December 13, 2017 by theclickercenter

The July Goat Diaries: Day 4 – Learning About Goats

What are you feeling?

The timing is perfect for posting this particular article. In it I reference Dr. Joe Layng’s 2016 presentation on emotions at the Art and Science of Animal Training conference. The organizers of that conference have just made that lecture available on the internet. It is very much worth listening to. (https://www.artandscienceofanimaltraining.org/videos/)

Today I’m going to begin with the July Goat Diaries:

Both goats were now consistently greeting me at the door. They were accepting and seemed to be enjoying long head rubs before we began the more structured sessions.

Seemed to be enjoying – there’s an interesting phrase. We use so many emotional labels. They enjoyed the session. They were happy to see me. How do I know what they were feeling? The answer is I don’t. I don’t know what a goat is feeling any more than I know what another person is feeling.

I can observe behavior and see how that correlates with what I experience. Under these conditions, I feel happy. When I feel happy, I present the following behaviors: I smile. I get wrinkles at the corners of my eyes. I laugh. My shoulders relax. Under similar conditions, when I see these indicator behaviors in another person, it’s a fair guess to say that he’s feeling happy.

What conditions would make a goat happy? What does a happy goat look like?

Several years ago at the Art and Science of Animal Training conference, Joe Layng gave a great talk on emotions. Here’s the example that stuck with me. Suppose you’ve been in an accident, a doctor might ask, on a scale of one to ten, how much pain are you in? What does the answer mean? We all know people who are running for the nearest hospital if they even so much as stub their toe, while others stoically tolerate broken bones. And that’s the point Joe was making. The answer does not reflect some absolute answer. We can’t know someone else’s pain. The answer tells you what level of intervention that person is asking for.

When I first scratched the goats, I would say they tolerated the attention. Now they were enjoying it. My hand was doing the same action, but the response was so very different. Now they arched their necks into my fingers. Their ears got floppy, their eyes soft. And when I took my hand away, what level of intervention did they ask for? Did they move away relieved that I had stopped? Or did they push into me asking for more?

I think I was safe in saying that they were enjoying the head scratching. But whatever they thought of this ritual, I was finding it most reinforcing!

I used another emotional label to describe P at the start of our next training session. He was eager.

2nd Session 11 am

P’s Session:

I let P out into the outside run. I wanted to film this session so I had the camera and tripod with me. P went straight to the platform. I should have reinforced him, but I was busy setting up the camera. Note to self – have camera set up ahead of time. These initial offerings at the start of a session are too precious to miss.

For the most part P was very good. He stayed on the platform – click then treat. When I offered the target, he left the platform to come to the target – click then treat. (Figure 1.)

Goat Diaries- Day 4- P's 11 am Session - leaving platform 3 photos.png

Figure 1

He was experiencing success with both responses. Stay on the platform – get reinforced. Orient to the target when it’s presented – get reinforced. All was going well, and then – conflict! P got stuck between two choices. What was he supposed to do!? He wanted to go to the platform. But I was holding out the target.

He started to leave the platform to get to the target (Fig. 2:1.) , but then he hesitated. He looked back at the platform. The pull was strong. (Fig. 2: 2-3.)

Goat Diaries- Day 4- P's 11 am Session - 3 photos leaving platform.png

Figure 2

He went to the platform. There was no click. He turned back to me, saw the target, and leapt towards it. When goats butt one another, they rise up on their hind legs and then curl their necks so they collide horns to horns with their sparing partner. (Figure 3.)

Figure 3

It looked as though P’s charge was going to turn into a head butt (Fig. 4: 1-4.) , but it fizzled out. He landed in front of me with a puzzled look. (Fig. 4: 5-6.) What to do? He looked back at the platform. (Fig. 4: 7.) That must be the answer. He turned away from the target and went back to the platform. (Fig. 4: 8.) No click. (Fig. 4: 9.) What is a goat to do?

