to share these articles by sending links to this blog to your friends.  But please remember this is copyrighted material.  All rights are reserved. Please do not copy any of the “Joyful Horses” articles without first getting written permission from Alexandra  Kurland, via theclickercenter.com

Also note: these articles are not intended as an instruction guide for introducing your horse to clicker training.  If you are new to clicker training and you are looking for how-to instructions, you will find what you need at my web sites:

theclickercenter.com                    theclickercentercourse.com

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JOY Full Horses: Tagteaching – The Focus Funnel

This is a continuation of Part 2 of my new book, “JOY Full Horses”.  If you are new to this series, go to the contents for links to the previous articles.

In the previous post I introduced you to TagTeaching which stands for teaching with acoustical guidance.  Tagteaching takes the excess words out of coaching and shifts the focus from what a student is doing wrong and needs to correct to what is wanted.  Instruction can be pared down to the four WOOF criteria:

What we want
One thing at a time
Observable
Five words or less.

I described what each of those meant in the previous installment.  Now in this section, I’ll introduce you to another tagteaching tool: the focus funnel.

The Focus Funnel
The founder of Tagteaching,  Theresa Mckeon, developed the concept of the focus funnel for TAG instruction.

A funnel is wide at the top and narrows down at the bottom.

So at the top of the focus funnel is a broad description of the lesson.  This is the part most of us find easy.  We like our words!

Next the coach reduces this general description of the task down to clear instructions about what is wanted.  Lastly she reduces this even further down to a point of focus which can be described in five words or less.

The Focus Funnel Applied to Horse Training
Suppose you are introducing a friend to clicker training.  You’re going to show her how to ask her horse to touch a target.  You’ve probably already given her a general overview of targeting and explained why it’s important, why it makes a great introduction to clicker training.

You’ve gone through the basic prep.  You’ve practiced the lesson letting her rehearse with you how she’s going to hold the clicker and the target, how she’s going to feed her horse.

You’ve found a good area to work with her horse.  He’s loose in a small paddock so he’s free to move about and interact with her, but there is a fence separating her from him just in case he gets pushy or overly excited about the food.  The barrier means she can step back out of his reach instead of correcting him.  That keeps the lesson focused on the behavior she wants – touching the target.

So now she’s ready for the lesson description.

“You’re going to ask your horse to touch the target.  When he does, click and treat.  Repeat this several times, then drop some treats in his food bucket and step away from his paddock.

Your tag point is: Click as nose touches target.”

Constructive Feedback
Tagteaching, like its cousin clicker training, keeps us focused on the positive.  How do we say things so they are clear, to the point and non critical?

One of the tripping up points in coaching is what happens after the handler completes this first round of training.  As you watch her work, suppose you noticed that she was reaching into her treat pouch a second or two before she clicked.

Horses miss nothing. Her horse is going to see that movement, and he’s very quickly going to connect the dots.  Whatever he was doing just as her hand started to move is what he’s going to repeat.  If that was touching the target, that’s the behavior she’ll get more of.  The click will be extraneous information that gets filtered out.  She’ll be clicking the clicker, but it will have less and less meaning as her horse begins to rely on the movement of her hand.  For him that’s the true marker signal.

Now you could say – what’s wrong with that?   Isn’t that easier than all this clicking nonsense?

You could absolutely decide that the movement of your hand is going to be your marker.  There is nothing in clicker training that says you have to use a clicker, or even an auditory marker.  If you were working with a deaf horse, you’d have to come up with some other way to mark behavior.

The problem isn’t that a different marker is being used.  It’s that the handler isn’t aware that’s what is going on.  She isn’t being deliberate in her use of that signal so it will become inconsistent.  If she watched a video of herself, she might notice her hand movement and decide to make that her marker signal, but it’s one I would advise against.  There are so many times in horse training where your hands are going to be busy doing other things.  If your hand is your marker signal, you’re going to run into major timing problems.

You’re seeing these potential pitfalls ahead for your friend so you decide to say something about it.  Here’s how this normally plays out:

“That was good.  You timed the click well, but I noticed that your hand was creeping into your treat pouch.”

