Everything You Need to Know About Cues
At the end of Part 1 I asked: What are ten things you would want a beginner to know about cues? That seemed like a simple enough question, but look where it has taken us – to neuroscience and the affective emotional systems, to habits and what maintains them, to TAGteaching and the focus funnel, to guide training for horses, to Feldenkrais work and asking questions, to the Premack principle and the creative use of imagery in training.
All that and we still have only three things on our list:
1.) Cues and commands are not synonyms. 2.) Cues are not just verbal signals. They can include weight shifts, hand gestures and other body language signals. 3.) Cues can come from the environment.
And now here’s number 4.) Cue Communication
Cue Communication
We tend to think of cues as coming from us, but cues can also be given by our animals. The behaviors we teach them can be turned around and used by them to communicate back to us.
When we recognize that cues are a two way street, we become much more aware of what are animals are trying to communicate to us.
Panda was the poster child for environmental cues. She can serve the same function for cue communication. Guide work is dependent upon the back and forth exchange of cues. I described earlier Panda’s traffic checks. That’s a great example both of environmental cues and cue communication. The moving car is the signal for Panda to stop and back up. Her actions cue Ann. Ann must interpret Panda’s sudden change of behavior correctly and allow her to move her out of harm’s way.
Everyday Conversations
Good training is about cue communication. It’s a two way street.
When novice trainers first encounter cues, they often think that they are something only they give. Most of us have spent time around dogs, either our own or a friend’s. We’re used to telling dogs to sit, to lie down, to come, to leave it! These are all cues (or possibly commands – depending upon how they were taught) that we’re giving to the dog.
But what about that sad-eyed look the dog is giving you that gets you to stop working on the computer, get up, walk to the coat closet, put on your jacket and your outside shoes, take the leash off the hook where it’s hanging, attach it to your dog’s collar, open the back door and take him out for a walk. That was quite the complex chain the dog set in motion just by raising his eyebrows and giving you “that look”.
He probably further cued the internal components of the chain by jumping up, wagging his tail, running to the back door, sitting quietly while you put on shoes and jacket and attached the lead.
Back and forth throughout this sequence there was a dance of cues. Some were given by you, some by the dog. It is so like talking on the phone. You have a long story to tell. What maintains the conversation? The little interjections your listener gives you that tell you she’s still on the line, still listening to you. The call hasn’t been dropped by your cell phone network, nor has she gone off to feed her horses. Without those little sounds cueing you that the connection is still active, and she’s still on the other end of the line, your story would stutter to a stop.
“Are you still there?” You may find yourself asking this as you talk on the cell phone.
“Are you still walking to the door?” Your dog wags his tail, or goes into a play bow. Yes! That just redirected the human from the kitchen back on track to the door.
We tend to think of cues as coming from us, but cues can also be given by our animals. When you live with animals, you become as much cued by their behavior as they are cued by you. We know the look our cats give us when they want to be picked up for a cuddle, when they want to be set down again, or let out, or fed. We become well-trained humans.
Animal Trainers – The Ones to Really Learn From!
I have always known how much my behavior is being cued by my animals. I know those “looks”. I have learned to interpret them and respond appropriately to them. It’s no good picking your cat up for a cuddle when what she wants is to go out. She’ll simply squirm out of your arms to repeat – louder – her cue. She knows what many people who travel in foreign countries also believe. If the foreigner doesn’t understand your language, repeat what you just said, only louder. In the cat’s case, this often works!
Cats are superb trainers. They are experts at arranging their households to their liking. If you want to learn about training – watch your cats. You don’t need to go any further to find a master trainer!
A Well-Trained Human
Cats are very good at taking the behaviors we have taught them, and turning them around to cue us. I became very aware of this when one of my cats was a small kitten. She wanted to see what I was having for breakfast and perhaps share it with me. I didn’t want to encourage this behavior, so I took advantage of her interest to teach her to sit. I followed the same procedure I had seen dog trainers use. I held a small tidbit over her head. As she looked up to see what was in my fingers, her hindquarters sank towards the floor. Click! I gave her a tiny bit of the buttered toast she was so interested in.
Two or three reps were usually enough to satisfy her curiosity. She would go off and leave me alone to enjoy my breakfast without the constant interruption of a too inquisitive paw pushing its way onto my plate.
Over the course of several days the sit began to evolve. Now we had a proper down on your rump sit. Click and treat.
One morning she added a slight paw lift. I grew that from a slight lift of her front foot into a “high five” wave. It was very cute.
And that’s when she turned the tables on me. I was in the kitchen not far from the refrigerator. She very deliberately sat down, lifted her paw and gave me my cue. It was so like the dog handlers who cue “sit” and “down” with a hand signal, only in my case the cue set in motion a much more complex chain. I walked to the refrigerator, opened the door, reached in, lifted out the tub of margarine, took off the lid, put a small dollop on the tip of my finger, reached down and let her lick it off my finger.
I had to laugh. I knew exactly what had just happened. She had turned everything around, and she was cueing me!
I also understood more clearly than I ever had before that the behaviors we teach our animals can be used by them to cue us.