Goat Diaries- Day 4- P's 11 am Session - charges target 9 photos.png

SGoat Diaries- Day 4- P's 11 am Session - goes to target 5 photos.png

Figure 4

The target was still there. (Fig. 4: 10.) He left the platform and came forward to the target. Click! (Fig. 4: 11.) He kept coming forward as I reached into my pocket. (Fig. 4: 12.) Food delivery should support what you want. I had been asking him to back up away from me to get his treat, but in this case I wanted him to stay forward with me. (Fig. 4: 13.) He followed the target back to the platform. (Fig. 4: 14.) This time there was no conflict. The target was directing him back to the platform. This was an easy choice to make.

Video: Goat Diaries – Day 4 – P’s 11 am session

P does everything with so much energy! If orienting to the target is good, running to it must be better! His enthusiasm was beginning to create some problems. I want the energy. I want the enthusiasm. I also want him to have the ability to relax and settle. That comes from being confident in the process. It comes from understanding how to use the information that cues are providing. Now is a great time to stay on a platform. Now is a great time to leave the platform to go to a target.

I don’t want P to feel conflicted. I want him to know that it is safe to make mistakes. And I want him to know that there are lots of way to earn reinforcement. That’s what these early foundation lessons clarify.

The Horses have shown me that mats can help to stabilize the emotional yo-yo. Mats have three parts to them – going to a mat, staying on a mat, and leaving a mat. All three elements have to be in balance. If mats equal lots of reinforcement, I don’t want my horse or goat rushing to get to the mat. Nor do I want them refusing to leave the mat when asked.

My plan was to reinforce P a lot for just being on the platform. We’d go from the excitement of moving from one platform to the next, to the more predictable just stand still and get clicked and reinforced. Time will tell if that helps him gain confidence in the whole process.

The Goat Palace Journals

That’s where we were – just beginning to sort out platforms and the emotional high they created in Pellias. Yesterday I introduced him to a fun game, one Elyan is really enjoying. I set a large plastic storage container out at the far end of the hallway. It’s filled with leftover wood from the construction, blocks that are too small to be really useful, but too big to throw away. I’m being reinforced for being a pack rat. It turns out they really do have a use. They add enough weight to the storage box to make it a stable platform for the goats to jump up on at speed.

Elyan had already shown me that he’s very clever at getting up on things. When I get up out of my chair, he takes my place. If he can jump up into a chair and turn around, he can certainly jump up onto a box. So on Monday I let him run to the box, click and treat. He thought that was the greatest game yet! I clicked and reinforced him several times for staying on the box. Then I went to the far end of the hallway and called him.

He jumped off the box and ran to me. Click and treat! I want to say he ran joyously, but I am mindful of Joe Layng’s lecture. Who knows what he was feeling, but the speed with which he ran to me certainly filled me with delight.

I reinforced him for staying with me, then released him back to the box. He ran down the hallway and jumped up on it. Such fun! What a great way to teach recalls and send outs.

Once he was on his box, I could reach my arms around him and give him a quick hug – click and treat. He seemed to like the contact and started to press in closer to me.

I taught Panda to press her body against my leg. This was done for her work as a guide for the blind. When her handler is busy doing something where her focus not on Panda, for example buying something at a store check out counter, Panda will press herself against her leg. Her handler knows exactly where Panda is. She isn’t swinging her rear end around into the face of some small child. She is standing exactly where she should be by her side.

I taught this behavior for a very practical reason. I reinforced it a lot, and it became a behavior Panda loves to offer. After almost fifteen years working as a guide, it is certainly one she offers readily. As I was giving Elyan a quick squeeze of a hug, I thought this was a behavior he might enjoy as well.

Yesterday I introduced Pellias to the box. He was more hesitant at first about jumping up on it. I used a target to indicate that was what I wanted. In true goat fashion once he had one foot on the box, the rest quickly followed. When I called him off the box, he trotted to me. And then he turned and raced ahead of me back to the box. Hmm. Was this really what I wanted?

With Elyan it seemed fine. He’s so very good at sticking to my side, sending him out in front of me to the box didn’t seem as though it would create a problem. But Pellias is a much stronger goat. Did I really want him running ahead of me? Is this something I wanted to be encouraging at this point? I didn’t think so. So I brought out a target. He jumped down off the box and began to follow the target. Click. He stopped with me and got his treat.