Oops.  You’ve just fallen through the trap door that catches so many of us out.  You’ve mixed reinforcement with instruction, and the result is that “but” just negated all the good things you said about her performance.  She isn’t going to hear that she did a good job.  What will stick is she got something wrong.

So what do you do instead?  You put a pause between the assessment and the next set of instruction.

“That was great. You timed the click perfectly each time he touched the target.”

Pause

Lesson description: “Now in the next round of targeting we’re going to focus on a different element.  It’s important that you wait until after the click to reach into your treat pocket.  This keeps the meaning of the click really clear.”

Directions:  “You’re going to repeat the targeting.  Your feeding hand will stay at your side until you click.”

Tag Point: “What would be a good tag point for you?  “Food delivery after the click.” Or perhaps “Hand on hip” might work better.  You tell me which one works best for you.”

Having the learner identify her own tag point makes it even stronger.  This is something that means something to her, that she can relate to.  So involve your learner in creating her own tag points.  It’s a great way to check that she really does understand what you want her to do, and because she helped create the tag point, she is more likely to remember it.

Try It Out
One of the reasons for publishing this book in small installments is it gives you time to think about each section and to try things out for yourself.  How many times during the coming day will you find yourself commenting on someone’s performance?

Your answer may be: “but I’m not a teacher.”

Hah!  We’re all teaching – all the time.  It may be with your children, or a co-worker – or yourself, but we all offer instruction and give feedback.  Do you fall into the trap of mixing feedback with instruction?  Are you letting: “that was great, but . . .” slip in and disrupt  what you intended as praise?

For today take the time to notice what you are currently doing.  What is your existing habit pattern?  Once you’ve observed what you do, you can take action to change any patterns you aren’t liking.  Use what you’ve been learning about habits from the previous chapters to help you create a plan for developing the good habit of separating feedback from instruction.  What new habit loop are you going to create for yourself?

Keeping track of the changes you see is a good way to build new habits that last.  That’s what we’ll be exploring in the next installment.

(P.S. If you are new to clicker training horses and would like to see what these first targeting lessons that I referred to in this post look like, in November of 2015 I posted a four part series on introducing a horse to clicker training.) https://theclickercenterblog.com/2015/11/20/2015-clinic-season-an-introduction-to-clicker-training-day-1/

Coming soon: Tagteaching and Keystone Habits

Remember, if you are new to the JOY Full Horse blog, click on the JOY Full Horses tab at the top of this page to find the full table of contents and links to each of the articles I have published so far.

I hope you will want to share these articles by sending links to this blog to your friends.  But please remember this is copyrighted material.  All rights are reserved. Please do not copy any of the “Joyful Horses” articles without first getting written permission from Alexandra  Kurland, via theclickercenter.com

Also note: these articles are not intended as an instruction guide for introducing your horse to clicker training.  If you are new to clicker training and you are looking for how-to instructions, you will find what you need at my web sites:

theclickercenter.com                    theclickercentercourse.com

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JOY Full Horses: Tagteaching – You Can’t Train My Child Like A Dog!

This is a continuation of Part 2 of my new book, “JOY Full Horses”.  If you are new to this series, go to the contents for links to the previous articles.

Chapter 2 of this section on Non-Verbal Cues was about habits.  What began as a simple question – how do you turn being PLAY FULL into a habit – took us down many paths.  We looked at habit loops, cravings, changing your habits, the power of community, small wins and keystone habits.  That led us back to horse training.  I shared with you some of the most important lessons my own horses have taught me.  That highlighted the contrast between clicker training and the force-based training many of us started with.  These were heavy topics to consider. Now in Chapter 3, I’m turning the spotlight entirely on what we do want: which is effective ways to teach our learners – horses and humans alike.

Chapter 3
Tagteaching – You can’t train my child like a dog!

TagTeaching
Tagteaching stands for teaching with acoustical guidance.  It is often described as clicker training for people, but really Tagteaching is it’s own self.  It evolved out of clicker training, so it is a relative, but not a clone.