The Time Has Come the Walrus Said To Talk of Many Things
“The time has come,” the walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of shoes and ships and sealing-wax
Of cabbages and kings
And why the sea is boiling hot
And whether pigs have wings.”
Lewis Carroll – Through the Looking Glass
In Chapter One of this section I shared some examples of how the environment can cue behavior. Panda, the mini I trained to be a guide, provided us with many examples of environmental cues. In the previous Chapter I showed how a combination of mats and strategic food delivery can be used to teach basic leading.
We’ll be building on that lesson is this next unit. Which means the time has come to talk about Premack, Feldenkrais work, asking questions, mats, airplane runways, needlepoint, and creativity. If you’re not sure what some of these mean or what the link is between them, read on. And yes, we will be getting back to play and our list of ten things a beginner needs to know about cues, but first let’s set the stage with a discussion of the Premack Principle.
Behaviors as Reinforcers
One of the things that quickly becomes apparent when you start turning training into play is how quickly the behaviors you teach your horse can be turned around and used as reinforcers for other things.
This is not a new understanding. In the late 1950s primatologist, David Premack developed his relativity theory of reinforcement which is better know as the Premack Principle. Simply put this means that a higher valued, more probable behavior can be used to reinforce a lesser valued, less probable behavior.
If you hate to sweep your barn aisle, but love to ride, don’t put sweeping after riding. Let riding serve as a reinforcer for sweeping up. When you finish grooming and reach for the broom before you reach for your hard hat, that puts you on a habit path that’s going to culminate not just in a great ride, but also in a love for barn chores. Clicks for you!
That’s something I discovered when I changed the sequence in which I did my barn chores. I’ve always disliked sweeping. When I was boarding my horses, it never made any sense to me that we were sweeping the barn aisle last thing at night. The only person who was going to see our beautifully swept aisle was the morning stall cleaner, and she was going to begin the day by making a mess.
It would have been much better to sweep up when we first arrived so we could enjoy the clean aisle all evening, but that wasn’t how things were done. In my own barn I sweep the aisle first and then follow that with cleaning the stalls and paddocks – something I enjoy. After the barn chores are done, I get to play with the horses. The result? I now look forward to sweeping the aisle. It’s a great way to begin my day.
Panda is “helping” me sweep my barn aisle during a visit to the barn.
The same kind of sequencing becomes important when you train your horse. Think about the order in which you ask for things. If you’ve taught a behavior well, it can serve as a reinforcer for a newer behavior you’re working on. Ideally every behavior you add into your training loops should function as a reinforcer for all the other behaviors. The result: every behavior you ask for will become something your horse enjoys doing.
That’s ideally. How can you make that a reality for the behaviors you teach your horses?
Turning Mats Into Tractor Beams
For a horse who likes to be actively doing something, what could be more tedious than standing on a mat? And yet, that’s definitely not how our eager clicker horses view mats.
Mats become like tractor beams drawing the horse in. They are where good things happen. You get treats on a mat. You get lots of attention. And when you leave one mat, you get to head off to another. More treats! Yeah!!
Mats are where good things happen.
If I teach mats well, they are a source of play not tedium. When I am first teaching mats, I keep the Premack principle very much in mind. Most horses initially view a mat as something to avoid. They will step over it, around it, slam on the brakes in front of it, anything but actually step on it.
I’ve taught mats in lots of different ways. You can freeshape stepping on a mat, but I prefer to put the horse on a lead and turn this into a more directed-learning process. The reason I do this is because it’s a great opportunity for the horse and handler to become more familiar with good rope handling techniques.
In the horse world the lead is often used as an enforcement tool. “Do what I say – or else!” If a horse pushes past the handler, the lead is there to give him a quick reprimand. The handler jerks the lead so the horse feels a sharp bump from the halter.
If a horse doesn’t back fast enough, he knows the lead will be there again swinging threateningly in his face.
That kind of expectation is not clicker compatible. We need to take the “do it or else” threat out of the lead. The lead is there to ask questions – not to tell or demand.
What does this mean – the lead is there to ask questions? One of the best ways to describe this came from a youtube video clip of Mia Segal. Segal is a Feldenkrais practitioner. Developed by Moshe Feldenkrais in the mid-1900s Feldenkrais work eases pain or restrictions to movement by increasing an individual’s awareness of small movements.
Feldenkrais Work
Unlike a massage and other manipulative therapies, Feldenkrais work is experienced through self-observation. You learn how to move with attention. You become aware of how you move; what parts of your body you mobilize to create an intended movement; how far the movement flows through your body; where it stops; where it is blocked; and what can be released to extend the movement. It is an exploration of movement in which an individual is guided via questions towards greater self-awareness and well being.
The expression “Where there is no fear or pain, learning can take place in a single lesson.” lies at the core of this training. Like many in the horse world I was first introduced to Feldenkrais work via Linda Tellington-Jones. Her TTEAM training evolved out of this work. Later I was fortunate to have a client who was an Alexander Practitioner and who had also studied the Feldenkrais work. We did trades, sharing back and forth the new things we were exploring. Through her I learned even more about the art of asking questions.