I had him follow the target to the opposite end of the hallway where there was a stack of plywood mats that we had been using earlier. He hopped up on those. Click and treat. We turned back to the box. He kept his nose oriented to the target as he trotted towards the box. I clicked. He wasn’t expecting that. He had been heading to the box, so he overshot past me, but instead of being pulled in by the tractor beam of the box, he turned back to me.

What a great lesson! He had so much energy and enthusiasm. He wanted to get to the box. But when I clicked mid way down the hall, he stopped with me and got his treat. And then he stayed with me as we continued towards the box. That’s a great preparation for putting a lead on and asking him to stay with me even when there is something exciting up ahead.

This is such a fun stage in the training. I’ve constructed the first layer of building blocks. Now I can use them to create the next layer.

Coming Next: Goat Diaries: Day 4 – Goats and Platforms

December 12, 2016 by theclickercenter

JOY FULL Horses: Understanding Extinction: Part 11

Being Emotional Is Being Alive
In the previous section we looked at degrees of freedom. We often assume that someone who is at the top of their chosen profession must also be emotionally at the top of the world. How can this successful actor or professional sports hero be anything but happy? And yet we hear over and over again how miserably unhappy these people often are.

Degrees of freedom help us understand this paradox. If you have become “The Expert” because that’s all you can do, you may well feel trapped and isolated. Emotional labels become attached to these extreme conditions. You’ll describe yourself as being depressed, frustrated, anxious, unhappy.

Dr. Jesús Rosales-Ruiz offered us another gem, a reminder, from his discussion of regression and resurgence. Often when people talk about “emotional behavior” such as aggression, they are forgetting that we are always emotional. It isn’t that now we are happy, and then a switch turns off and we feel nothing.

“Living is being emotional.”

The nature and intensity of the emotions fluctuates. We experience different degrees depending upon conditions and our reinforcement history. But thinking in terms of “emotional behavior” is too simplistic. Emotion is part of all behavior. It is not separate from it.

Traveling helps you to understand how much our emotions are a product of the habit patterns that have formed within our familiar environments and how true it is that emotions are always present. Perhaps you are one of the huge number of people who have more to do than you could possibly accomplish in one day. You have a family to care for, a house and barn to maintain, horses to feed and clean up after – not to mention ride. All that and then there’s also an overfull schedule at work. You’re always under stress, but it’s become so the norm, you don’t pay much attention to how you’re feeling. A mildly stressed state is just the normal emotional background “noise”.

And then you treat yourself to the Five Go To Sea cruise where everything is different. You still have a full day, with more to do and see than any one person could possibly squeeze into a day, but your normal triggers aren’t there. The phone isn’t ringing. You aren’t on the internet with the constant influx of work-related emails. Your co-worker’s voice coming through the office wall isn’t annoying you. All those triggers are gone and now you get to experience who you are and how you feel without them. You become acutely aware of just how stressed you’ve been now that you’ve stepped out of your normal habit patterns. You’re still emotional, but now the environment is set up to trigger the kinds of supportive, pleasant emotions you want to experience.

So the next time you find yourself saying that your horse, your dog, your fellow human is being emotional, remind yourself that that’s an ever present condition. “Living is being emotional.” The question is, how can you influence conditions so the emotions that support a JOY FULL experience are the ones coming to the fore?

Coming Next: Building Unlikely Behaviors with Resurgence

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

November 19, 2016 by theclickercenter

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-lever Here’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

theclickercenter.com theclickercentercourse.com

August 6, 2016 by theclickercenter

JOYFull Horses: Cue Communication Continued: Part 6 – Just Tell me How You Feel

Listen to Your Horse
I’ve been describing a lesson I call “Capture the Saddle”. It’s used to teach horses to line themselves up next to a mounting block. In the previous section I talked about how you can turn this ordinary, everyday behavior into extraordinary “Grand Prix” level excellence.

