Category: Critters Other Than Dogs ¤
  Author: Alexandra Kurland ¤
   Title: Teaching Horses Tricks ¤

The following question was posted to the list:

"I am rather new to clicker training.  I am now clicker 
training my horse to do some tricks.  I now have a 
problem and I hope to get some good advice.  

"I started off by teaching him to touch my shoulder.  
Then I taught him to take a baseball cap off my head with 
his mouth.  Now I am trying to teach him to touch a target 
stick with his muzzle.  
The problem is that since I started off by teaching him to 
touch me and then to take a hold of the baseball cap with his 
teeth, he is now muzzling on me during our training sessions 
and taking a hold of my clothes with his lips.

"What can I do to make sure he doesn't hurt me by mistake?  
I assume that I should have started with the target stick, but 
the harm is already done.  Will I regret teaching him these 
tricks and will I have to stop the clicker training or is 
there a way to ensure my safety?"  Alva Gronqvist

	Alva is learning the hard way that trick training for horses should
come with warning labels attached.  Tricks are a great way to introduce
dogs to the clicker, but with horses I think you should begin with basic
handling skills.  That way you are reinforcing good manners and safety
issues even while your horse is learning the clicker game.   I recommend
teaching horses tricks AFTER you have learned how to bring behavior
under stimulus control.  Without that tricks can very quickly become
dangerous behaviors as Alva is already discovering.
	
 Horses get very eager to perform the behaviors they’ve learned.  
Before you teach your horse to “count” or to shake its head “yes”, you
want to ask yourself: is this behavior I really want?   Do I really want
to teach my horse to rear or to lie down?  Will I be able to control the
behavior once I have it?  What is a cute behavior for a dog, can easily
become a dangerous behavior in a horse.

	Clicker trained horses are eager to work.  If you start teaching tricks
before you have established a good working relationship, you can lose
control of your horse.  Tricks don’t always follow the same rules of
respecting space that other training exercises do.   Enthusiasm is a
good thing, so long as basic manners are solidly in place first.

	This doesn't mean that you have to give up clicker training.  Quite the
contrary.  What I would recommend is that you go back to the beginning
and reintroduce your horse to the clicker.  To do this you're going to
teach him another "trick" only this one has real practical value. 
You're going to teach him to touch a target.

	To do this you're going to put him in a stall with a stall guard across
the front.  (I've described this technique elsewhere.  You can look in
the Spring issue of the Clicker Journal for full details.)  The stall
guard lets him interact with you, but it also keeps you safe.  If he
starts to nuzzle you, you can step back out of reach.  Once he
understands that touching the target earns him treats, you can add some
other pieces to his clicker training repetroire.  Have him follow the
target to the ground.  Then ask him to drop his head by placing your
hand on his poll.  Whenever he drops his head even a little, click, take
your hand away, and give him a treat.  Gradually fade ouit the target
and have him drop his head from just the pressure on his poll.

	Once he's dropping his head all the way to the ground and leaving it
there from just a light touch of your hand, ask him to drop it when you
put light pressure on his halter.  What you are building is a calm down
cue.  You are also beginning to solve the mugging problems that were
developing from the tricks you taught him.  He can't take your hat off
and have his nose on the ground at the same time.  

	Next teach him to back up.  You can do this in a variety of ways, and
the more different ways you find to teach the same behavior the better. 
Here are a couple easy ways to get you started.  Tap the front of his
legs with a dressage whip.  The instant he even shifts his weight back,
stop tapping, click and give him a treat.  Repeat this, but ask for a
little more of a shift back each time.    He'll soon be taking a full
step back, then two, then three.  

	You'll be using the whip as a "starter button", not a "constant on"
signal.  You want it to say to the horse "get your feet in motion."  As
soon as he starts to move, stop tapping with the whip.  If he stops, you
can tap him again.  You want him to learn that he's to keep going
without your having to keep after him all the time with the whip. 
That's the same way you'd want to use your leg under saddle.  So you may
think you're just giving your horse a basic leading lesson, but you're
really refining his response to your riding aids.   The beauty of all
this is he can be a young unbroke horse and still be having a riding
lesson.

	Another way to get him to back is to hold your lead over the bridge of
his nose.  The normal response of horses is to push into pressure. 
Steady your hands if he pushes against the rope and release the instant
he softens even a little.  Click him in the same instant that you
release the rope.

	Repeat this until he is backing easily from just a light touch of the
rope.  You'll be imporving his leading, lunging and riding all at the
same time with this simple exercise.  Instead of boring into the bridle
or his halter when he feels pressure, he'll soften his entire front
end.  You can do a similar thing with a neck rope.  Just loop (do not
tie) the rope around his neck and ask him to back from the pressure he
feels at the base of his neck.  (This is also a useful exercise for dogs
who pull.)  

	Once you've got this you're well on your way to building a polite
horse.  You should work on other leading skills.  Teach him to come
forward from behind and to step sideways out of your space.   Good
references for this are John Lyons' work (see: his new magazine "The
Perfect Horse" and his videos) and Pat Parelli's video the Seven Games
of Natural Horsemanship.  Just add the clicker to their lessons and
you'll have oustanding results.

	While you're doing all this you can also be learning how to bring a
behavior under stimulus control.  Go back to the original exercise of
teaching your horse to touch a target.  You have the behavior, so now
you're going to bring it under stimulus control.  This means that you
want the behavior to occur every time you give the cue, but you also
don't want it to occur in the absence of the cue.

	This is the hard part of clicker training.  Many of us are very good at
getting behaviors to happen.  Getting them on cue is another matter.  

	Hold the target up infront of your horse.  You know the horse is going
to touch the target so 
now you say "touch" just before he starts to move towards it.  This is
the easy part of the process.  The hard part is teaching him to wait
until he hears the cue.  Hold the target up, but don't say anything. 
Your horse has been reinforced consistently for touching the target. 
You've put it on a variable reinforcement schedule so he know to keep
trying.  Of course he's going to touch the target this time.  Your job
is to resist the temptation to reinforce him for his efforts and wait
for the behavior to extinguish and then to say "touch".  The reason this
can be so hard is your horse will often offer some of the best behavior
you've seen in an effort to get you, the vending machine, to work.  He's
going through an extinction burst, but if you want to bring the behavior
under stimulus control, you have to keep your finger off the clicker.  

	Where do you go from here?  Let your horse tell you.  Maybe he doesn't
pick his feet up very well, or he's hard to bridle.  Start with basic
barn manners like these that are easy to chunk down into small steps. 
As you learn more about clicker training, you'll see endless
applications for it. 

	The important thing is not to give up on clicker training just because
you've hit a snag.  It takes time to learn anything new, and we're all
going to stumble around at times trying to figure out what we're doing. 
The beauty of clicker training is its so flexible and forgiving.  You
always get more of what you reinforce.  So if you reinforced close
contact yesterday, don't worry about it.  Now you're going to reinforce
polite manners, and that's what you'll have.  

	Best of luck with this.  You're off to a better start than you know.


	Alexandra Kurland
	Kurlanda@crisny.org
	Http://www.crisny.org/users/kurlanda