Cindy Martin

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Do It Differently

It was bound to happen.  At the start of this year I said every month this year I was going to use this blog to write a thank you to some of the many people who helped bring clicker training into the horse community.  This is my way of marking the twentieth anniversary of the publication of “Clicker Training for Your Horse”.  Sometimes it was just by a whisker, but I managed to get this done every month – except August.  I will blame the extreme heat that slowed me down to a snail’s pace.

I can’t blame my travel schedule because I travel every month.  August was no exception.  I was out in Washington State at Ken Ramirez’s Ranch for his “Animal Training for Professionals” course.  For twenty years he taught this as a semester long course at the University of Illinois.  He also taught a concentrated week-long version of the course at the Shedd Aquarium.  Most of the time is spent in the classroom but twice a day students get to have some animal time.  For the week-long course at the Shedd attendees got to watch the trainers working with animals.  At the Ranch attendees get hands-on experience working with goats, miniature donkeys and alpacas.

IMG_5425 Ken Ramirez with alpacas

Ken Ramirez with his alpacas

For this course I got to be Ken’s assistant which was a great fun, especially since most of the training sessions involved his herd of dairy goats.  I enjoyed very much seeing what Ken was teaching his herd of clicker-trained goats – what was a match up with what I was teaching my goats and what were some good ideas to take back to them?  It was also very interesting to see how Ken structured the course.  What did he put in his foundation?  What stair steps did he use to take people into the more advanced aspects of training?

Ken Ramirez teaching husbandry behaviorsOn the third day Ken focused on husbandry, especially as it relates to medical care.  He is uniquely qualified to speak on this subject.  Both at the Shedd and through his consulting work, he has overseen the teaching of cooperative husbandry procedures not just to more animals than most of us will ever handle in a lifetime, but to more species as well.

Ken’s basic strategy can be summed up in a very simple phrase: do it differently.  Every day in your training you should be practicing some form of husbandry skills, but the key to success is don’t try to mimic a procedure someone else is going to be doing.  Your touch is going to be different, so even if you try to make everything the same as the real thing – you won’t succeed.  And besides, you don’t know what you are preparing your animal for.  Is it to stand quietly while you doctor a wire cut on your horse’s leg, or to put eye drops into an infected eye?  We don’t have crystal balls that can tell us what medical procedures our horses will need to tolerate.  X-rays might be standard, and certainly shots, but beyond that what are you preparing your animal for?

So Ken says do it differently.  Get your animal accustomed not just to being touched all over his body, but to being touched in different ways.

Do it differently also applies to getting an animal comfortable with changes in the environment.  Every day introduce some change, something different.  You aren’t trying to scare your horse.  You just want him to get used to the idea that change happens and it’s nothing to worry about.

Do it differently is a great life metaphor.  Sometimes we need to follow the rules, to do things the way “they have always been done” because the way they have always been done works.  The motto here would be “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

But even if it “ain’t broke”, can it be better?  Are we stuck in a rut just mindlessly copying what has been done before?  Horses have been trained for thousands of years.  On the surface the training that I learned from experienced horse trainers didn’t appear to be broken.  They could get on and ride their horses.  They could make them jump and cross scary streams.  They could make them go where they wanted.

“Make” was the operant word.  The end result could be very appealing, but if you scratched too far below the surface, you discovered a very broken system.  It was littered with discarded horses and far too many frightened would-be riders.  Something needed to change.

I was very lucky to be learning about horse training at a time when two very important change makers were shaking up the horse world.  One was Sally Swift who brought the Alexander technique into the horse world and changed the way riding was taught in the United States. Sally came regularly into my area so I was very fortunate to have been able to attend many of her workshops.

The other change maker was Linda Tellington-Jones, the founder of T.E.A.M. training (Tellington-Jones Equine Awareness Method).  Through Linda the horse world was introduced to the Feldenkrais work.  Early on I encountered T.E.A.M. training through a magazine article.  In it Linda described the body work she had developed, including the T.E.A.M. circles.

Peregrine’s mother was a wobbler.  She had a spinal cord injury that impaired her balance and made her very body defensive.  When she was a yearling, if I tried to touch her anywhere, I was met with gnashing teeth and pinned ears.  Her whole body couldn’t hurt, but I couldn’t figure out what was wrong because she wouldn’t let me in to ask questions.

