September 4, 2018 by theclickercenter

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.

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 behaviors On 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!

June 25, 2018 by theclickercenter

My Horse Is So Smart!!!

The cover of the first edition of “Clicker Training for your Horse” – published 20 years ago this year.

This post is another in the series I have been writing to commemorate the 20th anniversary of “Clicker Training for your Horse”. Each month I have been giving special recognition to individuals who helped bring clicker training into the horse world.

Today clicker training is firmly rooted in the horse world. There are people all around the planet who know two things about it: 1.) clicker training is fun and 2.) it’s good for horses.

But twenty years ago any time I mentioned clicker training very few people knew what I was talking about. I always had to add a lengthy description of what it was, followed by detailed instructions for how to introduce it to your horse. When I sent these posts out to the very limited number of horse groups that existed twenty years ago, here’s the response I would get back:

My Horse is so SMART!!!!!

That’s how the replies would begin. They always made me smile. Someone else was discovering clicker training. More than that, that individual was seeing her horse in a completely new light.

The 1990s don’t seem that long ago to me, but they were truly pioneer days on the internet. The entire community of clicker trainers was so small there was only one list – the Click-L list. That’s where everyone posted. And I mean everyone – dog trainers, parrot specialists, horse owners, exotic animal trainers, we were all on the same list. I loved that. You didn’t have to monitor dozens of separate forums to know what was going on. Everyone was in the same forum talking to one another. You could read a post from Karen Pryor followed by one from Bob Bailey. You could read about different species, dogs, parrots, and yes, even horses.

Any time I sent a post to the Click-L list I was reaching the entire clicker training community. But I wanted to reach out into the broader horse community as well, so I also posted on one of the early horsemanship lists. I was always careful how I used that list. I didn’t want to intrude where I wasn’t wanted. The list was a general one, but even so, clicker training didn’t always fit in to the discussions.

I chose carefully both which posts I responded to and what I said. I knew if I came in like a steam roller telling people that my way was the best and everything they were doing was wrong, I’d get nothing but resentment and push back – and rightfully so. If you push against what somebody else is doing, of course they are going to push back even harder against you. That wasn’t the way to get people to try clicker training.

Instead I would wait until someone asked a question in a way that indicated that they might be open to the use of treats.

I’d respond with a lengthy description of clicker training and a detailed lesson plan that would help them with their specific training issue. I don’t think I ever failed to get back an enthusiastic response. It was always filled with caps and exclamation marks. And it almost always began with:

“My Horse Is So SMART!!!”

Why was this such a surprise? Traditional command-based training is built on a belief that horses are stupid animals. This is not subtly implied. It is stated as fact. The corollary of this is: because horses are stupid animals, we need to use force to train them. But don’t worry dear, (and it was always said in this patronizing tone), they don’t feel pain the way we do.

Clicker training puts the lie to that core belief. We can see how smart our horses are. When you remove the threat of punishment and instead train with positive reinforcement, horse or human, you see a blossoming of personality and enthusiasm. It isn’t just our horses who suddenly seem so much smarter. It is every individual who is training in this way.

Not everyone responded with such enthusiasm to those early posts. Clicker training was both wonderfully well received and strongly pushed against.

There was one individual in particular, an Australian, who felt it was his moral duty to stamp out clicker training before it could spread. He wrote angry posts declaring how wrong all this hand feeding was!! His posts were also filled with caps and exclamation marks. The difference was there was no joy in his posts. There was no laughter – just angry sputtering.

I never responded to his posts – at least not directly. Clicker training was truly the new kid on the block. I knew if I pushed against what others were doing, they would push back even harder against me. That’s only human nature. There was a lot of horrible training going on at that time, but I was careful not to say anything negative. I wrote about what I was doing and why. I worked hard to avoid saying why I thought some other method was wrong.

I also knew that if someone posted something I didn’t like on the internet the best way to guarantee that that post would stay alive and gain traction was to comment on it. As fast as things move on the internet, if you don’t respond to something, it disappears in an instant to be replaced by the next puff of an idea. But as soon as you respond to a post, you give it legs. You can think you’re helping out by offering a rebuttal to someone’s huffing and puffing, but all that does is guarantee that their comments will gain more traction.

I am always mindful of the oft repeated line in Lewis Carol’s “The Hunting of the Snark”: “What I tell you three times is true.”

We’ve seen the power of that in American politics, but I don’t want to disappear down that rabbit hole! Instead I’ll just say I want to be careful how I post so that I don’t give added life to ideas that need to go away.

So I would never respond to this man’s nasty remarks. It must have frustrated him no end that I never took the bait. You could see the extinction burst he was in as he tried harder and harder to draw me into his rants. Instead I would make note of his comments, and in my next long post I would address each of his concerns, but never directly. If he stated that hand feeding treats would teach horses to bite, I would give detailed instructions for the teaching polite manners around food. If he said clicker trained horses would become pushy and always be demanding treats, I would describe in detail the teaching of the foundation lessons and show how they create horses that move readily out of your space.