Asking Questions
Recently a friend sent me a link to a youtube clip of Mia Segal teaching a workshop (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prGxrhXDEgQ). My friend said it reminded her a lot of my work. As I watched it, I thought, she’s right. Mia Segal might have been talking about working with people, but she was describing perfectly my approach to horse training. Segal was sitting on the floor with one of the workshop participants. She was clearly in the middle of a session. Her student was lying on her back, knees up in the air, with Segal comfortably supporting her head in her hands.
Segal was talking about the first time she saw Moshe Feldenkrais working. It was 1957. After the session he asked her if she had any questions. She had so many, but she knew there were other people waiting. How could he have time for all of her questions?
Feldenkrais answered her – “If you know the question – it will take but a minute.”
The art of training is knowing the questions to ask. That is as true for our horses as it is for people.
Segal went on to say:
“Someone recently asked the question: ‘What is the difference between this work and pilates, yoga, and other physical therapies. Isn’t it all the same? So you have another method.’ And I thought the biggest difference is this is a method of questions. I don’t have answers, and I don’t want answers.
You ask a person to move in a certain way. Bend your knees to the right and you ask – ‘How is she doing it? Is it anything to do with what I feel under my hands?’
How do I feel it in my hands? How is she coming back? Does this change anything under my hands? And do it to the other side – How is she doing it, and does this feel different?
So rather than thinking – Here it stops. Here it goes. Instead I just keep putting a little question mark at the end. HOW does it go? HOW does it stop? WHERE does it stop? WHEN does it stop? Is it the same on both sides? And then I have the whole lesson.”
The Translation to Horses
When I slide down a lead to a point of contact, I am listening through my hands. And I am asking questions.
This horse and I are deep in conversation. I am asking many questions through my hands.
When I meet horses for the first time, most aren’t used to being asked anything. They expect to be ordered about. Some horses are very compliant. They have learned that the best way to stay out of trouble is to do what they’re told. They will follow the feel of a rope. They will be responsive, and light in your hands. They may even seem happy or at least content.
Light we can measure in terms of how much pressure we need to apply to get a response; how quickly the horse responds; how much weight we feel in the rope as he moves. Does he move with us, or does he hang back leaving pressure on the lead? These are all measurable.
But happy. Who knows. How do I know if you or anyone else is happy?
The “Black Box” of Emotions
How do I know if another person is happy? I may see behaviors that I associate with times when I have felt happy, but I don’t really know how anyone else feels. When you say you love your horse, I believe you. But what does that really mean? If you tell me you love your horse, but then you sell him so you can buy another horse who jumps higher, I have to believe that that word means something very different to you than it does to me.
So I can say that a horse is responsive – that’s measurable. I can describe other behaviors that I like to see – his ears are relaxed so they flop back and forth in time with his walk. Or I might see the opposite. He has his ears pinned flat, he’s grinding his teeth, and the muscles around his eyes are tight. These behaviors tell a different story. I wouldn’t say that’s a horse who is happy.
The Lead Tells A Story
Often when I first attach a lead to a horse, what I encounter is resistance and concern. Leads have been used for corrections – so the horse is defensive. He may throw his head up as I slide down the lead, or punch my hand with his mouth. He might even bite at the lead or at me. He’s telling me about his history, and I need to listen. I also need to respond in a way that doesn’t prove to him that he was right to be guarded.
The mats are going to help me. I was about to add the phrase: get past his defenses, but that’s not exactly right. That would imply that the castle walls are still there, and all I’ve done is found a way to scale them.
Instead, I want to show him that the castle walls, the moat with the sharks, the draw bridge, the boiling oil, the iron portcullis, and all the armored men lined up behind it aren’t necessary. They can all vanish, whisked away not through force, but through play. In the next installment I’ll describe a lesson that replaces castle walls with airplane runways, and you’ll see how the Premack Principle can be applied to training loops.
Coming next: The Runway
Remember, if you are new to the JOY Full Horse blog, click on the JOY Full Horses tab at the top of this page to find the full table of contents and links to each of the articles I have published so far.
I hope you will want to share these articles by sending links to this blog to your friends. But please remember this is copyrighted material. All rights are reserved. Please do not copy any of the “Joyful Horses” articles without first getting written permission from Alexandra Kurland, via theclickercenter.com
Also note: these articles are not intended as an instruction guide for introducing your horse to clicker training. If you are new to clicker training and you are looking for how-to instructions, you will find what you need at my web sites:
Spring is clinic season which means a lot of traveling for me. I haven’t been able to post anything since the beginning of April which also means some of you may have lost track of where we are in the book. At the end of Part One I asked the question: what are ten things you would want a novice trainer to know about cues? In Part Two I began to answer that question. So far my list includes:
1.) Cues are not Commands.
2.) Cues can be non-verbal.
3.) The environment can be a cue.
In the first chapter of this section on environmental cues I shared some stories about Panda, the miniature horse I trained to be a guide. Her work illustrates well the many ways in which the environment can cue behavior.
Now in this post I’ll be looking at ways we can all use environmental cues in our training.