I was reading everything and anything related to horses, and I was eager to learn.  These funny T.E.A.M. circles Linda was describing sounded intriguing.  I tried them on my mare and her world changed.  In minutes her eyes had grown soft.  Her head was drooping.  She was letting me in all over her body – except in one area around her right shoulder.  That was where the pain was.  For the first time she could relax enough to let me know what was wrong.

Within a few weeks I was on an airplane headed to the mid-west to attend a workshop Linda was giving.  I had to learn more!

That was the first of my many travels for horses.  At first I was traveling to learn, and then I was traveling to teach (which really means to learn even more!)

At one of the T.E.A.M. workshops Linda was letting us experience for ourselves the T.E.A.M. body work.  She let me feel one version of the T.E.A.M. circles, and then she did it another way.  She had her hand on my back so I couldn’t see what she was doing, but, oh my goodness!  It felt so very different!

I turned to face her.  “What did you do!?”

Her answer meant nothing to me.  “I breathed up through my feet.”

Now I’ve been trained in the biological sciences.  I’ve studied anatomy and physiology.  I’ve done dissections.  I know we breathe through our lungs, not our feet.  And beside, I had hay fever when I was little.  I was constantly congested.  Even breathing through my lungs felt like a foreign notion.  My breath got clogged somewhere at the top of my chest.

But I knew that breathing up from her feet meant something to Linda, so I went in search of the translation to that phrase.  One of the teachers I found lived in my area. She had a horse with a hard-to-diagnose lameness.  She contacted me to see if I could help her with him.  It turns out that the lateral work I was learning helped enormously.  When he carried himself in good balance, there was no sign of the lameness.

His owner, Marge Cartwright, was an Alexander practitioner, and she had also studied the Feldenkrais work.  So we ended up doing trades.  I worked with her horse to help him to be sounder, and she worked with me. Overtime I learned not only what it means to breath up through my feet, but to breathe up from the ground.  Learning that changed how horses relate to me.  It isn’t magic.  It isn’t some mystical gift of a horse whisperer.  It is simply the systematic unblocking of tension.  One metaphor that I love is the shining of a light on the dark places.  These are the places where movement become stuck, and we hide from ourselves the reasons for the stiffness.  This image comes via Anita Schnee, a Feldenkrais practitioner and regular attendee at the clinics I give at Cindy Martin’s farm near Fayetteville Arkansas.

The work Marge shared with me stands as one of the central pillars of what I teach today.  It is woven into every lesson both the ones that I give directly to horses and the lessons that I teach to their handlers.  Unless you live in my area and had the good fortune to learn from Marge, you won’t know her name.  But I owe her a huge thank you for enriching my life beyond measure.  Her work is woven into what I mean by equine clicker training.  If you have participated in a body awareness lesson at one of my clinics, you have been the direct beneficiary of her work. If you have thought about your own balance as you feed your horse a treat, that’s Marge’s influence again.  If you are learning about school figures – circles, lateral work, diagonals, etc. – by walking them without your horse, Marge has a hand in that, as well.

An awareness of balance, no much more than that – an appreciation for balance, an understanding that balance and soundness go hand-in-hand is something that I explored with Marge.

Clicker training for horses might have been little more than the teaching of tricks if it weren’t for this fascination and appreciation for balance.  Instead clicker training is a complex, wonderfully rich and diverse training system that can meet all needs. It includes the fun of tricks, but it doesn’t stop there.  The central core, the pillar that supports everything else is balance.

So thank you Marge for sharing your work so generously.  When you suggested we trade services, I’m sure you had no idea the ripple you were about to set into motion.  You helped make clicker training so much more than simply the pairing of a marker signal with treats.  What we teach and how we teach have become woven together to create a magnificent whole new way of doing things.  We dared to to it differently and look what grew out of it!

Thank you!

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JOY FULL Horses: Animal Emotions

Emotions: To Feel or Not To Feel – That Is The Question
When you begin talking about animal emotions, emotions run high.  The belief systems that have grown up around emotions are truly amazing.  In the past people have denied that animals even feel emotions.  They’ll tell you animals may feel pain, but they aren’t really aware that they feel pain.