Even before you have built the behavior to this point, you can use the mounting block as a measure of how your horse is feeling. If your horse normally lines up well, but today he is swinging out or he’s walking off before you can get on, don’t assume that he’s “testing” you. Instead ask him what’s wrong? He knows standing at the mounting block leads to riding. Why doesn’t he want to be ridden today?

Our horses work so hard to communicate with us. We need to learn to be better listeners. When we train them with play in our hearts, they will want to work with us. If today they are saying “No” to riding, there’s a good reason. It may not always be obvious, but we need to become good detectives and find the answer.

Detective Work
Ask most horse owners about the ancestral background of the horse, and they can tell you that horses are a prey species that evolved in open grasslands. What they may not be as clear about are some of the consequences of that background.

Horses are herd animals because there is safety in numbers. The flip side of this is there is danger in appearing to be vulnerable. A lame or sick horse draws attention to itself and to the herd as a whole. Show weakness, and you’ll be drawing in predators, so horses are very good at hiding their injuries. They are protecting not just themselves, but their whole family. It takes something acutely painful such as an abscess or a torn tendon to bring a horse hobbling to a stand still. If they can hide an injury, they will.

So we have to be good detectives. It may not be immediately obvious what is wrong, but if you keep looking, if you keep collecting data, you may be able to piece together enough clues to discover that the reason your horse fidgets at the mounting block has nothing to do with training and everything to do with the poorly fitting saddle that is hurting his back.

“Just Tell Me How You Feel”
Normally an angry or frightened horse gives lots of warning signals that he is about to explode. If you punish those early warning signals in an attempt to stop a horse from biting, you can create that most dangerous of animals – a horse that gives no warning signals and goes straight to attacking when he has been pushed over threshold.

Just as horses can learn to withhold these signs of stress, they can learn the opposite. Instead of punishing them for fidgeting and refusing to step up to the mounting block, if you show them instead that you will listen to them, they will become more comfortable about expressing how they feel.

Just as we can actively teach a process that leads to intelligent disobedience, we can teach our horses to express more openly how they are feeling. When we listen to them in a context such as the mounting block, they begin to generalize the concept and offer us a truer picture of how they feel both physically and emotionally.

Peregrine for years bounced from one health crisis to another. The aftermath of a bout of Potomac Horse fever sent him on a downward health spiral that took several years to sort out. During that time I was grateful for his grumpy faces. I needed to know from one day to the next how he was feeling.

He was never punished for making faces. The rule was he could make faces. He just couldn’t act out on them. Because I was listening, he never needed to.

Saying “No”
Sometimes the reason a horse says “No” to us, is not because there is something wrong with him, but because there is something that isn’t right with us.

This was driven home to me by a horse I met in a clinic many years ago. The horse was on loan to one of the course participants. She was a very clicker-experienced horse who was used to being handled by a skilled and very tactful owner.

Some horses are incredibly generous teachers. They seem to enjoy working with beginners. They are truly worth their weight in gold as they make up the heart of a good lesson string. Round-bellied ponies who take care of their young riders are treasures. Solid citizen campaigners who will take you over your first jump no matter how out of balance or how scared you are are the salt of the earth.

This mare was none of those things. She was a finely-trained artist who expected a high level of expertise and delicate feel from all her human partners. Unfortunately the woman who was working with her wasn’t able to live up to this mare’s exacting standards.

They started out well enough. I had them walking around a “why would you leave me” circle of cones. The mare started out by offering what she knew – beautifully balanced steps of shoulder-in on the circle. The handler clicked, gave her a treat and then slid down the lead. The mare wasn’t happy. Something was wrong, but it wasn’t clear yet what it was.

They went through a couple more cycles. The handler slid up the rope, and the mare walked off in shoulder-in, click and treat. Only now she was beginning to grab the lead before the handler could get more than a few inches down the rope.

“That’s as far as you’re going, little miss,” she was effectively saying.