Every Day Environmental Cues
Panda’s training shows how much inanimate objects can cue behavior. You may never ask your horse for the kind of work that is expected of a guide, but you can still make effective use of environmental cues. They can help turn a frustrating or even dangerous situation into play.
Here are a few examples:
For a horse who rushes out to turnout – even to the point of rearing if you try to slow him down – teach him to stand on a mat. Then put out a series of mats on his way out to turnout. Now instead of trying to keep things calm over the long stretch to turnout, all he has to do is walk a couple steps to the next mat – click and treat! Turn each mat into a station where he can engage in some favorite game. That takes the focus off the turnout. In fact when you do finally get to the paddock, you may find your horse doesn’t want you to leave.
“Must I go eat grass? This is so much more fun!”
For the barn-sour, herd-bound horse who doesn’t want to leave the comfort zone of his friends, hang targets at strategic points around the barnyard and along the driveway. Click and reinforce him for walking to the target.
For the horse who worries out on trails, take his toys out with him so he can play familiar games.
Combine mats with a circle of cones to teach a horse how to trot around a circle. Lay out a small circle made up of cones and one mat. Your horse will begin on the mat and end up back at the mat – click and treat. As you gradually expand the circle, he’ll understand that his job is to stay out around the the outside of the cones.
For the horse who fidgets and fusses to be groomed, hang a stationary target or give him a mat to stand on.
Mounting blocks become wonderful environmental cues. Teach your horse to bring himself over to your mounting block and line himself up so it is easy to get on. It’s not only a fun behavior to “show off”, it’s also a great way to measure how ready – or not – he is to ride.
(Note: This video features Michaela Hempen, one of my coaches for the on-line course. I almost didn’t use this video because she wasn’t wearing a hard hat. When I mentioned it to her, she said she normally wears a hard hat. She just couldn’t resist getting on. I decided to use the clip after all because it is a great example of the joy this training brings to both horses and handlers. And it also gives me an opportunity to say safety always comes first. Certainly good preparation contributes to safety, but hard hats are still important.)
These are just a few training suggestions. The more creative you are, the more playful you can be with your horse.
When you have a training challenge, instead of tackling it head on with your normal “horse training” solutions, think instead about how you might use props. If your horse has trouble turning to move out of your space, how could you use mats to help with this?
Maybe you have large cones or temporary fence posts that can be used like gates on a slalom course. How could you use them to explain the patterns you want to your horse?
If forward is an issue, teach him to retrieve, and then toss a cone out in front of his path.
If stopping is the problem, set out lots of mats. Give him a positive reason to stop. That’s a lot better than the “horse training” solutions of harsher bits and running horses into fences.
If you want your horse to get more exercise, but for some reason you can’t ride, use targets to teach your horse to go from person to person. This can easily be turned into a game Panda would say she invented and which we named after her: “Panda catch”. She “taught” us this game when she was a yearling. At thirteen she plays it with every bit as much gusto as she did then.
As you can see from this article, teaching your horse to stand quietly on a mat has many uses. What I haven’t included here are the how-to instructions for introducing your horse to mats. You can find detailed instructions for teaching this lesson in my books and DVDs and in my on-line course. Visit my web sites to learn more:
Remember, if you are new to the JOY Full Horse blog, click on the JOY Full Horses tab at the top of this page to find the full table of contents and links to each of the articles I have published so far.
I hope you will want to share these articles by sending links to this blog to your friends. But please remember this is copyrighted material. All rights are reserved. Please do not copy any of the “Joyful Horses” articles without first getting written permission from Alexandra Kurland, via theclickercenter.com
Also note: these articles are not intended as an instruction guide for introducing your horse to clicker training. If you are new to clicker training and you are looking for how-to instructions, you will find what you need at my web sites:
Number 3: The Environment can be a Cue
Chapter 1: Emotions and Environmental Triggers
My Cue Trumps Your Cue
In the previous section Panda, the miniature horse I trained to be a guide, provided us with many examples of environmental cues. Among them were curbs marking a street crossing. Moving cars are one of the many dangerous obstacles a guide has to deal with. People who aren’t familiar with guides often ask how the animal knows when a light has turned green and it’s okay to cross.
The answer is that’s not the guide’s job. The guide finds the curb and stops the handler before they get to the edge. Then the handler listens to the traffic patterns. When the handler thinks it is safe to cross, she will tell the guide to go forward. But these days with cars turning on red, and so many people riding bikes, and the new, very quiet electric cars, there are many opportunities for mistakes.
Moving cars trump go forward cues. If Ann tells Panda to go forward, but Panda sees something coming that will cut across their path, she will stand her ground and refuse to move until the vehicle has passed. If they are already crossing and a car suddenly comes towards them, she will stop quickly and back up, taking Ann out of the path of the on-coming car.
Intelligent Disobedience
When Ann asks Panda to go forward off a curb, Panda knows perfectly well what she is supposed to do. When she refuses to move, she isn’t being bad. She’s doing her job. There’s a name for this kind of response: intelligent disobedience.