Wait a minute.  What are they saying!?  That just made my head spin.

What nonsense.  Clearly these people have never been on a thoroughbred.  Thoroughbreds are wonderfully emotional creatures.  That’s their charm.  They let you know everything they are feeling – the excitement, the fear, the worry, the joy.  They truly “wear their emotions on their sleeve”.  To say that these wonderful horses are not aware of their emotions is nonsense.

With his work on the seven core Affective circuits, Jaak Panksepp has helped bring the discussion of emotions “out of the closet”.  Suddenly talking about emotions is the “in” thing.  If an animal is being “too emotional”, people will tell you you’re clearly doing something wrong in your training.

Wait a minute.  What did you say?  Too emotional.

Words are amazing.  They show us our belief systems.

Too emotional.  What does that mean?

One of the roles of a behavioral analyst is to make us think about the words we use.  Dr. Jesús Rosales-Ruiz would say we are always emotional.  Emotions can be pleasant or unpleasant.  You can feel excited and agitated, calm and serene, but they are all emotions.

The Emotions of Extinction
We can look at a particular process, such as extinction.  Suppose you have been consistently reinforcing your horse for standing on a mat.  He has your undivided attention, so the clicks have been very consistent.  But now you’re interrupted.  Your friend has asked you to watch how her horse is trotting.  She’s not sure if he’s lame.

Your attention shifts away from your own horse.  He’s still standing on the mat, but now he’s not being reinforced.  You’ve just put him into the early stages of an extinction process.

While you’re focusing on your friend’s lame horse, your own horse is going through his most recent repertoire of behaviors.  What is going to work to get you paying attention to him?  He puts his ears forward, he poses, he drops his head, he paws, he nudges your arm.

While he’s presenting those obvious behaviors, he’s also experiencing emotions.  He’s feeling confused, then frustrated, then possibly angry.  If the extinction process continues on long enough, he may begin to feel helpless because nothing is working.  Finally, he’ll become resigned as he gives up and settles into a more subdued state of acceptance.

Extinction’s Emotional Pattern
We see this extinction process as a negative thing because it “produces emotions.”

Jesús reminds us that ALL processes produce emotions.  We tend to think about emotions when they are the size of a five alarm fire, but really we are always “being emotional”. There are emotions associated with ALL behaviors.  Ideally in training we’d like to avoid the five-alarm-fire type. That’s why it is so important to understand these processes.  The sooner you recognize that you are in an extinction process, the sooner you can do something to get out of it.

In extinction the individual (rat, human, horse, etc.) follows a predictable emotional pattern.

First, you see response bursting.

rat-pressing-leverHere’s what that means:  You are observing a rat that has been reinforced consistently for pressing a lever.  Abruptly the lever pressing no longer produces the expected result.

What does the rat do?  It presses the lever with even more energy trying to get it to work. This has been equated with the classic hitting the button over and over again on the vending machine when your coke doesn’t fall out.

In the next stage you get angry.  Now you’re kicking the coke machine.

Next you see regression.  Behaviors which have been useful to you in the past reappear.  What have you seen modeled? What is your past history when things like this fail?

Then there is a pause followed by another period of response bursting. Gradually the cycles become less pronounced.  Each phase becomes smaller both in scale and duration until the individual settles into a calmer stage of acceptance.

Grief
Some psychologists have equated this pattern with the stages people go through when they are grieving.  When you lose a loved one, a job, a home, you are thrown into an extinction process.  Your loved one is gone.  The reinforcers associated with that individual are gone, and your behavior is ineffective.  Nothing you can do will change the reality of your loss.

The stages of grief begin with denial, followed by anger, then depression, bargaining, and finally acceptance and a return to a meaningful life.

It’s interesting to see the comparison people make between the process of grief and the process of extinction. Understanding does bring with it coping skills.  If you understand the process you are in, you can keep things in perspective and find a faster way out of the worst of the emotional tangles.  You can also be more understanding towards others (horse or human) if they are caught up in an extinction or grief process.

One of my Click That Teaches coaches, Cindy Martin wrote:

“Your description of the process people and horses go through, when things don’t work the way they expected, was so accurate and yet so full of empathy. The more I do clicker training, and teach and share clicker training, the more I realize there are some very profound lessons in the process; forgiveness, compassion, consideration. Those occupy a deeper layer, beneath the observation, handling skills, planning and preparation.  Lately, I’ve been describing this type of clicker training, the kind that emphasizes details, and consideration for the learner, as ‘thoughtful clicker training.’”