Tagteaching was developed by Theresa Mckeon.  Theresa was a gymnastic coach.  We’ve all watched the Olympics and seen the intensity of the coaching.  This goes on at all levels, and in all sports.  Under the intense pressure of competition, students are hammered with all the things they are doing wrong, and all the things they need to do to correct them – everything – all at once.

At one point or another you may have been in a riding lesson that was like this.  The instructor was giving you a barrage of instructions – all at full volume.  Put your hands forward, no back, shoulders UP! Sit BACK! Why are you leaning to the side!? No! Don’t pull back.  Kick him HARDER!

I’ve certainly seen plenty of these lessons, and even taken a few.

Theresa was also familiar with this sort of lesson.  She has a horse, so I’m sure she’s seen this kind of instruction. She was certainly seeing it in the gymnastics coaching.  When my first book, “Clicker Training for your Horse”, came out in 1998, Theresa read it with interest.  She was familiar with clicker training in dogs, and now here it was for horses.  Why couldn’t she do something like this for her gymnastics students?

Excited to try the experiment, she introduced the concept to her students.

“Oh, yuck, you can’t treat us like dogs!” was the reaction.

Theresa was surprised and disappointed. She was sure adding a marker signal would help the training.  She went home that night and started thinking of other ways she could get the kids to buy into the idea.  Maybe if she didn’t tell them it was clicker training, she’d be all right.  What else could she call it?

The way Theresa tells the story, she says she always liked words beginning with T.  Ts made a sharp, clear sound.  So she started thinking up T words and came up with the acronym TAG – Teaching with Acoustical Guidance.

In clicker training we work non-verbally.  We can’t say to our horses we want you to walk over there and pick up that plastic cone and bring it back to me.  We have to shape that behavior through a series of small approximations.

Tag Points
In TAG Teaching we have the advantage of words.  We can tell our human students exactly what we want them to do.  But that description can turn into a verbal barrage.  So part of the brilliance of TAGteaching is the coach learns to pare down the instruction to just the core key phrases that the student most needs to focus on next.

Whether the student is a young gymnast attempting her first somersault, a golfer perfecting his swing, or a child with disabilities learning to walk, the coach is looking for one specific skill that the student will concentrate on for this next turn.  This skill is referred to as the TAG point.  When the learner is successful, that will be indicated with a TAG – an agreed upon marker signal that indicates success.

WOOF Criteria
A good TAG point meets the four WOOF criteria.

1.) Ask for what you Want.  Just as in clicker training, the focus is on what you want your learner To Do.  You don’t focus on what is wrong, what you don’t want to see.  Instead you define in clear, precise ways what you WANT your learner to do in the next round. Your instruction needs to strip away all the clutter that comes from describing all the ways things can go wrong.

2.)  Ask for One thing at a time.  You will be identifying one key element that the learner should focus on in this next trial.  Think about this in terms of the keystone habits and small wins that were covered in the previous section. Can you identify an element that will have a ripple effect and help to create many of the other good habits you would like to see developing?

3.) The behavior you choose needs to be Observable and Measurable.  This allows you to mark the exact moment when your learner is successful.  Saying “lift your arms up” is too vague.  The learner doesn’t know how far or in what direction?  Instead you might put a target on a wall and say: “finger tips to target.”  Which brings us to the fourth and often the most challenging criterion.

4.) Five words or less.  You may be prepping your instruction by giving a detailed description of what is wanted.  You may be modeling what you want your students to do and then describing it for them, but once you’ve done this, you want to pare down your instruction to five words or less.  That’s what your learner will remember.

Five words or less also obliges you to focus on what is really important and to come up with a clear and simple way of describing it.  It promotes creativity.

In the previous example: “lift your arms up” really is too vague.  But how are you going to say what you want in five words or less?

“Lift your arms up straight out to your side so you end up with your arm parallel to the ground” doesn’t cut it.  But putting a target on the wall and saying: “finger tips to target” is not only short and simple, it’s an elegant way to get exactly what you want and for your learner to know instantly when she has been successful.

These four criteria become the WOOF points.

What we want
One thing at a time
Observable
Five words or less.

Tag!  You got it.