When I took on the project of training Panda, this was one of the areas I was most interested in There were so many myths floating around about intelligent disobedience. Ann told me that many people believed guide dogs were especially intelligent and could do a job that ordinary dogs just wouldn’t be able to handle.
There were certainly people in the horse community who huffed and puffed when they heard about Panda. “If I were blind,” they declared, “I would never trust a horse to guide me.”
I always thought – how sad. Is that really what they think about the horses that they get on and ride? How little do they understand the amazing abilities of the horses they say they love. I would much rather think that I am entrusting my safety to an intelligent animal than one I regard as stupid.
Horses as Guides
As a herd animal, guiding made perfect sense to Panda. It was easy to teach her the basic elements. A dog might want to explore the hedgerow. That’s where the rabbits live. To a horse it makes sense to go around. By extension going around other obstacles also makes sense. And because horses do live in herds, they understand that they need to make room for the person walking next to them.
A dog is nimble and can easily handle rough footing. So can a horse, but they are very aware of where they put their feet. Looking out for rough ground makes sense to them. A broken leg from a fall is a death sentence for a horse.
Dogs are distracted by squirrels, other dogs, pigeons and lots of other things that can run or fly away. Panda has never chased a squirrel in her life. She can be distracted by grass, but as Ann has said, the grass isn’t likely to run away. It’s a much easier distraction to deal with.
Some horses are very spooky and nervous in unfamiliar settings. Panda seems to thrive on the puzzles they present. I live not far from Albany, the Capital of New York State. During the time Panda and Ann were first learning to work together, there were a lot of street repairs going on in Albany. We used to take field trips into the downtown sections where we knew the sidewalks were under construction. Every visit presented monster-sized challenges. Sometimes the entire sidewalk would be torn up, and Panda and Ann would have to work together to find a safe way through the construction zone. I never saw Panda even hesitate. She would size up the task in front of them and proceed forward. (You can see an example of one of these sidewalk hazards in the video at the top of this page.)
Panda guiding Ann safely through a construction zone.
Ambulances blasting their sirens just a few feet away, people on bicycles, busy traffic, nothing seemed to surprise or frighten her. Whatever was in front of her was just another puzzle, another opportunity to earn clicker treats, another part of the game.
Teaching Panda to guide a handler over and around obstacles was easy. It was really just a matter of supporting the good decisions she was already making. The outstanding question was would she be able to understand intelligent disobedience? Could a horse understand this concept?
Evidence in Support of Intelligent Disobedience
Before I ever started training Panda, I already had the answer to this question. Anyone who rides out has experienced some form of intelligent disobedience. There are so many stories of horses who have refused to go forward on a trail. The horse stops, feet firmly planted, his whole body clearly saying “No!”. The rider gets after him, kicking him, maybe even hitting him with a crop or the long end of the reins. The horse just plants himself even more. And then a friend’s horse catches up to them and passes them on the trail, only to find itself mired up to its belly in deep mud. Horse and rider are lucky to escape uninjured.
Of course, the first rider always feels about two inches tall. Her horse was trying to tell her the trail wasn’t safe. This is a horse who grew up free to roam over large tracks of land. He understood the signs that were in front of him. The second horse may have grown up in a small field and had never seen this kind of boggy ground before. But the first horse was trying in every way he knew how to say that it wasn’t safe to go forward, and his rider didn’t know enough to listen.
Trusting Intelligent Disobedience
Intelligent disobedience is a wonderful response to build into our horses. Panda’s training shows us we can do so deliberately. If I know that I have taught a behavior well and my horse doesn’t respond to my cues, I need to look for a reason.
Suppose I have taught my horse to come to me from the middle of the arena over to a mounting block. If he comes every time, and then suddenly one day, he hangs back, I need to look for a reason. It may be that he isn’t feeling well, and his reluctance to ride is his way of telling me. It may be that I’m in a grump of a mood, and again, he is letting me know that riding isn’t the best choice for the day. Whatever the reason, I need to listen and not simply assume that my horse is “testing me” with his disobedience. That “disobedience” could one day save my life.
Teaching Traffic Checks
Let me describe briefly how Panda’s traffic checks were taught. The lesson that I followed was given to me by Michele Pouliot. Michele has thirty plus years of experience working with guide dogs. She is currently the Director of Research and Development at Guide Dogs for the Blind where she has played a primary role in transitioning the training of their dogs to clicker training.
I don’t know if this is still how she teaches traffic checks, but these are the instructions she gave me in 2002 when I was teaching Panda this lesson.
Step 1: We began with a parked car. We walked directly toward the car. When Panda stopped in front of it, I clicked and reinforced her.
Step 2: I enlisted the help of one of my experienced clicker friends. As we approached the car, she began to drive it very, very slowly forward towards us. Panda stopped on her own, and I cued her to back up. Click and treat.
Step 3: Panda stopped and backed up without needing to be cued by me when the car went into motion. Click and treat.
Step 4: We now moved to simulated traffic checks. Still using my experienced driver, we had her wait for us in a neighbor’s driveway. (You do wonder what people looking out their windows must have thought!) I walked Panda along her familiar route. As we began to cross the driveway, my driver would pull out slowly across our path. Panda backed us up out of harm’s way.
