Teaching your horse to line up and stand at the mounting block is a basic skill that every riding horse should be taught. Generalizing the behavior to other types of mounting blocks or objects and other locations is also a good idea. The more flexible your horse can be about where and when you mount, the safer you will be. In addition to being safer, going through the teaching process […]
If you’ve been clicker training for a while, you’ve probably discovered how useful mats (foot targets) are for training husbandry behaviors and groundwork. But, you may not realize that mats are also useful for riding. Yes, for riding. Here are some of my favorite ways to use them: I could write a detailed explanation about how to use mats for each of these applications, but then this would be a […]
Do you know how long it takes your horse to chew his food reinforcers? Does it Matter? In this blog, I am going to share some thoughts on one aspect of training with food reinforcers – chew time. This is the time it takes for the horse to consume his treat. Compared to other species like dogs and cats, horses take more time to consume their reinforcement because they don’t […]
If you’re like me, new training projects are exciting and you can’t wait to get started. I love the early stages of learning when things can change so quickly and my brain is busy with possibilities and ideas for the future. But … Whether I am training a new horse or training a new behavior, I’ve learned that it’s important to take the time to accurately assess my starting point. […]
I’ve always wanted to have an indoor training area where I could train in inclement weather and do liberty work. This summer (2022), I finally got one. We had a local builder put up a 60 foot covered round pen with a half wall around it. I hoped this would give me protection from the weather while still having an outdoors feel. So far, it’s been great. The roof provides […]
My Facebook page has been pretty quiet all summer as I’ve been doing other things. Now that the weather is changing, I’d like to wake it up a bit. This week happens to be the fourth anniversary of the publication of the paperback version of my book Teaching Horses with Positive Reinforcement. That was a milestone for me as it took a lot of effort to organize 15 years of […]
This blog post was written to accompany the podcast I did with Shelly Woods for the “Making Ripples ATA podcast show.” If you want to listen to the podcast, you can find it here. Aurora is my Oldenburg mare. I bought her in 2014 (when she was a weanling) and she spent her first 5 years with us in a big field with two equine friends. In 2020, her little […]
As the weather warms up, I’ve been thinking about horses and their drinking habits. This has prompted me to do some experimenting with offering water in different places and in different ways. This may not seem connected to clicker training, but it is – and it’s prompted me to address something that’s been in the back of my mind for years. I routinely train for long periods of time (an […]
Recently I’ve been listening to the Hidden Brain podcast. The host, Shankar Vendantam, covers a variety of topics, all with an emphasis on how our brains process information and how that affects our behavior as individuals and as groups. The range of topics is wide; everything from babies babbling to climate change. I’ve been enjoying the podcast because the underlying message is that by learning more about how our brains […]
I’m slowly putting together some additional material for the Alphabet blogs (What Can I Train? A to Z) series. In the first version, my goal was to provide ideas for specific behaviors that people could train and I covered them in varying degrees of detail. Now that I have that framework, I’d like to expand on some of the topics that I covered more generally, as well as add some […]
equine clicker training 