Beginning Clicker Training

Highboy is relaxing!  Today my friend who went to the track with me to pick him up even noticed how much calmer he is now that he's been at Bit of Honey for a few days.  When I am working other horses, he stands at the gate of his paddock and STARES at us, wondering what on earth I'm doing with them.  When I ride Major, my OTTB dressage horse (retired from eventing), Highboy really watches carefully trying to understand what we are doing.  This evening my friend took some video of Highboy trotting in hand away and towards her so I have a baseline video to compare as he progresses.  The video can be seen HERE

When Highboy is in the pasture in the afternoons, he spends a lot of time staring towards the house if I'm inside.  He'll graze some with Garmin the pony, but mostly he watches what is going on.  He observes the farm across the street, the alpacas down the road, the neighbor dogs come over to visit, and of course the house to see if I might come out soon.

Today I introduced clicker training to Highboy.  There is nothing special about the clicker in and of itself, it is all how you pair the sound of the click with a highly desirable treat.  This way the horse learns that the click means he did the right thing, a goodie is coming, and I can be much more precise with my praise using this sharp sound than I can even with my voice or patting.  I begin this process by standing on the opposite side of the fence so I can stay out of reach, holding a target, which in this case was a large empty laundry detergent bottle.  It doesn't matter what the target is, just something that is big enough to catch the horse's attention.  When Highboy touched it with his nose, I would pop the clicker (used in dog training and originally dolphin training) and give him a treat.  The treats are very small and frequent.  For example I've found Highboy likes carrots and candy canes, but not the regular horse cookies all the other horses like.  That may change in time, but for now I'm using a carrot chopped into tiny pieces, like thumbnail size.  So each click earns one small piece of chopped carrot, and occasionally when he does something really good he gets a "jackpot" of a whole handful. 

He figured out the target pretty quickly, and then got bored.  However he was very interested in following me around, and so I changed the program so we were playing a game of "follow the leader".  Each time he did the correct thing he got a click and a treat, and if he did the wrong thing I would completely ignore it.  By the end of our 15 min. session, spent completely at liberty with no halter or lead rope, he was calmly following me at a walk over the tires, putting his front feet on the bridge, walking next to me politely, stopping when I took a deep breath out, and trotting when I jogged.  Smart boy!  It is important to make these sessions interesting, short, and to quit when the horse is REALLY into it so he is eager to start work next time. 

For more information about clicker training you can look up the book Clicker Train Your Horse by Alexandra Kurland  HERE