Whatever arguments he had, I countered them with detailed descriptions of the training – never pushing against him, never even mentioning him. I just addressed point by point each blustering statement by providing people with good instruction for introducing their horses to the clicker. The contrast in tone was startling. I’m sure many of the people who were brave enough and curious enough to go out to the barn to it a try were in part attracted to clicker training because of the contrast in tone.

What people wrote back were posts filled with excitement. The delight in their horses was crystal clear. You could see it in every exclamation mark and underlined phrase. We weren’t using emojis back then, but they found other ways to express their excitement.

Their enthusiastic posts encouraged others to give it a try and the snowball effect began. The angry, blustering posts sent by this one detractor had the opposite effect from the one he intended. If he meant to stamp out clicker training before it could spread like wild fire from horse barn to horse barn, he was too late. Clicker training spread even faster than a wild fire. It’s an infectious idea. It brings with it great joy and that’s certainly something we all want to share.

In 1998 when I published my book, “Clicker Training for your Horse”, I gave the “snowball” a big push. I was quickly joined by many other people who got the ball rolling ever faster into the horse community.

Each month I’ve been writing thank you posts to the many people who helped bring clicker training into the horse world. I’ve been singling out individuals to thank by highlighting their training. This month is different. I want to thank all those early adapters and their exclamation marks. Your horses are indeed smart!!

I want to thank all those brave people who were curious enough to take treats and a clicker out to their barns and to ask their horses: “What do you think?”. Your exclamations of delight helped spread clicker training around the planet!

Celebrate!

Years ago at a clinic I gave in Florida one of the attendees brought a horse she had only recently bought. She was a novice, first-time owner. She had done many things right. She bought a horse she had been riding at a local lesson barn. She was still boarding the horse with her instructor, but this was about to change. She was going to be taking her mare home and caring for her herself. That’s where the worry began. Her mare was one of those horses who makes really ugly faces whenever anyone approaches her in a stall. Her new owner was afraid to go into a stall with her. That had been okay as long as she was boarding her and there were people around to help her, but once she took her home, she would be on her own.

So that weekend we focused on “happy faces”. That’s all we worked on with her mare. Whenever anyone went past her stall, if even one ear perked forward, click, she would get a treat. It was very opportunistic training.

We covered a lot of training topics that weekend – as we always do, but for that horse the focus remained squarely on “happy faces”.

The following year I gave another clinic in that area, and this team were back. This time they were the clicker superstars. She was our demo horse for exploring lateral work and introducing people to single-rein riding. That was a huge jump from our first clinic together.

At the end of the three days we did a wrap up. Each person talked about a highlight of the weekend. When it was her turn, she started out by saying that at the end of the previous clinic she had been so mad at me because all I had let her do was reinforce her mare for putting her ears forward. But when she took her horse home she began to understand why I had made that the central focus. She continued to reinforce her mare for putting her ears forward. It wasn’t all she worked on, but it continued to be an important element in every training session. We could all see the results.

There’s a lovely training principle – The longer you stay with an exercise, the more good things that you see that it gives you. When you focus in on what can seem like a very small and seemingly insignificant detail, it begins to collect other good things around it.

So this was her comment after this second clinic. She said: she had always known her horse was beautiful, but now everyone could see it.

As more and more people are clicker training their horses, that statement takes on even more meaning. We always knew our horses are beautiful. Now we also know they are very smart, and because of clicker training more and more people can see it.

Thank you to all my exclamation mark posters! Twenty years on you are still bringing good things into the horse world.

Keep it positive!!!!

Share the JOY!!!

May 21, 2018 by theclickercenter

Seeing Steps

We’re Mid-way through May. Time to send another thank you out into the world to all the people who have helped bring clicker training into the horse world. 2018 marks the twentieth anniversary of the publication of “Clicker Training for your Horse“.

1998 was very much pioneer days. There was no trail ahead. We were blazing it. Everyone who went out to the barn with a pocket full of treats and a clicker in hand was truly a pioneer. We were stepping out into unknown territory. The first people who went on that journey with me were my clients. These were people I saw on a regular basis, some of them I had been working with for years. They were familiar with how I operated. I’d read a book, I’d go to a clinic, I see some interesting training, and then I’d try it out. My horses were always the first guinea pigs. If they liked what I was testing, I’d share it with a few of my clients, and, if they liked it, I’d share it with everyone.

That’s how clicker training got started, first with Peregrine and then with a few of my client’s horses. That’s all it took to get the snowball rolling down the hill. The first few steps into clicker training were easy. You taught basic targeting. You cleaned up the horse’s manners around food, and then what? That’s was what my clients were helping me to figure out.

So this month belongs to them, to all those willing pioneers who joined me in that first approximation in. As usual, I am going to single one person out, but in doing that what I am really doing is saying a huge thank you to all of my many clients who followed me into this exploration of clicker training. So this month I am going to introduce you to Sharon and her Arab Missfire. They were the inspiration behind Chapter 5 in “Clicker Training for your Horse”.