When people ask Kay Laurence how she trained a particular behavior, the answer she often gives is: thoughtfully.  As we gain more of an understanding of this work, we converge along similar paths.  They all lead in the same direction – toward an ever deepening appreciation of others – whatever the species.

Coming Next: Understanding Extinction to Master Extinction

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 “JOY Full 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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JOYFull Horses: Using Environmental Cues

In the previous post I shared many examples of using environmental cues.  For one example I wrote:

“When you have a training challenge, instead of tackling it head on with your normal “horse training” solutions, think instead about how you might use props.  If your horse has trouble turning to move out of your space, how could you use mats to help with this?”

One of the reasons I wanted to share the JOYFull Horses book on line was I knew I wanted to include video along with the text.  That’s what I’ll be doing in today’s post.  To illustrate just how useful environmental cues can be in training, I’m going to explain more fully how you can use mats to teach basic balance and leading skills.  I’ll be combining the draw of  the mats with the set up for a turn that can be created out of food delivery.

These videos were taken during the spring 2015 Arkansas clinic at Cindy Martin’s farm.  Cindy is one of the coaches for my on-line course.  The video features her beautiful draft cross mare, Scout.  Scout is a fairly new arrival in Cindy’s family.  When she first started riding her, Cindy discovered two things.  First, Scout’s idea of steering meant going where she wanted to go regardless of the rider’s wishes.  And second, if you asked for forward, you were just as likely to trigger rearing as any forward impulsion.  These riding issues meant it was time to go back to ground work and teach Scout the basics of leading.

By the time these videos were taken, Scout was well versed in the foundation skills of clicker training.  She had become a mannerly, very pleasant horse to be around, but her tank-like qualities were still in evidence.  This was in part due to a lack of balance.  During the spring 2015 clinic, I introduced Cindy to a simple lesson in which food delivery was combined with the use of multiple mats to teach better leading skills.

These videos take you step by step through the process.

Part 1 establishes a baseline.  Cindy is asking for Scout to turn away out of her space.  In this short video you’ll see Scout push forward through Cindy’s request.  In many traditional forms of horse training we would have dealt with this push-through by getting after Scout.  We would have punished the forward push, but punishment brings with it many unwanted consequences.  Obviously, we used a very different approach, one that used positive reinforcement to teach Scout what was wanted.

In Part 2 you’ll see how Cindy begins to use food delivery to set up the balance shifts she wants.  If you aren’t familiar with clicker training, this can look as though Cindy is simply feeding Scout out to the side.  That’s only part of what is happening.

In the video you’ll hear me refer many times to “grown-ups”.  This is a short hand expression for a lesson which I call: “The grown-ups are talking, please don’t interrupt”. This is one of the foundation lessons of clicker training, one of the very first things we teach the horses when we introduce them to clicker training.  It’s a long name for a simple lesson.  What it means is the handler is able to stand next to her horse with her pockets full of treats, and her horse will stand quietly beside her.  I gave it this very long name because I wanted to emphasize that at the core of clicker training sits good manners.

Having a horse who is mugging you for treats takes the fun out clicker training.  I don’t want the mugging behavior.  And I also don’t want the horses to be anxious about the treats, so early on we teach them this foundation behavior.  Moving away from the treat pouch is what earns clicks and treats.

So many people avoid using food in training because they see it as a distraction.  They want the horse working for them, not any goodies in their pockets.  I ask a lot of my horses, and I want to reinforce their good behavior generously with something they really enjoy.  Being able to offer something they will actively work for adds enormously to my training. Plus, I find it reinforcing for myself to be able to say thank you for a job well done.

How do you know what your horse will actively work for?  Ask yourself what will he mug you to get.  At the top of the list for most horses is food.  I’m going to take that information and transform food from a distraction into a powerful teaching aid.  I do this by teaching the “grown-ups are talking” lesson.  Once a horse understands that treats come when he shows me good emotional self-control, I can use food as a reinforcer to help teach other things.  That’s what you’re seeing in this series of videos.