We stopped, put the mare away and worked with the handler. We had her slide down the lead while someone else held the snap end. She felt soft enough to us. There was nothing especially harsh or abrupt in the way she handled the lead. We made a few adjustments to the details we did notice, and then we brought the mare back out. Things were not much better. Hmm. We put her away again and went back to rope handling basics.

Our handler told us she had the same sort of issues with her own horse. Clearly both horses were trying to tell her something. This was a puzzle we needed to solve.

We brought the mare back out, but now we let her be the teacher. The instructions were to wait until she showed her handler that she was ready to begin a new cycle. Not until her horse cued her was she to slide down the lead.

They stood side by side. The handler had her hands folded together about waist height. That’s the cue for a behavior which I call “the grown-ups are talking, please don’t interrupt”. It is one of the very first lessons which I teach a horse. The horse is clicked and reinforced when he keeps his nose pointing forward, away from the handler’s treat pouch. Over time it evolves and branches off into many different behaviors.

Robin Runway return to mat grups 2016-06-18 at 6.21.41 PM

Robin shows us a beautiful baseline for “the grown-ups are talking, please don’t interrupt” behavior.

The grown-ups are talking:

is the formation of ground tying which means, among others things, you can groom a horse while he stands at ease.
transforms from a simple at-ease posture into the pilates pose. This is a “grand prix” behavior. The horse engages the same muscles he uses under saddle to collect himself for advanced performance. Only instead of doing this in motion, he is collecting at the halt. It is wonderfully good for a horse’s overall muscle tone and can help maintain a horse’s back strength for riding.

The Conversation
This mare had a beautiful pilates pose which she normally was perfectly happy to offer. Now she just stood next to this handler in a flat, at-ease stance.

The handler was waiting in grown-ups for she wasn’t sure what. She let out her breath, and the mare posed.

“Slide down the lead,” I quietly instructed her. The handler did as she was told. There was no biting at her hand. Instead the mare flowed into a beautifully balanced shoulder-in. Click and treat.

The handler waited again. Again, she let out her breath, and again the horse posed. “She’s telling you she’s ready for you to go on,” I told her handler. “Let the pose be the cue to you that she’s ready for you to slide down the lead.”

The mare had been trying her best to tell us what was wrong. When this handler slid down the rope, she held her breath. That made her feel tighter, heavier. It made her feel as though she was shouting at this very light horse.

Either we humans weren’t as sensitive as this mare, or the handler hadn’t been holding her breath when she practiced the rope handling with us. But at least with this horse she was definitely holding her breath. Without meaning to she was applying too much pressure. This horse didn’t like it and neither, apparently, did her own horse. When we gave the mare a way to signal to us when things were more to her liking, we could not only see what was going on, we could solve the problem.

Fixing the “Fixers”
As I watched this handler more closely throughout the weekend, I saw lots of little ways in which she was keeping the pressure on. It was so subtle, it was easy to miss. The pressure wasn’t coming from her hand on the lead, it was coming from her expectations and to be blunt – her neediness. She was a rescuer. She wanted to “fix” this mare. But this mare didn’t see herself as broken.

When we gave the mare permission to lead the dance, she was able to show us all that she wasn’t broken. Her handler needed to breath, smile and set aside the “poor horse” energy that was clogging up the relationship she brought to all the horses she worked with. She saw horses as sad little infants in need of rescuing and fixing.

If you don’t see yourself as either a baby or broken, you don’t want someone mother henning you and trying to “fix” you. There are definitely times when my horses aren’t feeling well, and they want to be cuddled. And there are horses who have fallen on hard times and really do need to be rescued. But that’s not forever. At some point that event sits in their distant past, and they are no longer “broken”. When we surround them with “fix it” energy, some of these horses can begin to feel restricted and annoyed.

It’s very much like a toddler who squirms out of his mother’s protective arms. “I can do it myself!” He’s beginning to exert his own independence. “I can tie my own shoes!” At some point you have to let him try.

At some point we have to stop treating our horses like infants in need of our constant care and supervision. They are our partners in the best and truest sense of that word, and sometimes our partners get to take the lead.

This handler needed to play more. She wanted to be a nurturer, and for some horses that is exactly what is needed. But every good mother knows there is a place for play, as well.