The title of Chapter 5 is: All Aboard! Mounting Blocks and So Much More: The Power of Goal Setting. You could say Chapter 5 is about teaching your horse to stand still at a mounting block, or you could say that it is about breaking training down into small steps. Both would be right.

Sharon was a first-time horse owner who kept her mare at home. She had what was a very common situation. She had a couple of small fenced-in fields with access to a run-in shed, but no separate designated training area. All the work was done out in Missfire’s paddock. Missfire didn’t come with too many warning labels attached. She was comfortable being groomed, okay to lead, she was afraid out on trails and would rush for home, but in her home paddock she was safe to ride. The problem was she frustrated Sharon. It was all the little things that Missfire didn’t do well. Yes, you could groom her, but she fidgeted. Yes, you could put a saddle on, but she fussed. Yes, you could get her to the mounting block, but getting her to stand still long enough to get on was a challenge.

Sharon was a special ed teacher. She taught math to teenagers who had been removed from regular classrooms because of their disruptive behavior. When I first introduced Sharon to clicker training, I thought – she’s going to love this! This will be right down her alley.

I was right. She did love clicker training, the parts of it she understood, but oh how she struggled to make it work. She just couldn’t see the steps. She understood the overall concept, but she needed me to guide her through each lesson. In between my weekly visits she was still struggling with her horse and feeling frustrated.

Clicker training has brought me many great things. I’ve been able to travel and meet people I would never have connected with if not for the adventure called clicker training. One of the connections I very much treasure is that with canine trainer, Kay Laurence. Kay feels about dogs the way I feel about horses. The species we are passionate about may be different, but our regard for the animals we love is the same. It was Kay who highlighted for all of us in the clicker training community the difference between guided and self-directed learning.

There’s a time and a place for both. Knowing which to use when is the skill.

In the horse world many traditional riding lessons are designed to create dependent students. There is a very clear hierarchy. The trainer is the expert. The learning is very much directed. In group lessons you’re told when to trot, when to canter. You’re not taught to become an independent thinker. When you buy your first horse, you are still very much dependent upon the trainer. You need him/her to fix things when the training goes wrong.

Clicker training changes that. The role I play is that of guide not guru. My favorite definition of a teacher is “someone who started before you”. When someone asks me to help them with a horse, that’s all that I am. Someone who started before that individual. My job is not to make that person dependent upon me. It’s to help her realize that she can be a teacher for her horse. She can be an active, effective problem solver.

Even someone who has limited handling skills can be a good teacher. The first requirement is understanding how to apply basic principles. It’s: safety always comes first. It’s: train where you can – not where you can’t. If you don’t have the riding skills yet to handle rough terrain, sudden surprises, and an excited horse who wants to bolt for home, then ride where you can be safe. Ride in your home paddock. Or ride from the ground first. Remember – ground work is just riding where you get to stand up.

Here’s another core principle: find a step in the training where you can get a consistent yes answer. If you are just learning how to handle a horse, what CAN you ask for? It might be as simple as having a horse touch his nose to a target. That may not seem like much, but it’s a beginning step. Each step opens the door to learning new skills which you and your horse are learning together.

The stumbling block that many people encounter when they are first experimenting with training is they become very outcome oriented. Instead of focusing on the process, they want to jump to the end result. That means they tend to lump criteria, and they miss seeing all the places where the horses are asking for more information. That’s where Sharon was. When she brought Missfire up to a mounting block, she expected to be able to just get on. She was missing all the small steps that could be inserted into this process. She just didn’t see them.

This was over twenty years ago – long before any of us knew about Hogwarts and Harry Potter. But thinking back on it, that’s the image that comes to mind. When I stood on the mounting block next to Missfire, I could see all the steps, but it was as if there was an invisibility spell cast over her when Sharon stood in the same place. She just couldn’t see all the little questions she could be asking Missfire.

Can I put my hands on the saddle? Yes. Click and treat.

Can I wiggle the saddle? Yes. Click and treat.

Can I touch the stirrup leather? Yes. Click and treat.

That’s great. That was a nice unit. Now I’m going to step off the mounting block, and we’ll walk off together in a big circle so we can go back to the mounting block and ask those same questions – and maybe one or two more – all over again.

Slowly the invisibility spell lifted. Sharon saw the steps. She got it. She was able to take Missfire to the mounting block and ask these small questions. She was understanding how these small asks accumulated into a solid owning of the behavior – for both of them.

The following week when I arrived Sharon showed me how she had taught Missfire to “self bridle”. And the week after that she showed me another new skill they had worked on together. She was owning the process! She was becoming what clicker training allows us to be – our horse’s teacher. She wasn’t dependent upon me. We still enjoyed our visits together. There were lots of new skills that I could help her to learn, but she didn’t need me.

In “Clicker Training for your Horse” I used specific lessons such as foot care or the mounting block lesson to teach broader principles. Sharon’s struggle with the mounting block became the inspiration for a chapter in “Clicker Training for your Horse“. The week after her lesson I wrote Chapter 5: All Aboard! Mounting Blocks and So Much More: The Power of Goal Setting.