In Part 2 Cindy is using grown-ups.  First, she asks Scout to look straight ahead so her head is out of Cindy’s space. Click.  Normally, Cindy would feed Scout so her head continues to be centered between her shoulders.  But to teach her how to turn so she doesn’t crowd forward into Cindy’s space, Cindy is instead stepping into her and extending her arm out so Scout has to look to the right to get her treat.

Once she does, Cindy again asks for grown-ups.  Scout’s head is still bent to the side.  To earn a click and a treat, she needs to keep her head away from Cindy.  When she does – click! – she earns another treat.  Again, Cindy extends her arm out to the side so Scout has to bend her head even more.  As she does, she discovers that she can move her feet.  That simple realization lets her straighten out into a more comfortable position.

So, while it might look as though Cindy is simply feeding Scout treats, and that’s how she is getting her to turn, the treats are in fact reinforcers that come after Scout has been clicked for keeping her head away from Cindy in the “grown-ups are talking” lesson.

When she does, she not only gets clicked and given a treat, she also gets to walk forward to a mat.  In previous lessons Scout has been introduced to mats.  She’s not only comfortable standing on them, the mats have become conditioned reinforcers.

This means that there is such a deep history of reinforcement that’s been built up around the mats, Scout regards them as a great place to be.  They are a predictor of good things – easy requests and lost of treats.  So Scout likes going to mats.  We can use them to reinforce previous behavior. We’re going combine the strategic use of the food delivery with her eagerness to go to mats to help her find her own balance through these leading turns.

Part 3 continues to develop Scout’s balance.  Not only will this teach great leading manners, but it also opens the door to lateral work.  So many good things come out of lessons that are taught with positive reinforcement.

Part 4 begins to introduce the lead back into the equation.  We don’t want to have to rely forevermore on food delivery to get turns.  Now that Scout understands the pattern we want, Cindy can begin to ask for the turns from the lead.  She may encounter some old history when she slides down the lead.  Scout’s old pattern was to push through pressure, so Cindy goes back and forth between the food delivery and the lead to set up the turns and and change Scout’s expectations.

You’ll see some beautiful rope handling in these videos.  Cindy is very light and tactful on the lead.   She is familiar with the rope handling techniques which I teach in my books, DVDs and on-line course.  If you aren’t familiar with this type of rope handling, refer to my web sites: theclickercenter.com and theclickercentercourse.com.

The lessons I am presenting here are built around this style of rope handling.  The lead is taught as a clicker-compatible tool.  The horses trust the information it gives them.  It is not used as a correction tool.  I don’t want my horses to be afraid of the lead or to be worrying about what might happen if they make a mistake.  That would poison the cues the lead is giving.  If you are using a style of rope handling in which escalating pressure is at times used to enforce behavior, you will undermine the intent and the power of this lesson.

Part 5 takes us into the second day of the clinic and shows us steady progress in this lesson.  You might want to refer back to Part 1 as a reminder of the starting point.

Up to this point Cindy has just asked Scout to turn away from her.  In this lesson I have her ask her to turn in her direction, as well.  We’re following a basic principle of training: For every exercise you teach, there is an opposite exercise you must teach to keep things in balance.  These two turns are part of creating beautiful leading balance.

Part 6 continues the process of adding in the lead.  Again, I’ll refer you to my books, DVDs, clinics and on-line course for details on this rope handling technique.

Cindy and Scout are learning how to dance together.  Each small step is part of a larger flow that will let them move in balance one with the other.  This is the final video of this particular lesson.  Scout had been doing wonderfully well, but she was beginning to get a little slower in her responses.  That’s a good indicator that she might be getting tired.  So rather than push beyond what she could do, we noted this early sign of fatigue and brought the day’s lesson to a close.  Both Scout and Cindy had learned a lot.

This is a glimpse into the future.  This clip was taken during the fall 2015 clinic.  Scout and Cindy have made great progress in their dance together.  Lateral work is one of the many good results that comes out of teaching good balance.

The fun of teaching in this way is you always get so many good things popping out of simple lessons!

Have Fun!

Coming Next: Chapter 3: The Time Has Come the Walrus Said To Talk of Many Things: Premack, Asking Questions, Mats, Airplane Runways and Creativity

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 kurlanda@crisny.org

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