Coming Next: The Focus Funnel

To learn more about Tagteaching visit: Tagteach.com

Remember, if you are new to the JOY Full Horse blog, click on the JOY Full Horses tab at the top of this page to find the full table of contents and links to each of the articles I have published so far.

I hope you will want to share these articles by sending links to this blog to your friends.  But please remember this is copyrighted material.  All rights are reserved. Please do not copy any of the “Joyful Horses” articles without first getting written permission from Alexandra  Kurland, via theclickercenter.com

Also note: these articles are not intended as an instruction guide for introducing your horse to clicker training.  If you are new to clicker training and you are looking for how-to instructions, you will find what you need at my web sites:

theclickercenter.com                    theclickercentercourse.com

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This is a continuation of Part 2 of my new book, “JOY Full Horses”.  If you are new to this series, go to the contents for links to the previous articles.

Learned Helplessness
At their best Horse Expos should be events that expand in positive ways our understanding of horse training.  Sadly that isn’t always what is presented.  At one Expo I found myself standing outside a demo ring where a trainer was cracking a bull whip over a horse’s head.  She first warned the audience to cover their ears because the crack was going to be loud.

The horse couldn’t cover his ears, and he couldn’t get away.  Over and over again she cracked the whip around his body.  Each time you could see his belly tighten.  You know the expression “tied up in knots”.  That’s how this horse was clearly feeling. No matter what he did he couldn’t get away from that fearful crack.

This isn’t training.  This is learned helplessness.

We know about learned helplessness from some terrible laboratory experiments that were done with dogs in the 1960s.  The dogs were restrained in harnesses and given electric shocks through electrodes attached to their foot pads.

For the experiment two dogs were yoked together.  The first dog could stop the shocks by pressing a lever which also stopped the shocks the second dog was receiving.  The second dog could not stop the shocks through it’s own actions.

In the second half of the experiment the dogs were placed in a room with a barrier down the center.  The floor they were on had electric wires running through it. Again the dogs were shocked. The dogs that had learned that they could control the shocks jumped over the divider and escaped.  The dogs that had not been able to control the shocks made no attempt to jump out.   Nothing was restraining them.  They could have jumped across the partition to the safety of the other side, but instead they just curled up in a ball and took the shocks.  Learned helplessness.  They didn’t believe any more that they could escape from the pain.*

Is this what we want for our horses? Do we want them to give up and simply endure whatever we do to them in the name of training?  It’s important to remember that this trainer with the bull whip had a benign intent.  This horse was pushy and tended to spook.  The trainer wanted to be sure the horse was safe for the owner to be around.

Safety does always come first – but that has to mean for BOTH the horse and the handler.  The trainer continued to crack the bull whip around this horse.  I don’t know how long it continued.  I left to find the show management to lodge a complaint.

* Failure to Escape Traumatic Shock, Martin Seligman, Steven Maier  Journal of Experimental Psychology Vol. 74, No. 1  May 1967

Standing Up For Our Horses
I know if I push against you, you will push back against me.  And I know that we will not all make the same training choices.  There are many in the clicker training community who want to avoid all use of pressure, including any use of leads.  But pressure and release of pressure is our riding language, so I’ve made it part of clicker training.  I want the horses to learn in a positive, constructive way how to use the information that pressure provides.  I want it to mean not “do it or else”, but “follow the hints the pressure is offering, and you’ll get to your reinforcer faster.”  How we teach these lessons changes how pressure is perceived.

We all make different choices.  We all draw our lines at different points.  People who are exploring force-based training methods want good things for their horses.  They see that the end results can look very light.  They see that horses can be responsive.  They are afraid of the dangerous behaviors they are dealing with, and they are looking for solutions that work.

I don’t want to push against these good intentions, or the exploration that each of us goes through as we sort out how we want to train.  But at some point we all need to remember that it is more than okay, it is our responsibility to stand up for our horses.  We are their voice.  When we see methods that cross the lines of safe training, we need to be able to move past the words the trainers are using and see what is really going on.

