Playground Play and Posing with Lexi

Goal accomplished: Lexi stands quietly while I
take a picture on the way back from our ride.

With these snowy conditions, I haven't been able to do much riding, but I have been able to work on small projects with Lexi that might otherwise get designated to another day. One of my goals has been to work with her on stopping and standing when we're out in the orchards. She likes going out and has a nice forward walk for a small horse, but she doesn't like to stop and stand. I've tried to convince her that if she would just hang out beneath an apple tree she'll be well rewarded, but she hasn't been convinced. And in Kevin's "playground," a part of the farm that's dedicated to fun, she gets anxious. It's a lovely spot with a small pond (though not one we can take the horses into) and some flat and hilly ground for galloping and lots of little logs for jumping. In the summer there's a water complex too, but it's full of snow today as is the playground in general. Every time we got out there, she wants to take off, which would be fine if there weren't gopher holes hiding under the snow and the potential for slipping. So my goal has been to get her listening even when she's feeling spicy.

The challenge with clicker-training Lexi in particular is that she's not food-motivated when she's tense. She has broadened her view of acceptable treats, but until two days ago I could rarely get her to eat one when we were out. When she did, she usually gobbled it down while she tried to charge off or held it in her mouth as she stared at whatever goblin might be up ahead. 

But we've been doing a lot of click/treating while walking out in the snow the past couple of weeks, and two days ago we ventured into the playground and walked around the pond and up the hill past the cross-country jumps that usually get her wired up. As usual she would start getting high-headed and "looky," but this time I asked her to walk figure-eights on the ground around me, then disengage her hind quarters, with plenty of clicking and treating for a quiet response. And pretty soon she was offering me behaviors. What if I drop my head to the snow? Click/treat. What if I stand quietly with my ears pricked? Click/treat. What if I touch this log? Click/treat. And so on.

And yesterday we rode out in the orchards and for the first time she stopped to take treats quietly and appeared to be trying to sort out what behaviors might get her a click/treat. What if I walk faster? Drop my head at the walk? Stretch my nose forward? How about a trot transition? The beauty of the click is that the response to what she's doing is immediate. She gets instant feedback. "Yes, that's a lovely walk." "Yes, rounding your neck and lifting your back is absolutely the right thing to do." And so she does it again. And again. And if I respond with perfect timing (hah!), theoretically I could make rapid progress towards whatever my goal is. 

The challenge for me is sorting it all out. Clicker training teaches mindfulness, because it's very easy to miss a clickable moment, or worse, to click the wrong thing because you're a split second late. So, for example, when tied for grooming, Lexi has her little buoy to target as I'm grooming. She has a small repertoire of behaviors which I'm working to "microshape." That is, I want to take her from touching the buoy with her nose stretched out and her neck flat and change her "shape" to an arched neck, her weight balanced and slightly rocked back so that she lifts her back at the halt. It's something Alexander Kurland calls "the pose."* We've been working on the pose over the last few days and today, as I was grooming her, I had her standing closer to the buoy, her neck lifted and her head more perpendicular to the ground than it has been, as well as her ears pricked. I was working to click her only when she gave me a more attractive look as she touched the buoy, a step closer to the pose (I'm not asking for the finished product. It's too soon!) If you were watching, you would have seen her moving her head quite a bit. What if I touch the snow? No? OK, how about wiggling my lips on the buoy? No? What about looking out across the distance with my ears pricked, with my nose almost on the buoy? Click/treat. Hurray! OK, what about pricking my ears with my nose on the buoy. Click/treat. Yeah!!!!! 

And so on. But if I mistime the click, I'm clicking her for turning her head towards me, or for pinning an ear, or for taking a bite out of the buoy, so I have to be absolutely mindful in order to click at the right moment. I don't always get it right and that's why it's a slow process, but it's always fixable. If something isn't working, I just go back to the previous step. 

Next up: Using play, and fixing as I go.

*Make sure to watch this video by Alexandra Kurland to see what "The Pose" will lead to (I hope) as my work with Lexi progresses.

And then I messed up....

Image taken from Alexandra Kurland's
Clicker Training Your Horse

Last weekend, I took Lexi to my friend's place for another lesson. She was reluctant to load again, and it may be she'll just be one of these horses who doesn't like to ride in the trailer. I hope as she gains experience she'll become more and more reliable about loading, but for the moment she's still somewhat iffy. Still, I was happy with how a little ground and target work got her in the trailer, and she rode with some restlessness but no explosions out to our destination about 50 minutes away.

Then we got there, and I messed up. I had tied her slightly differently than before, deciding to use a short quick-release trailer tie. When I unhooked it, I didn't do it properly and she ended up getting a bump on the way out of the trailer when her lead rope got caught up. Being Lexi, she panicked, pulled back and fell. Again. The last time it happened she panicked because the butt bar terrified her, but this time it was my fault. I wanted to harangue myself for not making sure everything was perfect, but there's no point, especially with horses. I had to just move forward, knowing I was likely going to have a problem to fix later on.

She got up and I checked her over and then we went for a quiet walk and started some clicker-training "long line" work (I'll explain it in another post), and she was excellent the rest of the day, including a fairly relaxed dressage lesson despite the howling wind and the presence of the ever-terrifying piebald calf and his Great Pyrenees dog best friend.

But then I went to load her. And she said no. And no again. And so an hour later there we were, working on loading in a howling gale while occasional drops of icy rain spat out of an ominous sky. I kept in mind Alexander Kurland's story of her horse, Peregrine, who has never learned to be totally comfortable in a trailer. (I was binge-reading her blog a while ago and I'm pretty sure she was talking about Peregrine when she mentioned a horse whom she always needed to work on the ground a little before asking to enter the trailer. He was never totally comfortable with just walking in.) Anyway, I watched Lexi carefully as I worked to combine the little bit of clicker training I knew with traditional work. Away from the trailer I asked for slow lateral work at a walk and slow trot. Close to the trailer I let her relax. When she put her feet on the ramp, theoretically I could click/treat her to help increase her desire to continue into the trailer, but Lexi won't eat when she's stressed, so I had to move back towards more traditional methods, which was to let her rest on the ramp, and then ask her to back up and go to work when away from the ramp.

Eventually I saw her turn her head towards the trailer every time she passed it, her ears indicating she wanted to be in it. But she could only stay on the ramp (or in the trailer as she gained confidence), a second or two before her anxiety got the better of her. I worked hard to anticipate how long she could tolerate being in the trailer, using Kurland's "Four Second Rule," which says that if the horse can handle something for four seconds, click/treat in three. Since Lexi won't eat when she's stressed, I couldn't really use clicker training to reinforce her, so instead I would simply ask her to back out of the trailer before I thought she was going to leave herself. Once out, we'd do a little slow work, and if she turned her ears towards the trailer, I'd invite her to load. Eventually she was walking all the way in, and finally she stood quietly while I fastened the butt bar. The drive home was quiet, and she unloaded well at the other end.

Clearly I need to work more on all the ground work we're doing, but I feel OK about how things went. Safety and relaxation are my goals. Lexi wasn't relaxed about the trailer at first, but she was safe and not panicky, and our work was slow and quiet, which helped her to maintain her sanity.

I love what Kurland says in the image above, which I took from her book, Clicker Training for Your Horse, an excellent book to jump start your clicker training adventures: "Any time you think you have all the answers, some horse will come along to tell you that you don't. You can never stop learning and evolving. The key to good training is to always be looking for new ideas to add into the mix." I know I used to think teaching horses to load was pretty straightforward. Not with Lexi -- in part because of my own mistakes. But it's a perfect opportunity for growth and new learning.

In gratitude for learning.