Here is the opening section from that chapter:

“Some of you who are more experienced may glance at this and think: a whole chapter just on getting your horse to stand next to a mounting block! You’ve got to be kidding. When is she going to talk about some real training?

This book is intended for people of all experience levels. In my own teaching I work with many highly trained riders and instructors, but I also work with beginners and first-time horse owners. If you haven’t spent much time around horses, no exercise is ever too basic to be taught. I’ve given lessons in how to lead a horse into a barn, turn it around, and close the door behind you. Sound simple? If you’ve been around horses for years, of course it does, but to a timid, first-time owner with a pushy horse it can seem like an impossible task.

You may know how to teach your horse how to stand quietly while you get on. It’s no problem for you, but for someone who has never dealt with this issue, it can be extremely frustrating. You may take bridling for granted. Then you buy that green, three year old you’ve been dreaming of for years, and he throws his head up into the rafters whenever you come near him with a bridle.

I don’t know what issues you’re struggling with, or what you already know, and what you don’t. I don’t want to skip over anyone, so I’ve chosen to talk about some very basic training issues here. That way everyone can participate. Embedded in the discussion are the principles and concepts that will help you with every step of your training. If you’re an experienced rider, you’ll be able to generalize easily from these examples and apply the principles to your own training situation . . . . Foundation is everything in horse training. So even if you’re working with upper level horses, I think you’ll find a great deal in this chapter that will interest you.

Training is easy once you know where to begin. Getting started is the hard part. You want to ride. You’ve got a picture of your dream horse in your head. You can see yourself clearing every fence on the course; galloping along a winding trail; or executing the perfect canter pirouette. That’s your dream, but right now you and your horse are just starting out together. What are you going to work on today to get to all those wonderful tomorrows? What are your immediate training goals that address the issues you are working on today?

Goal setting is an important part of training. When I’m working with someone on a regular basis, I’ll ask them what they want to focus on today, in this lesson. Very often they’ll say they don’t know. They have an overall dream of what they want to do with their horse, but they don’t have a specific goal in mind for that day’s training. That’s fine. The horse will always tell us what he needs to learn.

We’ll take him out to the ring and he’ll refuse to walk up to the mounting block. Great. He’s just given us the lesson for the day. Yes, we could get on somehow, but we’d be missing a wonderful opportunity to train.

We might have been planning to work on canter departs, but that’s not what the day’s lesson is going to be about. We’re going to teach him to stand next to the mounting block. In the process we’ll be working on leading; on ground tying; on lateral work; on loading into a trailer; and, oh yes, on canter departs, and even on flying lead changes. How is that possible when all you’re doing is getting on? The answer is, you can never teach just one thing. You’ll see what I mean as we go through this lesson.”

It’s great fun reading this chapter so many years after it was written. I feel as though I could be writing it today in response to someone’s email query. The words wouldn’t be that different. I may know a lot more ways to teach the lessons I was writing about, but the core, underlying principles are the same. What Sharon showed me was the power of those principles. When you learn how to use them, they set you free.

So this is my thank you to Sharon and to all my other clients who showed me how to transform these principles from words on a page into actual practice. Those pioneering days were great fun! I am glad we took the journey together. Many of you have split off and gone off on your own. That’s as it should be. The best part of clicker training is it teaches you how to forge your own path. We will be friends always, and I am sending you a thank you for the time we journeyed together and the discoveries we made. Thank you for helping to bring clicker training into the horse community.

Have fun!

April 26, 2018 by theclickercenter

Remembering

Each month this year I’ve been writing a post in celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the publication of “Clicker Training for your Horse”. These posts are thank yous to all the many people who have helped bring clicker training into the horse world. In January I began with a tribute to Bob Viviano and his horse Crackers. February belonged to Ann Edie and Panda. Last month I turned the spotlight on all the clinic organizers. To represent them all I singled out Kate Graham and her horse Lucky.

This month is different. April can belong to no one else but my beloved Peregrine. April 26, 1985 was his birthday. For thirty years I celebrated that event with him. Now I remember the day without him. Today I am getting ready to fly out to California to teach a clinic. Peregrine put me on the path to all these great adventures. I learned about clicker training for him, through him. When I went out to the barn all those many years ago with treats in my pocket and a clicker in my hand, I had no idea of the journey he was sending me on.

When I lost Peregrine’s mother, I promised her I would write her a love story. I didn’t know at the time what form that would take, just that I would do it. My book, “Clicker Training For Your Horse”, was that love story. It was written for her and for Peregrine. Clicker training was not a story to keep to myself. I have been sharing it with all of you because of them.

When Peregrine turned thirty, I wrote a series of posts in celebration. They are a tribute to him and a history of equine clicker training. You can read them beginning with https://theclickercenterblog.com/2015/04/13/todays-peregrine-story-early-lessons/

For most of his life Peregrine lived at boarding barns. It was only in his final years that I was able to move him to a home of his own. The barn is still so full of his memories. We moved July 4th 2011. It was truly Independence Day for all our horses.