We were essentially teaching Panda that moving cars trumped the go forward cue. If I asked her to go forward, and there were no cars or bicycles coming, she was to take me across the intersection. But if there was a vehicle in motion, she was to stop. She wouldn’t be punished for refusing to respond to a known cue. Keeping us out of the path of a car produced clicker treats.
Step 5: The traffic checks continued. We used different cars and different locations. They became increasingly more like real world situations.
Step 6: Once Panda was paired up with Ann, we went through the whole process again, making sure that the behavior was solid now that the possibility of real traffic checks existed.
Testing the Training – How Strong are your Habits?
Panda was so good at these checks I wanted to get them on film. Our usual driver wasn’t available so we enlisted the help of Ann’s husband. We gave him the instructions. He was to wait for us in a neighbor’s driveway and, as Ann approached with Panda, he was to pull out in front of them.
That was fine. He knew how traffic checks worked. The one part of the instructions we forgot to tell him was we only needed one or two traffic checks. After that he could go home, and we’d keep walking. Since we left that part out, at every driveway and parking lot intersection along our route – there he was.
Later when we watched the video, we thought we should have the sound track from Jaws playing in the background. There was the gold van stalking Ann and Panda yet again! Ann was taking her usual route heading for the barn. It’s a long walk, and that day we all learned just how many driveways there are between her house and the barn! (You can see one of the many of these traffic checks in the video at the top of this page.)
All of these traffic checks served them well. Prior to pairing up with Panda, Ann had had two guide dogs who both failed to stay in work. They were both very distracted by other dogs, squirrels, really anything that moved.
Crossing streets was always a white-knuckled affair. Ann would get to the barn with horror stories about missed curbs and missed traffic checks. Neither of these dogs should ever have been passed by the school that trained them, but they were hoping that an experienced handler like Ann would be able to manage them. In both cases they had to be returned to the school and re-homed into other careers. I think both went on to be police dogs, work they were much more temperamentally suited to.
Ann’s experience with Panda was completely different. Dogs were something you ignored. And traffic checks – for Panda they were like playing a video game where you’ve reached master level. Ann would get to the barn laughing, telling me about that day’s adventures. For well over a year the high school she walked past on her way to the barn had been under construction. Every day there was some new challenge for them. One day there would be a sidewalk for them to navigate along. The next day it would be gone. All that was left would be a gaping hole and piles of rubble.
This once familiar landscape has been transformed by construction, but Panda still manages to find a safe route.
Traffic checks didn’t just mean avoiding cars, school buses and the high school track team out for the day’s run. It now included encounters with heavy construction vehicles and bulldozers. Panda had to watch out for traffic and figure out how to find a route across a parking lot that was completely transformed. This was nothing like the tidy sidewalks and suburban side streets she had trained over. All those trips into Albany paid off here.
Saying “No”
I’m writing about intelligent disobedience because this is something we need to be more aware of in our training. I wish our big horses could have the same freedom to say no that Panda does. If we’re going to ride a horse, he should be able to say no, not today. If we’re going to jump a horse, or ride him over uncertain ground, we need to trust those times when he slams on the brakes and says not there.You may not see the slick ground or smell the grizzly bear, but I can.
If I have taught well, my horse will understand what I want. If I have taught well, my horse will want to do what I ask. If he says no, I need to trust that he is aware of something I have missed. Instead of forcing him to comply, I need to find out what that is. If I believe that horses are intelligent animals, it makes sense to acknowledge that intelligence and let it be expressed through the training. It makes sense to use their senses to help keep us both safe.
The importance of Panda is not that horses can serve as guides, but that it is okay for a horse to say no.
Coming next: What About Mistakes? When is it okay for us to say no? Panda has some things to teach us about that, as well.
Also, there is an excellent children’s book that was written about Panda: Panda: A Guide for Ann by Rosanna Hansen with photographs by Neil Soderstrom, published by Boyd Mills Press 2005.
Remember, if you are new to the JOY Full Horse blog, click on the JOY Full Horses tab at the top of this page to find the full table of contents and links to each of the articles I have published so far.
I hope you will want to share these articles by sending links to this blog to your friends. But please remember this is copyrighted material. All rights are reserved. Please do not copy any of the “Joyful Horses” articles without first getting written permission from Alexandra Kurland, via theclickercenter.com
Also note: these articles are not intended as an instruction guide for introducing your horse to clicker training. If you are new to clicker training and you are looking for how-to instructions, you will find what you need at my web sites:
Number 3: The Environment can be a Cue
Chapter 1: Emotions and Environmental Triggers
The previous section began a discussion of environmental cues.
Panda, the miniature horse I trained to be a guide, provides us with lots of examples of environmental cues. In this photo there’s no real curb to mark where the sidewalk ends and the driveway begins, but Panda has stopped exactly where she should. This section of their daily walk had been under construction for months. Every day the landscape was different. In this photo the pavement has been newly patched. The appearance of the intersection has changed dramatically from it’s previous state, but Panda still knows what to do at this intersection.