When my horses wrap themselves around me in beautiful lateral work, they make me smile. I laugh with them. We are dancing together, and for both horses and humans there is no better of expression of Joy than that.

This article ends this section on “Cue Communication”.

Coming Next in our list of “Ten Things You Should Know About Cues” is: Number 5: Cues Evolve.

The way in which cues evolve as we teach new skills leads us straight to play. That makes this a very important concept to explore.

theclickercenter.com theclickercentercourse.com

January 14, 2016 by theclickercenter

JOY Full Horses: Part 1: Why Play?

I’ve teased you with an introduction to this book, and with the Table of Contents. Now finally here is Part 1: Why Play!

This is a short section – just to get your feet wet. Enjoy!

blue bar

Part One: Why Play?

Panda scrabble - leaning against me

When science and art come together,
they become indistinguishable from play.

blue bar

Chapter 1: Mammals Play

Fengur Sindri rearing 5:19:13

Airplane Reading
When you travel by plane as often as I do, you begin to know all the major airports in the country. I can tell you which ones have free internet access and electrical outlets at your seat, and which ones force you to sit on the floor to recharge your computer. I can tell you which airports have decent food and which ones assume that the entire traveling public wants to eat junk food. I can also tell you where all the good bookstores are. I enjoy browsing through airport bookstores. Instead of feeling overwhelmed by an overabundance of choice in the mega bookstores, the airport bookstores are confined to cubbyhole spaces. They give you just a small sampling of what is current and popular.

What I want for traveling is what I call airplane reading – nothing too heavy. I mean that both physically – I may have a long walk between gates and my backpack is already weighed down with my computer and camera equipment. And I also want something that’s light enough reading to let me dip in and out as I nap on the plane.

I often check out the business and science sections where I’ll find titles that might not otherwise have crossed my radar. That’s how I spotted a book on play, called appropriately enough “Play”. For a long time, whenever I referred to this book, I could never remember the author’s name. I finally tracked down my copy for the express purpose of being able to reference the author in a talk I was preparing. It was written by Stuart Brown.

Stuart Brown. How was I going to remember that?

Stuart is easy. Stuart is Stuart Little from E.B. White’s charming children’s book. And if we are thinking about children’s books, then, of course, we have Paddington Bear, and that gives you the author’s name. Not sure of the connection? Paddington Bear lived with the Browns. Hence Stuart Brown.

That’s a playful way to remember the author of a book on Play.

Stuart Brown book covers

Why Do Animals Play?
Stuart Brown is an M.D. who has studied play. In his book he posed an interesting question. Play carries with it enormous metabolic costs and genetic risks. Two horses playing mock stallion battles are not only expending a great deal of energy, they are exposing themselves to possible injury. In the wild if they miscalculate and one of them is injured, that horse could very quickly be out of the gene pool. So given this, why is play so prevalent? It’s not just people and puppies who play. You’ll find play behavior across all species of mammals.

aa Iceys play in snow 3 pictures caption

It’s not my intention here to give a detailed review of Brown’s book. The main point he was making is that regardless of the evolutionary forces that led to the prevalence of play, what we are left with is this conclusion: play is important for the development of healthy brains.

When you compare brain scans of individuals who have been play deprived with those who are living in enriched environments with many opportunities for play, you see a marked difference. Should you wish to, I’ll leave it to you to explore this in more detail. You can begin with the lighter read of Brown’s book and then move on to the work of neuroscientist and play specialist, Jaak Panksepp. And if you want even more, their books will give you plenty of additional references to explore.

The launching point for what I’ll be covering is this basic premise: play is important for healthy brains. That means it is important for our horses, and, equally, it is important for us. As I explore what play means in the context of training, I will be focusing my attention on both ends of the lead rope. I’ll be looking at what it means for both the horse and the handler to be engaging in play.

aa crackers basketball

blue bar

Part 1: Chapter 2: Animal Emotions

Bob Viviano and Crackers – Great partners who knew how to play and to share their connection with others.