Peregrine shaped how the barn is used. He taught me to open all the doors. Throughout his life he was always opening doors. The most important one was the door to clicker training.

He is greatly loved, and he will always be greatly missed.

Peregrine April 26, 1985 the day he was born, and Peregrine when he was 29

February 9, 2018 by theclickercenter

Thank YOU!

I’m taking a brief detour from the Goat Diaries. 2018 is the 20th Anniversary of the publication of my book, “Clicker Training for your Horse”. To celebrate every month this year I will be writing an article about one of the many people who have helped me bring positive reinforcement training into the horse world.

Last month I told you about Bob Viviano and Crackers. Bob was there literally at the beginning of my exploration of clicker training. Ann Edie joined us a short time later when she started taking lessons from me at the barn where I boarded my horses. This month I want to turn the spotlight in her direction to thank her for the enormous contribution she has made to the development of clicker training and for 25 years of friendship.

Most of you know Ann through her guide horse, Panda. Ann has big horses as well. We seem to share our equine family – at least that’s how it feels. Ann’s first horse, Magnat, is our one in ten thousand horse. That’s how I think of him. He was originally my school horse, but he was such a great match for Ann, in 1996 I gave him to her. In 1999 he was joined by our two Icelandics, Sindri and Fengur. Panda joined the “herd” in 2001.

I’ve written so much about Panda, I’m going to shine the spotlight instead on Magnat. He played such an important role in the early development of clicker training it is right that he should get the attention as I celebrate twenty years of “Clicker Training for your Horse“. There is so much I could write. I’ll just share a couple of favorite Magnat stories.

Remembering Magnat

Magnat is an Arabian. He came to me through clients of mine who wanted a weekend trail horse for their guests. Several months and several disastrous rides after they got him, they discovered that he had a severe heart murmur. My clients were in a dilemma. They didn’t want to keep him as a pasture ornament, but they couldn’t ethically sell a horse with such a severe heart condition. Who would want such a horse? The answer was I would.

So Magnat became mine. One of my favorite training mantras is:

The walk is the mother of all gaits.

I didn’t need to ride fast to enjoy a horse. Magnat and I were a perfect fit. I would love to have reserved him just for myself, but he was such a great school horse. I began to use him to give lessons at the barn where I boarded. I could not have asked for a better co-teacher. This was in 1994. I had just begun the year before to explore clicker training with Peregrine. I was having such good success with it, I had started to share it with all my clients.

Pretty soon the only horse who wasn’t clicker trained was my own school horse. I was reluctant to introduce it to him. I had all the questions that everybody else has when you first start introducing food into your training. What if he got mouthy? He was so polite now. I didn’t want to risk messing up my one and only school horse by teaching him clicker training!

When someone is hesitant to give clicker training a try, I get it. I had the same questions and concerns that most people have when they first encounter this work. But I really couldn’t go on encouraging all my clients to give it a try and not follow my own advice with Magnat.

I needn’t have worried. For Magnat it barely caused a blip on the landscape. He was polite before I introduced food, and he remained so even when my pockets were bulging with treats. He was never muggy.

There are lots of horses who go through a very rocky transition stage. The food does get them excited. They frustrate easily and often older behaviors that have been suppressed through punishment resurface to create problems. Magnat showed none of this. That isn’t to say there weren’t changes. My solid, reliable lesson horse truly began to shine. If he had been good before, now he was outstanding.

Throughout that first winter he helped me teach people the basics of single-rein riding. There’s a great expression:

“The longer you stay with an exercise, the more good things you’ll see that it gives you.”

One of the good things the basics of single-rein riding produced for Magnat was collection. The beginnings of two favorite behaviors popped out: piaffe and canter in-hand. This later is a gorgeous behavior to have in repertoire. Magnat became so balanced and collected, he could canter while I walked beside him.

It was around this time that Ann came to the barn wanting to take lessons. Ann was not a beginner. She had ridden as a teenager, but then like so many others she gave up riding when she went off to college and never got back to it once she started raising a family. The challenge for me was Ann is blind. I had never worked with a blind rider before. This was a new frontier for me. But I assumed my job was teaching her to ride. Ann would take care of the rest. If I taught her the way I taught everyone else, we’d come out okay. It turned out I was right.

I started Ann the way I start all riders who come to me. It doesn’t matter how many years you have ridden or how experienced a trainer you are, if you are going to ride one of my horses, you start with a pony ride. I guide the horse from the ground. All you have to do is sit and enjoy.

As the rider becomes familiar with the horse’s communication system, and understands how to cue the horse, I gradually turn over more and more of the control. So at first I have the reins, and I’m working the horse in-hand with a rider up. Then I hand the reins over to the rider, but I stay close so my body language continues to support the rider’s cues. Then I gradually fade out and the rider takes over completely from me.

This worked perfectly for Ann. Having Magnat as my co-teacher made all the difference, especially since he could canter in-hand. For teaching that made him worth his weight in gold. I wish I had learned how to ride on a horse like Magnat. Ann has such a relaxed canter seat because she learned the rhythm of the canter from him. Starting out she never rode a bad canter. All she had to do was relax and enjoy. There was no struggle trying to get him into the canter, no trotting faster, faster, faster like a plane taking off. There was no leaning sideways through unbalanced turns.