Force-Based Training
I have watched and learned good things from force-based trainers. How am I defining force-based training?  This is training that is backed up with a do-it-or-else threat of escalating pressure.  The trainer applies light pressure.  If the horse complies, the pressure is released, and all is well.  If the horse fails to respond, the pressure increases until the horse gives a correct response.  The more the horse resists, the greater the pressure becomes.

A skilled trainer using these methods can look unbelievably light. Raise an eyebrow and the horse backs up twenty feet.  The final result is very impressive and compelling.  How magical.  Of course we want that.  But it is like a magician’s illusion, all built out of slight of hand. We need to remember that the reason the horse backs up for that raised eyebrow is because he knows that if he doesn’t, the subtle directive will turn into the sharp crack of a whip.  The threat is always there even if the audience fails to see it.

What Good Trainers Have In Common
I make this sound unbelievably harsh, but good force-based trainers can create good results and end up with eager, happy horses.  Good trainers no matter what methods they use share many of the same characteristics.

Good trainers are splitters.  They break their lessons down into many small steps.  If you are a force-based trainer and you are heading straight for the towering brick wall, you will end up in a fight.  But if you tear that wall down and build it up brick by brick, layer by layer – in other words if you are a good teacher – then the amount of do-it-or-else pressure you will be adding at any one step will be small.  You will be building confidence in your learner that he can succeed.  You’ll create a learning environment in which he knows he’ll be able to figure out the answer.  And just as important, he’ll be confident in his physical ability to perform.

If your small steps are accompanied by good timing, your requests will be clear and fair.  You will truly be working for the good of the horse.  Safety will be built into your training, and you will be a trainer I can watch and learn from.

It is important to make these distinctions and not put all the eggs into the same basket.  It’s only the rotten eggs that need to be left out.

Speaking Out For Our Horses
When we see training that violates safety, we need to speak out.  It can be hard.  Punishers are good at punishing. And they will all tell you it is for the good of the horse.

But good trainers know there is always another way to train everything.  If I am working with someone who isn’t comfortable with one of the choices I’m making for their horse, I’ll change the lesson plan.  There is ALWAYS another way to teach what we are after.

If you are working with a trainer who tells you that lassoing the horse’s hind leg to get him over his fear of shots is the way to go, it’s okay for you to say you aren’t comfortable with that method.  It isn’t safe for your horse and to please find a different way.  A good trainer won’t belittle you or make you feel bad.  A good trainer will listen to your concerns for your horse’s welfare.  A good trainer will respect you more for standing up for your horse.  And a good trainer will find another way.  There is ALWAYS another way.

That wasn’t what I expected to write when I began the section on small wins.  Let me bring it back around to a wonderfully positive note and that’s to the brilliant use of keystone behaviors and small wins that you see in tagteaching.  That’s the subject of the next chapter.

Coming Next: We’re still in the section on Non-verbal Cues. Up next is: TagTeaching – You Can’t Train My Child Like a Dog!

Remember, if you are new to the JOY Full Horse blog, click on the JOY Full Horses tab at the top of this page to find the full table of contents and links to each of the articles I have published so far.

I hope you will want to share these articles by sending links to this blog to your friends.  But please remember this is copyrighted material.  All rights are reserved. Please do not copy any of the “Joyful Horses” articles without first getting written permission from Alexandra  Kurland, via theclickercenter.com

Also note: these articles are not intended as an instruction guide for introducing your horse to clicker training.  If you are new to clicker training and you are looking for how-to instructions, you will find what you need at my web sites:

theclickercenter.com                    theclickercentercourse.com

 

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JOY Full Horses: Part 2: Ten Things You Should Know About Cues

This is a continuation of Part 2 of my new book, “JOY Full Horses”.  If you are new to this series, go to the contents for links to the previous articles.

In the previous installment I talked about patience and persistence.  I ended with: “One of the many things that you learn from horse training is the longer you stay with an exercise, the more good things it will give you.  Focus on some little, achievable piece of the training, something you and your horse can accomplish together, and all kinds of other good and often unexpected results will emerge out of it.”

Now in this section I’ll share more lessons my horses have taught me.

