The coming of the New Year brought a beautiful post to the clickryder list, written by Karen Willmus, mother of four, and a horse trainer in Minnesota. Karen discovered clicker training [0] in 1998, when Sunshine Books and clickertraining.com first published Alexandra Kurland's Clicker Training for Your Horse [0].

She writes:

" . . . Since then I have started 12 horses with the clicker [0] and have had wonderful results. Still, after all this time, I can't get over how my horses are always standing there, waiting for me at the gate. When I get out of the car they'll whinny for me to come play as soon as they hear my voice three barns away! I own six horses now, and they all work with me at liberty [i.e., loose with no reins or restraints]. The ponies, especially, spend a lot of time at liberty with the kids and are in their sandbox with them, climbing on the gravel pile, wading in the swimming pool, and running back and forth with the kids on their bicycles."

Dogs, after all, are house pets, so while our clicker dogs sometimes amaze us it is not too startling when they greet us, hang out with us by choice, and romp with the children. Horses, however, that are glad to see us, and work without restraints, not to mention ponies playing in the sandbox and running (safely!) alongside the children's bicycles—now that's another thought! Consider what horses have endured from their masters for millenia. The change that comes over them when they are clicker trained-the way they hand you their love and trust by the bucketful-it's quite a shock for horse owners. Almost like discovering a new species, or finding yourself in a magic kingdom.

Karen Willmus goes on to describe a recent client:

"I have to say that I still encounter massive resistance in this area with horse people when I talk about the clicker. But then there have been the people who have come to me in secret. I took a two-year old gelding from one such owner this fall for three weeks. I only got to work with him about 10 hours, no more. In that time I took him from not even leading very well to being rock-steady with tacking, mounting, backing, and moving out at a walk and a

trot. I even drilled him with the idea that I could both mount and fall off him from either side. When I was demonstrating this to his owner I plunged into a snowbank directly in his path. He immediately stopped and stood over me without batting an eye, patiently waiting for his click. His owner was in tears. She says she can't begin to describe the differences she sees in him after 10 hours with me versus '30 days' with a 'traditional' trainer. This clicker training is powerful stuff!"

Here's what I most wanted to share with you. In her New Years' Day post Karen Willmus went on to praise and encourage all the people on the Clickryder list, from beginners to 'oldtimers' with four years experience, like herself.

"To all you who are new on the list—keep it up. Keep up the questions, keep up the searching, keep up the trial and error, keep up the listening. And to all you who have been on this list as long or longer than I—a hearty thanks!! You've been answering questions faithfully, sometimes the same questions over and over, sometimes new ones, for months and years now. It's a big job...
and I'm very grateful such good people are doing it!

I monitor a lot of clicker lists. There's the horse list, a cat clicker list, the bird lists, a ton of dog clicker lists, a zoo list, and more. This year I also want to thank all the clicker lists. Thank you, list managers, for being so hard-working and generous. Thank you, everyone who posts to the lists, for your kindness, patience, endless interest and curiosity, your gifts of time and thought, your love for what we are all doing together. Thank you for your flame-free, beneficent good manners to each other. It's not just because of any one source, any one teacher, that this technology is spreading so fast. It's because of you, the list makers and the list participants. You really are changing the world, one click at a time.

Click here to find out how to join a clicker list [0].