Magnat canter

Instead there was just the relaxed rhythm of a collected, glorious canter. And then there was the piaffe and the passage. It was Ann who was riding the first time Magnat succeeded in mobilizing into piaffe. I was working him from the ground while she helped manage his weight shifts.

We were figuring out how to teach riding with the clicker. I gave Ann the lesson, and she taught Magnat. They were such a good match, I decided after their first winter together to give him to her. It gave me so much more pleasure watching them develop as a team than I ever would have had riding him for myself. And I had Peregrine. He and Magnat became riding partners. For the next sixteen years while we kept the horses at the boarding barn, Ann and I shared our evening rides together.

They were an unlikely pair, my thoroughbred, her Arab. But it turned out that each horse gave their best to the other. Magnat gave Peregrine the confidence to move forward again after a long, hard recovery from the aftershocks of Potomac horse fever. And Peregrine taught Magnat about collection.

Magnat lived in a small paddock with two other horses. I’m sure you can picture what he looked like during mud season. Every night Ann would spend an hour or so grooming him and by the time he was ready to go into the arena, he was snowy white. I don’t know how she did it! When I brush my horses, the dirt moves from one spot to another. When Ann grooms, the dirt leaves! And a horse isn’t clean until her fingers tell her he’s clean.

Early on we taught Magnat to retrieve. There’s a picture of him with a wooden dumbbell in his mouth on the cover of the first edition of “Clicker Training for your Horse”. When Ann brought him into the arena, he would ask to be turned loose. She’d let go of his reins, and he’d go out in the arena and bring back to her all the things the previous riders had dropped.

We boarded in a barn where there was a very active after school lesson program so there were always dropped riding crops, gloves, hats, kleenex. Ann never knew what she was going to be handed. Magnat was very diligent in making sure that he had found anything and everything that might get in their way. In so many ways he was Ann’s first guide horse.

When the arena was clean, he would walk with her to the mounting block and line himself up. Now the real glory of Magnat shone through.

Ann understood that clicker training means so much more than just using a marker signal and treats. Clicker training for us is synonymous with good balance. It was a joy to explore with her what that meant for our horses.

When Ann first started riding Magnat, she couldn’t manage his trot at all. He bounced her out of the saddle. It was the most jarring, bone rattling, uncomfortable trot imaginable. That was because for her Magnat wasn’t yet balanced. She didn’t yet understand how to use lateral flexions. When she asked for the trot, she got the hollow-back, high-headed, stiff-legged trot that is all too often associated with Arabs.

As she learned how to use lateral flexions, Magnat relaxed and lifted himself up into a magic carpet ride. The transformation was so black and white. Ride him without asking for the lift that comes through the lateral work, and he would jar you right out of the saddle. Ask for collection, and you were in heaven.

I taught Magnat lateral flexions before I began to explore clicker training. He understood what I wanted and was a willing student. Often people seek out clicker training because they are struggling with a horse. That wasn’t the case with Magnat. He could have gone through his whole life without ever needing to be clicker trained.

Before clicker training he was a good, solid-citizen riding horse, but that’s all he was. Without clicker training he would have remained a nice, but ordinary horse. With clicker training he shone. I used to say he was a one in a million horse, but as the years went by and he just became more and more wonderful, not just to ride but to be around, I changed this to a one in ten million horse.

But I really shouldn’t be the one to describe what it was like to ride Magnat. He was Ann’s horse. Here is how Ann described him in a piece she wrote for my riding book:

“It’s always a dilemma to describe the experience of riding a truly extraordinary horse who has had the benefit of several years of clicker training. Although many technical components go into the production of a really memorable ride, the irrepressible smile, the feeling of wonder, and expression of “WOW!!” that arises so regularly these days when I ride Magnat simply cannot be described in anything but poetic terms.

Yes, athletic talent and neuromuscular conditioning are part of what makes the ride so special; and yes, many hours of repetition over many months have gone into it; and yes, there is extraordinary lightness and balance. But this is still far from the sum total of the experience.

Musicians have described a great melody as “ a journey which has many familiar passages, and which also contains some wonderful surprises which cause you to look at the world in a completely fresh way and gives new meaning to life.” This is the best description I can find of what it is like to ride Magnat.

Magnat comes out into the arena every night feeling relaxed and eager to work. He knows he will be appreciated and reinforced for his performance. He knows that he is a respected dance partner and member of the team, not a mere subject of training. This awareness and active participation on the part of the horse is one of the benefits bestowed by clicker training.

Our rides begin with warm-up exercises. In the course of executing figures or doing simple softening and balancing work, I will pick up on the reins and suddenly feel the most indescribable lightness!!!