Looking ahead to the opposite side of the driveway we see another place where the environment will cue a stop. Stopping at the far side of the driveway helps her blind handler stay oriented. The stop on the up-curb side of the driveway lets her know when they have come to the beginning of the next section of sidewalk.
The sidewalk itself is another environmental cue, one which overrides the pull of the grass to the side. Panda will guide her handler straight along the sidewalk to the next curb crossing. There are lots of cues being exchanged between Panda and her handler, but it is Panda’s responsibility to respond correctly to the environmental cues which her handler cannot see, and to alert her to any changes or obstacles in their path.
I ended the previous installment by promising you some more Panda stories and here they are:
Goose Neck Trailers
I can’t resist telling one of my favorite Panda stories. When Panda was first being paired up with Ann, we spent a day at the Equine Affaire, a giant horse expo and trade show that is held every year in western Massachusetts. It’s a wonderful place to take a guide-in-training. The concentration of challenging obstacles is a trainer’s delight. We had loading ramps that could substitute for railway platforms, and garage doors that gave us lots of practice with overhead obstacles, not to mention the crowds of people in the trade show to navigate through.
Panda handled it all with ease. Late in the day as we were walking through the back parking lot area, we passed a goose neck trailer that was parked alongside the sidewalk. I decided to put Panda through one more challenge. I instructed Ann to stop at this point and cross the street. This would take them directly under the front of the trailer.
The goose neck portion was right at forehead-hitting height, but I had no worries. Of course, Panda would stop. Except she didn’t. I was about to cry out an alarm. It looked as though Panda was going to crash Ann straight into trailer. But before I could get the words out to say STOP! Panda slammed on the brakes, looked up at the trailer hitch and hastily backed Ann away.
The double take she did was priceless. It was as if she was saying: “Where did that come from! How could I have missed that?!”
It reminded me of those times when I’m driving, and I’ve been so focused on the road ahead that I have completely failed to see a car coming up alongside me. “How could I have missed that!?” I’ll exclaim as the car comes into view. I could sympathize with Panda’s surprised reaction to the goose neck.
Now for Panda the goose neck trailer was not a hazard. She could easily fit under the hitch, but Ann would most certainly have hit her head. When Panda looked up, it was clear to me that she had seen the overhead obstacle and was backing up to avoid it.
Every class of obstacle requires a different type of response. Find an empty chair means Panda scans the available seats and takes Ann to an empty one. She alerts her to the presence of the chair by putting her nose on it.
For doors Panda finds the door and then orients her body sideways towards it so it is easy for Ann to reach out and find the handle.
A Trainer’s Play Ground
Stairs present a special hazard. It’s important that the handler understands that the guide is stopping at a flight of stairs and not at a single curb. Towards the end of Panda’s training we spent a fun day practicing stairs during a visit to Albany, the capital of New York State.
A photo of the Empire State Plaza taken from the steps of the State Museum. The State Capital is straight ahead. To the right is The Egg, the Center for Performing Arts.
We turned the state plaza into our personal playground. We were in a huge concourse that serves as a public park. Underneath the plaza is a maze of offices and shops. At one end is the state library and museum. At the other end the State Capital.
The State Museum with its imposing flight of steps leading up to the entrance.
The State Capital Building at stands at the opposite end of the Concourse
These are beautiful buildings, but we were not there for the sight seeing. The plaza provided us with a wonderful array of training obstacles. There were stairs everywhere – stairs going up, stairs going down, stairs in all sorts of unexpected places.
Ann wasn’t familiar with the area, so she never knew for certain what was coming up next. I was having a grand time directing her towards every unexpected obstacle I could find, the more challenging, the better. If you’re given a playground, you should play in it!
Stairs cue a distinct set of responses from Panda. When she comes to a set of stairs, she will stop before the first step. At this point Ann will not know what is in front of them. She will tell Panda to go forward. In response Panda will put one foot on the first step – either up or down – and again stop. She will not go forward until Ann has also placed her foot on the step and given her the verbal cue to go. Panda is not to proceed until both of these things have happened. It’s important that Ann not only knows there’s a set of stairs in front of her, but that she also has time to prepare herself for them. Panda is not to go forward until Ann tells her she’s ready.
I think we found every set of stairs in the concourse that day, including the long flight that takes you up to the State Library. I especially liked pointing Ann and Panda towards the stairs that led down into the underground concourse. Up stairs are more expected. It’s the ones that took them down below the Plaza that really tested them as a team.
The Herd Horse Advantage
Pedestrians, bikes in motion, dogs being walked, baby carriages, parked cars are all obstacles that cue specific responses. One of the things that I most enjoy is watching Panda maneuver Ann through a crowd of people. I will sometimes position myself far enough ahead so that I can see Panda and Ann approaching.
Panda will be scanning what is in front of her. You can see her eyes moving, taking in all the activity that’s coming up. She’ll make little course adjustments so there is never a collision. As a herd animal, she is superb at being able to judge where she is going to be relative to people who are moving towards her from the opposite direction. The course corrections are seamless. The only ones swerving abruptly are the people doing double takes when they realize what has just passed them!
