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.

Why Clicker Training for a Horse?

Here Lexi is targeting a small buoy.
I taught her not to chew wood while being groomed.

When I first heard of using clicker training for horses, I couldn't imagine it. I've been trained traditionally, in Ireland. The natural aids: seat, hands, legs, voice. The artificial aids: whips, spurs, crops, bits/hackamores (if these all sound cruel to non-horse people, they are not. Whips are not used for whipping -- or shouldn't be -- but for gently directing the horse. A light touch of a dressage whip can ask the horse to move into piaffe or another advanced move and help keep the cadence. It's a touch, barely a tickle, not an attack or an abuse. Ditto with spurs and the other artificial aids).

When I started riding in the U.S., I learned about "natural" horsemanship, a way of working with horses that allegedly taps into their roles as fight-flight animals and our tendency to approach as predators. Simply put, when we apply pressure, horses should move away from it. When they move, we release instantly. The release helps horses realize they're on the right track. The idea is to apply feel, timing and balance to help the horse gently recognize you as a leader (an alpha mare, if you will), and gain the horse's respect and obedience. The old masters of this way of riding were incredible horsemen. Their horses were light and responsive and calm. Horse and human together looked like that mythical beast, the centaur -- half-horse, half-human, fully connected.

When I first got my own horses over here some 25 years ago, I read the books by Tom and Bill Dorrance, watched Ray Hunt in action at a clinic in a local town, and audited two or three Buck Brannaman clinics. I also cliniced with a few local "natural horsemanship" trainers and watched others put on shows at the local fair and other equine events. I realized early on there was a wide variety of ability amongst those who called themselves natural horsemanship trainers, and often people who didn't take on the label were equally effective "horse whisperers." Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that horsemanship was horsemanship, regardless of the equipment and the labels. The masters of "natural horsemanship," Tom and Bill Dorrance, Ray Hunt and Buck Brannaman, had simply found a different way to communicate with horses than the classical dressage riders like Nuno Oliveira. Ultimately the goal and end result was the same: Horses in harmony with their riders; soft, flexible, connected.

When I came back into horses after a decade away, I had lost all sense of confidence in what I knew or how to connect with horses. It's not just that my muscles were unused to the feel of a horse under me. It's that my sense of how to "talk" to horses was fragmented. I learned French as a child, living in Switzerland, but we moved to Ireland when I was eight. A few years later, I could recognize words here and there, and sometimes I could piece together a fragment of meaning, but the sense of fluency and ease I was used to was gone. Same with horses. I knew what the bridle was and knew in theory how to put it on, but everything felt awkward. I had to think through the steps, re-organize myself when the noseband got in the way and ended up in the horse's mouth along with the bit. It's been almost four years since I started riding again, and I still don't have the sense of confidence and ease that used to make riding so easy.

Still, some 40+ horses later -- some ridden only once and some ridden multiple times -- I have a better sense than I did when I first mounted Blitz and began to feel my way back to the language of horses. And now I have a new kind of dialect to add to the traditional language of horse training and the "natural horsemanship" words I learned a couple of decades ago -- clicker training.

I became intrigued with it when I went to a movie with a dog-training friend and she mentioned that she had moved to clicker training for her dogs instead of the traditional way that she had used for so many years. She loved it, and she said her dogs loved it and were always eager to "play" when she began training. More than a year later, I signed up for a few clicker training lessons with my friend's clicker trainer, Susan Signor of Dog Dilemma. My dog Muffin loved the lessons, and I loved playing with her at home. Right about that time, Lexi came into my life. When Susan heard I had a horse, she told me she would help me use clicker training to train my horse, if I was interested.

I was. But I was also dumbfounded. I couldn't imagine how to incorporate clicker training into horse training. It seemed anathema to everything I knew about horses. There is a well-established controversy in the horse world about feeding treats to horses. Some people do. Some don't. Some are adamantly opposed. I always have, although in small doses, and have never had a problem with horses learning to bite as a result, but I know others have concerns that horses can become aggressive with treats. The idea of using food rewards to train riding didn't fit with what I knew and went against what many wise horse people counseled. I also had no idea how it would work logistically from the saddle. But still, I was open, especially given how joyful my dog and my daughter's dog were when we did our clicker training sessions.

And so I embarked on our clicker/target training adventure. I don't want to drag out this essay, so I'll just say that incorporating clicker training does not mean throwing out the traditional "yield to pressure" training that helps horses learn. Once I figured that out, clicker training became conceivable in ways it hadn't been before. I still use most, or all, of the methods of training I did before, but have added the clicker and the target to help speed up Lexi's understanding of what I'm looking for. It's also just fun, because it teaches her to start making choices about behavior, thinking for herself, playing. And I'm not very good at play, for various reasons, so it's helping me, too. But more about that later.

In gratitude for new ways.