We may be in a super-buoyant, floating trot, a deliberate, balanced, ballet-like piaffe, or a heavenly rocking-horse canter. Whatever it is, it will feel as though I am floating on a magic carpet. He is so responsive in these moments. It’s as if there are clear filaments of two-way communication from my finger tips to each of Magnat’s feet. The slightest breath of a touch on one of those lines will be answered by an immediate floating response.

The musicians described music as a journey which “contains some wonderful surprises.” That’s how I feel about riding Magnat. Each ride contains surprises and special pleasures we have not experienced before. It is like coming around a bend in the road and seeing a spectacular sunset, or a grove of awe-inspiring redwood trees, or the grandeur of an ancient castle, or the peace and cool of a Buddhist temple. It truly takes the breath away! It creates the deepest joy and aliveness in my heart!

These moments have totally changed the way I think about riding. I feel such awe for Magnat and for what we create together. In this moment I know, without the slightest doubt, exactly what I ride for – it is just this amazing feeling of total balance, effortlessness, lightness, and energy. Magnat seems to feel the same excitement and joy, for he literally beams with pride, and recently he has begun uttering deep chortles in his throat at these moments.

I let the magic moment go on for as long as I dare, wanting it to continue forever, but knowing I must capture it with a click, before it disappears like a soap bubble or a delicious dream.

The click creates a pause in the music. Magnat comes to a halt; I throw my arms around his neck in a huge hug, shower him with lavish praise, and empty my pockets of the most desirable treats!

The “WOW” feeling is definitely addictive. The glow of the experience lingers and stays with me long after the ride. Our whole horse-human relationship is one of appreciation, respect, and awe.

This is, for me, the great gift of clicker training. When taken to the high-performance level, it creates transcendent moments of great joy”

Ann Edie – written in 2005 for “The Click That Teaches: Riding with the Clicker”

Ann’s words express so perfectly why we have both worked to bring clicker training into the horse world. If clicker training had just been about teaching tricks, and finding kinder way to get horses onto trailers or to stand for grooming, I would have moved on years ago. Instead clicker training takes us on a journey to Joy. It connects us deeply to our horses.

This is what Ann and I wanted to share when we wrote about our horses. It is what I am celebrating in this twentieth year of “Clicker Training for your Horse”. It is what we hope others will find as they explore clicker training: the great love and wisdom of horses.

Sadly we lost Magnat in 2011 not long after we moved to our new barn. He had reached the grand age of 33, but it wasn’t enough. We were both hoping he would be one of those Arabs who live to be forty. Sadly he had cancer, and we had to say good-bye.

Ann has shared so generously her horses. Magnat and the Icelandics have served as my school horses. I’ve written about them, and they have appeared in the books and DVDs. Sindri, our Icelandic stallion, was my riding horses. Thank you Ann for that great pleasure and honor.

And then of course there is Panda, Ann’s guide horse. Ann is a very private person, but she has shared Panda literally with the world. We’ve had journalists from as far away as Japan and Australia come and do stories on her. Ann has always been a good sport, and so has Panda!

What many people don’t know is Ann is one of the partners in The Clicker Center Barn. Without her help, the barn would never have been built. Thank you Ann for this. And thank you also for teaching me how to play scrabble and for occasionally letting me win.

Alex Panda scrabble 0038

January 2, 2018 by theclickercenter

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year Everyone! I know you’re expecting the next installment of the Goat Diaries. I’ll get back to those in my next post, but first I am going to do something a little different.

2018 is the 20th anniversary of the publication of “Clicker Training for Your Horse.” Before 1998 clicker training was not part of the general horse world. I’ve always said that first book was like my space beacon: “I’m here! Is anyone else out there?” The answer is yes. Here you are, reading this post. We are people who love the animals in our care and who want the training methods we use to support the relationship we want.

I’m one of those people who ignores most anniversaries, but twenty years is something to pay attention to. It represents a huge commitment of time, energy, and love for our horses. I’m not talking just about my contribution. I’m thinking about all the many thousands of people who have helped pioneer clicker training and whose efforts have helped to spread it around the planet.

I would love to thank each and every one of you by name – but I don’t know all of you personally. Even if I did, I would be bound to leave someone out. I don’t want anyone to feel like the fairy in the children’s stories who wasn’t invited to the party, so instead I’m going to single out just a few people. Every month this year I’ll be publishing an article commemorating the contribution of one of the many people who helped me bring clicker training into the horse world.

The first article features my long time client and friend, Bob Viviano. For many years we boarded our horses in the same barn. Bob’s appaloosa, Crackers, lived in the stall opposite Peregrine. Soon after I moved Peregrine to the barn, Bob asked me to help him with a jumping problem he was having. That was in 1993. Little did he know what he was getting himself in for!

When I watched Crackers go under saddle, it was clear the jumping problem was balance related. That meant peeling back some layers and introducing them both to lateral work. One of Bob’s hobbies was country line dancing. Line dancing used a lot of the steps we were teaching Crackers. Why not teach him an actual dance? Forward – back – side – side: Bob taught Crackers the Electric Slide.