“They Don’t Feel Pain the Way We Do”
Shortly before she became mine, Peregrine’s mother was injured in a handling incident.  One of the teenagers at the barn had been given the assignment of pulling her mane.  In case you aren’t familiar with this technique, it is literally what the name implies.  The mane is shortened and tidied up by pulling out the longer strands.

The horses I grew up with never had their manes pulled.  The first time I watched this being done it was to a young racehorse, a two year old who was literally climbing the walls trying to get away.  The trainer stood outside the stall door watching as a groom struggled to control her.

I couldn’t help but ask what they were doing.  It looked to me like some horrific form of torture.  The trainer dismissed my concerns.  “They don’t feel pain the way we do,” he said.  In his view, the mare was climbing the walls not because of pain, but because she was being disobedient.  That’s a great example of the stories we tell ourselves – and come to believe – to make things okay.

Peregrine’s mother wasn’t in a stall the first time someone tried to pull her mane.  Shortly before she officially became my horse, it was decided she should have her mane tidied up.  For her introduction to this procedure she was tied tight to a post supporting a four foot high fence.  To get away from the pain she presumably didn’t feel, she jumped the fence.  You could say it showed how athletic she was that she was able to jump the fence with her head snubbed up tight to the post.  Really, it just says how desperately she needed to get away.

I only learned about it because I saw scrapes on her hind legs and asked about them. It wasn’t until much later that I discovered the full scope of the injuries she sustained.  Her spine was damaged in what was a very avoidable accident.  My beautiful, athletic, perfect horse had become a wobbler.  That is exactly what the name suggests.  She sustained neurological damage as a result of that incident.  She could no longer tell where her hind legs were so she wobbled about trying to stay on her feet.

The Evolution of Belief
I learned over time just how severely compromised she was. What began as a slight dragging of her hind toes eventually deteriorated into such a profound loss of balance that it became hard for her to walk without falling.  All the dreams I had had for her were shattered.   All that was left was helping her relearn the most basic of motor skills. It was my early training experiences with her that taught me about small wins, and about finding ways around the many brick walls in her life. Long before I ever heard about clickers and positive reinforcement, she taught me how to break things down into the smallest of small steps.  The power of those lessons formed the core of what clicker training means to me.

If belief is a major part of changing habits, she taught me to believe in the power of change.  You cannot NOT change.  How’s that for a sentence!  But it’s true.  We are constantly changing.  The question is: are you changing towards something new, or are you simply boomeranging back to familiar patterns?

If you don’t believe that change is possible, you will always be reverting back to the same reality you are currently in.  Eventually you may find yourself so bogged down in that state that change truly does seem beyond your reach.

I didn’t know what change, if any, was possible for her.  The vets at the time painted a very bleak future for us.  They told me they could do nothing to help her, and eventually she would deteriorate to the point where she would be unable to stand.  It was a grim future to consider.

Since I couldn’t ride her, the vets recommended that I put her down.  That I couldn’t do.  Whether I could ride her or not, her life still had value to her.  Together we would deal with the challenges each day presented.  When things got too hard for her, that’s when I would make that decision, but until then we would keep going as best we could.

Stepping over the sill of her stall door was hard for her. But it was something she needed to be able to do, so we worked on stepping over ground poles. Those were terrifying for her, so I put a rope on the ground instead.  Even that was too hard, so I drew a line in the dirt.  That she could manage so that’s where we began.

She was showing me that no matter how small a step may seem, there is always, ALWAYS a smaller step you can find.

That is truly at the heart of all good training.  It is certainly at the heart of how I think about clicker training.

Eventually she was able to walk over those ground poles, and the sill of her stall was no longer a problem.  She could even manage a small cross rail.  We didn’t know what was possible.  We just kept working on the little things that challenged her.  Over time the little things grew into wonderful things.  She became my riding partner and introduced me to the world of classical dressage. She was the first horse I ever taught to piaffe.

Balance – The Core of Everything
She is why at the core of everything I teach there is balance.  For me balance is everything.  It gave her life.  When some people talk about dressage, they see competition rings and rosettes.  I see balance.  That’s what dressage means to me.  The end result may indeed take you to the show ring, but first it takes you to a feel that is heaven itself.  Balance is everything.  It is life giving, life sustaining.  It is beauty, grace, power.  It is love.