Is Your Training Fun?
When we think about clicker training, we often think about play. After all, we’re often using clicker training to teach some very playful behaviors. But just because you are having your horse kick a beach ball, doesn’t necessarily mean either one of you is having fun. If you’re so caught up in the science behind the training, if you’re thinking about what the discriminative stimulus is for kicking the ball and whether you should be using a least reinforcing stimulus after that last miss, your brain may be processing the interaction in a way that’s a long way away from play.

If you’re concentrating on your handling skills, if you’re thinking about the timing of your click, and whether your hand is staying out of the treat pouch between clicks, again you may be a long way away from play. It’s easy to get so caught up in “getting things right” that play drops out of the equation. The function of these articles is to remind you that we need to keep bringing play back to the forefront of our training.

I mentioned Jaak Panksepp earlier. His work is getting a great deal of attention at the moment within the clicker community. Karen Pryor gets the credit for this. Karen Pryor is one of the very early pioneers in clicker training. Her book, “Don’t Shoot the Dog” has introduced thousands of people to this modern form of animal training. Karen wanted to know what the neuroscientists could tell us about how the click is processed in the brain. In her book, “Reaching the Animal Mind” she talked about the SEEKER system, one of the seven primary emotional states Panksepp has identified. It is the SEEKER system that Pryor attributes to the enthusiasm and – dare I say it – joy we see in our clicker-trained animals.

Animal Wise
Panksepp has been studying what was once a forbidden area in science – emotions in animals. Here’s another “airplane” book I’ll recommend, Animal Wise by Virginia Morell. Morrell begins her book with the following:

“Animals have minds. They have brains, and use them, as we do: for experiencing the world, for thinking and feeling, and for solving the problems of life every creature faces. Like us, they have personalities, moods, and emotions; they laugh and they play. Some show grief and empathy and are self-aware and very likely conscious of their actions and intents.

Not so long ago, I would have hedged these statement, because the prevailing notion held that animals are more like robotic machines, capable of responding with only simple, reflexive behaviors. And indeed there are still researchers who insist that animals are moving through life like the half dead, but those researchers are so 1950s. They’ve been left behind as a flood of new research from biologists, animal behaviorists, evolutionary and ecological biologists, comparative psychologists, cognitive ethologists, and neuroscientists sweeps away old ideas that block the exploration of animal minds. The question is now not “Do animals think?” It’s “How and what do they think?”

Hurray! Finally people are coming around to my view of animals as intelligent, very aware beings with rich emotional lives. I know this goes against strong cultural biases. But where did this notion that animals do not think come from? Why do scientists have such a horror of being accused of being anthropomorphic (attributing human mental abilities to an animal)? How can we deny the evidence we see in every interaction we have with our horses, with our cats and dogs?

Outdated Belief Systems
Morrell points out in her introduction that this idea that animals do not think or have emotions as we know them is an old one. Aristotle did not believe that animals could think rationally, but he did at least grant that they experienced physical sensations such as hunger and pain, and they could be angry.

It turns out that Aristotle represented an “enlightened” view of animals – even with all of it’s limitations. Later philosophers denied that “animals had any thoughts, emotions, or sensations and therefore we did not need to extend any moral consideration to them.” (Morrell)

Belief systems are a curious thing. There’s that wonderful line that crops up during political discussions: you wouldn’t want a little thing like facts to get in the way of a good argument. It applies here, as well. Belief systems become self supporting. We tend to attract experiences that support our belief systems. I find it beyond comprehension that anyone could deny the emotionally rich life that animals have. You have only to sit on a panicked horse who has been separated from his herd to know very directly the emotions he’s feeling!

But I suppose there will be those who would say I’m just delusional. I’m the one attracting evidence to support a faulty belief system. Perhaps. But I am no longer alone. If you want a good read, add Animal Wise to your list. Morrell has been visiting with scientists from all over the world who are doing pioneering work in the field of animal cognition. That includes the neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp.

Coming next: Part 1: Chapter 2: Animal Emotions: Affective Neuroscience

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

theclickercenter.com theclickercentercourse.com