It didn’t matter what you called it – dressage or line dancing – the changes of bend and the weight shifts forward and back were exactly what Crackers needed. Once Crackers had the dance figured out, Bob got others to join in. The kids from the local 4-H group formed a line dance with Crackers in the middle. That was just the beginning. Eventually Bob and Crackers joined a group that was trying out for a Guinness Record of most people ever to perform in a line dance. They got close with over a thousand people. They certainly should have gotten the record for most people plus one horse!

In those early pioneer days we had no idea what you could do with clicker training. We were just having fun. We started out teaching our horses to touch targets. That was step one in introducing a horse to clicker training. Our horses all caught on fast to the targeting, and then we were confronted with the question everyone faces: now what? What do you do with targeting?

Well, one answer is you teach your horse to retrieve. My young horse, Robin was our first retriever. Once he showed the way, the rest followed. We very quickly had a barn full of eager retrievers. And then what? If a horse can retrieve, could he open a mail box? Bob built Crackers his own mailbox so we could find out. The answer, of course, was yes. And not only can he open the mail box, he can also reach in, get the mail and hand it out to you.

He can also retrieve a basketball and dunk it through a hoop, kick a football, swing a hula hoop over his head, answer the telephone, play a piano and paint you a picture, to name just a few of the many tricks Bob taught Crackers.

Lots of people teach their horses tricks. What set Bob apart was the way in which he shared them. He started taking Crackers to outdoor fairs and festivals. Bob loved seeing people’s faces light up as they watched Crackers perform. “He’s so smart!” they’d exclaim as Crackers opened his mailbox and handed people the presents Bob had stashed inside.

I visited them at one festival where Crackers’ pen was right beside an area where people were flying enormous kites. It didn’t matter that brightly colored dragons were swooping over his head, Crackers went right on performing for the people who had come to see him.

At Christmas Bob would take Crackers to local shopping malls to raise money for the Salvation Army. I remember watching them outside a busy supermarket one snowy December evening. People gave so generously because it was Crackers ringing the bell. Bob took him to nursing homes and to the Hole in the Wall camp for children with cancer. One of the many stories Bob shared was of a little girl who decorated her hospital room with pictures of Crackers.

It was always Bob and Crackers. They were a team. If you knew Bob, you knew Crackers. And Crackers was always up for anything. From tricks to line dancing, he would perform for hours. As long as there were people who wanted to see him, Crackers was always willing. At the barn whenever someone came to visit, they were always treated to a show. Crackers loved it. Bring out his mailbox, and he was always eager to perform. Bob not only made Crackers’ life better through clicker training, together they enriched the lives of the thousands of people they met.

Bob and Crackers helped us discover what you could do with clicker training. It wasn’t just that Crackers could open a mail box or ring a bell. It was that he could perform wherever Bob took him whether it was at a crowded festival or in a snowy parking lot. Clicker training had given Crackers a confidence Bob could rely on.

Bob played another very important role in the development of clicker training, one that not as many people know about. He was my horse sitter. There aren’t many people I would entrust my horses to. I always knew I could rely on Bob.

In those early days, there were just occasional trips away. Most of my teaching was done locally, but word of mouth was beginning to bring requests for clinics. The people who signed up for my clinics didn’t yet know I was experimenting with clicker training. They were coming because they had heard I was good at solving training problems. During our time together, I would introduce them to clicker training, but it wasn’t yet the primary focus of the clinics.

In 1996 I launched my web site: theclickercenter.com. That was also the year Karen Pryor asked me to write a book for her new company, Sunshine Books. At clinics I still kept clicker training “under my hat”. I waited until my book was published in 1998 to announce that I was giving clinics that were specifically about clicker training. That’s when my travel schedule exploded. For many years after that I was away teaching almost more than I was home.

Whenever I was out of town, it was Bob who came every day to look after my horses. Without him I would never have been able to give those clinics. And without the clinics I would never have been able to connect to all the other clicker pioneers who helped me spread clicker training around the planet. So I owe Bob and Crackers a huge debt of thanks for joining me in this amazing adventure we call clicker training.

Crackers sadly is no longer with us. He died in 2012 at the grand age of 30. He is buried, as he should be, at the Clicker Center Barn where he will always be remembered with much love. At 80 Bob is still going strong. He may not have Crackers at his side, but he’s still sharing clicker training. He continues to pass on Crackers’ legacy by volunteering at a local horse rescue. So the ripples we started over twenty years ago are still going out into the horse world. Thank you, Bob and Crackers! It has been a great pleasure and honor to share clicker training with you.

Crackers and Bob are featured in all three of my books: “Clicker Training for your Horse”, “The Click That Teaches: A Step-By-Step Guide in Pictures”, and “The Click That Teaches: Riding with the Clicker”. They also appears in The Click That Teaches DVD Lesson series.

Visit theclickercenter.com to learn more. (Crackers is the first horse featured on the page celebrating some of our clicker-trained horses. https://www.theclickercenter.com/clicker-horses-1)

Next month I’ll be celebrating this 20th Anniversary year with another story featuring one of our clicker-training pioneers.

Happy 2018 Everyone!

Coming next: The Goat Diaries returns.