Some wonderful things have grown out of that terrible training accident, but I am never very far removed from the consequences.  It reached past her life and changed Peregrine’s.   During his foaling, she got down against a stall wall and couldn’t get up.  He was boxed in by the corner of the stall, trapped in her pelvis.  If I had not been camped out beside her stall, ready to help, I would certainly have lost him and possibly both of them.

Peregrine’s spine was damaged by the foaling.  That in turn led to his locking stifles which led to a challenging first few years of training which led – through a series of twists and turns – to clicker training.  So again, good things came out of a hard beginning.

My “Soap Box”
It has also given me the right to stand on the soap box that actively promotes positive training methods.  When I first started introducing clicker training to the horse world, I was very careful what I said about other training methods.  Clicker training was the new kid on the block.  If I came in like gang busters denouncing what everyone else was doing and saying my way is the best, I’d have been pounced on and crushed – and rightly so.  If you push against someone, of course, they are going to push back.

So I chose not to comment on what was occurring in the rest of the equine training community.  At times this was incredibly difficult.  There have been so many emerging trends over the last thirty years.  Many, very horse-friendly advances have been made.  Acupuncture, chiropractic work, physical therapies of many varieties are now common.  But why do we need so many interventions?  It is because we also have so many “methods” that are so very hard on horses. Strip away the rhetoric, and you will see revealed some horrific things being done in the name of training.

The words often sound great.  Everyone talks about partnership, harmony, etc..  But when you turn the sound down on the videos and watch what is actually being done to horses, it is often times nothing more than abuse.

I remember watching one video where the trainer’s solution to a needle-shy horse was to run him to exhaustion in a round pen.  The trainer was riding a stocky quarter horse, controlling from the saddle a rope that was lassoed around the horse’s hind leg. At the other end a strong twenty-something handler anchored down a lead attached to the horse’s head.  Between them he was well and truly trapped.

Every few minutes the trainer would tighten his rope, and the horse would go bucking and pitching around the pen.  Then they would back off and give the horse a short break.  The horse’s sides were heaving as he tried to catch his breath.  The trainer, meanwhile, was telling stories about how much he was helping this horse to get along with people.  He was like a skilled magician distracting the audience away from the things he didn’t want them to see.

After about forty minutes of this, his assistant did indeed manage to wrestle the horse into a head lock and give him a pretend shot. As the horse’s owner walked him out of the round pen, the trainer told her he might be a bit stiff for a few days, and he’d need some ointment for the rope burns on his hock.

I was horrified.  Whatever happened to safety always comes first!?  Whatever happened to common sense and humane handling!?

The trainer never asked about the physical history on this horse.  Did he have any hock or hind end issues that might be made worse by this kind of handling?  Suspending a horse as they did between the two ropes could easily have resulted in an injury to his pelvis, his spine, his hind legs.  He could have ended up with the same kind of neurological damage that had so crippled Peregrine’s mother.  Was it worth it?  All this just to give a shot!  When you see the videos from the zoos and aquariums showing wild animals – whales, dolphins, cheetahs, giraffes, rhinos, baboons etc. – voluntarily presenting themselves for shots and blood draws, you have to question these methods.

This is a soap box I have earned the right to stand on because for over thirty years I have lived with the consequences of this sort of training approach.  We do get to stand up for our horses and say find a different way, find a better way. Find a humane way.

And always, always – safety does come first.

Coming Next: Standing Up For Our Horses

Remember, if you are new to the JOY Full Horse blog, click on the JOY Full Horses tab at the top of this page to find the full table of contents and links to each of the articles I have published so far.

I hope you will want to share these articles by sending links to this blog to your friends.  But please remember this is copyrighted material.  All rights are reserved. Please do not copy any of the “Joyful Horses” articles without first getting written permission from Alexandra  Kurland, via theclickercenter.com

Also note: these articles are not intended as an instruction guide for introducing your horse to clicker training.  If you are new to clicker training and you are looking for how-to instructions, you will find what you need at my web sites:

theclickercenter.com                    theclickercentercourse.com