Horses

"He's surprised, did you see that?" I said, laughing, to the watching people. It's easy to startle a horse; but this was not alarm: this was just pure amazement. That expression told me two things: first, he thoroughly understood the game we were playing. Second, in his past experience, things usually just went on and on getting worse, not better. What I wanted to do was to pat Bad Bob (which at present he would probably hate) or throw my arms around his neck, or give him a month's supply of alfalfa pellets. What I did was smile, and pay him his treat. Poor thing. Maybe Festina Lente will turn out to be a better place for you.

You can also begin to incorporate the clicker into your horse's regular training. Indy, a six year old half arabian gelding came to me in June for training. He was a kind, beautifully-mannered horse. His owner/breeder had never had time to saddle-break him, so at six he had a lot of catching up to do. During the worst of the summer heat when the temperature was creeping towards 100 and neither of us wanted to work hard, I introduced him to the clicker. He was slow to catch on. It took three sessions before he finally got the connection between touching the cone and getting grain. After that there was no stopping him. He became an enthusiastic over-achiever. He needed only minutes to shift from touching one cone to touching a whole circle of cones. (Figs. 7a, 7b).

So how do you actually begin to teach this to a horse? I start by teaching a simple trick. My intent here is to condition the secondary reinforcer and to establish the link between behavior and reward. I'll worry about practical applications after he's learned how the game is played.

I like to start with something that's very simple and easy to understand. I'm going to teach the horse to touch his nose to an object. I've found this works really well in part because it is outside the horse's normal training program. It's so different from anything else he's been asked to do, he has to pay attention to figure me out.