Coming Next: Intelligent Disobedience This is the name given for those times when a guide does not respond to a cue the handler has given, but instead responds to environmental cues. It might be ignoring the cue to go forward and instead backing up out of the path of an approaching car. Intelligent disobedience is an important part of every guide’s training. It is also something we would do well to be aware of in the training of our full-sized horses.
Remember, if you are new to the JOY Full Horse blog, click on the JOY Full Horses tab at the top of this page to find the full table of contents and links to each of the articles I have published so far.
I hope you will want to share these articles by sending links to this blog to your friends. But please remember this is copyrighted material. All rights are reserved. Please do not copy any of the “Joyful Horses” articles without first getting written permission from Alexandra Kurland, via theclickercenter.com
Also note: these articles are not intended as an instruction guide for introducing your horse to clicker training. If you are new to clicker training and you are looking for how-to instructions, you will find what you need at my web sites:
Today’s installment begins a new unit. So far in my list of ten things you should know about cues I have: 1.) Cues are not commands. 2.) Cues can be non-verbal
This brings us to:
Number 3: The Environment is a Cue
This mini is a guide horse for the blind. She’s just done a beautiful stop at the curb, and now she’s guiding her handler across the entrance to a busy parking lot. Just to add to the complexity of the task, the parking lot is under construction.
Chapter 1: Emotions and Environmental Triggers
Environmental Cues
We seem to have wandered a long way from the ten things I would want a beginner to know about cues. So let me pull us back to that list for a moment.
Beginners tend to think of cues as something they present to the animal, but cues can also come from inanimate objects. In fact much more than we may be aware of these environmental cues move us through our day from one habit pattern to the next.
Many of us have experienced this with our horses. If you work in an arena, you may have found that there is one corner where your horse’s balance makes it easiest to ask for a canter. Maybe you’re starting a youngster, so setting up the canter out of the short side makes sense. He pops up nicely into the canter which is reinforcing for both of you. It gets easier and easier to ask for the canter out of that corner, except now, even when you aren’t wanting to canter, that’s what he’s offering. That corner has become the cue, not your riding aids.
We often experience the same thing riding out. The stretch of trail where the path widens out into a gently rising slope over good footing just invites a canter. Both you and your horse enjoy a good run up the hill. You don’t even notice that the trail has taken over control of your horse – until you are riding out with a friend who is on a young horse that she doesn’t yet want to canter. You get to the bottom of that hill, and your horse is off and running – following instructions that you helped to write.
Here’s the mantra to remember:
“Never make your horse wrong for something you have taught him.”
Punishing the canter isn’t the solution. That may squash the behavior for the moment, but it will have fallout. For one thing punishment takes you a long way from play. You may stop the canter in that moment, but the damage you do to your relationship is a price you may not want to pay.
In a later section I’ll describe how you can manage these environmental cues by teaching cues in pairs. But before I get to the solution to the problem, let’s first dig down a little deeper to see how environmental cues work.
Guide Horses
The “Equine Poster Child” for environmental cues is Panda, the miniature horse I trained to be a guide for her blind owner, Ann Edie.
Guide work is dependent upon environmental cues. It’s the job of the guide to spot changes in elevation, overhead obstacles, moving cars, other pedestrians; to find the door, the stairs, an empty chair; and to point out designated landmarks that the blind handler uses to navigate, such as driveways and street crossings.
The different triggers elicit different responses. When Panda spots a section of sidewalk that’s been pushed up by a tree root and that might trip her person, she stops and waits for her handler to find it.
As Panda approaches a street crossing where there is no raised curb, she will pull her handler to the left hand edge of the sidewalk.
At the opposite side of the street if she encounters a raised curb, Panda will stop and tap the curb with her hoof.
Out in the country where there is no sidewalk to follow, Panda will follow the curve of the road past a street crossing and then stop. She will not go directly across or stop as she might at a driveway. Following the curve of the corner lets her handler know that they have come to an intersection.
At street corners with traffic lights, her handler will direct Panda to “find the button”, and Panda will take her to the pole with the pedestrian crossing signals.
If they encounter an overhead obstacle such as a tree branch weighed down with snow that her handler won’t fit under, Panda will stop and look up. The movement tells her handler what sort of obstacle is in front of them.
Coming next: More Panda stories.
Even when the familiar environmental cues are obscured by construction, Panda still finds the way from curb to curb.
Also, there is an excellent children’s book that was written about Panda: Panda: A Guide for Ann written by Rosanna Hansen with photographs by Neil Soderstrom, published by Boyd Mills Press 2005.
Remember, if you are new to the JOY Full Horse blog, click on the JOY Full Horses tab at the top of this page to find the full table of contents and links to each of the articles I have published so far.
I hope you will want to share these articles by sending links to this blog to your friends. But please remember this is copyrighted material. All rights are reserved. Please do not copy any of the “Joyful Horses” articles without first getting written permission from Alexandra Kurland, via theclickercenter.com
Also note: these articles are not intended as an instruction guide for introducing your horse to clicker training. If you are new to clicker training and you are looking for how-to instructions, you will find what you need at my web sites:
The Clicker Center Blog 