Month: June 2023

Equine Therapy – you don’t have to sit on me

Most equine assisted therapy programs have a riding component. Did you know they also ride donkeys and mules, not just horses.

Did you know that donkeys are even better suited to non ridden therapy than horses, due to their very curious, friendly and sociable nature? They also love scratches, brushing and massage and of course they love being trained with Positive Reinforcement (clicker) training!

Did you also know that most therapy programs utilise Natural Horsemanship, or some type of pressure and release training (Negative Reinforcement)? That means they are pressuring, coercing or forcing the equine to participate. Do they pressure, coerce or force clients to participate in activities? I don’t think so, yet it’s ok to do it to the equine.

The rights and welfare of animals in service or therapy roles should be equal to a human’s rights and welfare. If you’re not going to do it to the client, don’t do it to the horse, or donkey or mule or dog or cat or rabbit or chicken.

Clicker Training – don’t rush

hen you start clicker training, take your time. Don’t be in a rush, enjoy the journey.

There’s so much to learn AND to enjoy and if you rush, you’ll miss that enjoyment and that learning.

If you rush, you’ll also skip the opportunity to really refine what you are doing. R+ training is an art, as well as a science, don’t let anyone tell you it isn’t.

It isn’t manipulative or coercive, it’s organic and beautiful, if you allow it to be and allow yourself to see and feel it.

It isn’t slow and it doesn’t take longer. Behaviour can change in less than a second. If you rush you will miss it and miss the opportunity to recognise and change it, if you want.

R+ training is also an opportunity for personal growth, to become a better person, as well as a better trainer. With R+ training comes empathy and compassion, if you allow it.

You can also develop your focus, observation and learn how to be in the moment. That’s probably one of the most important lessons that I see a lot of people need to learn, how to be in the moment. You cannot connect with another, if you are stuck in your head, in your shopping lists, arguments with your partner, ‘to do’ lists, in your anxiety, in your bias, in your pressure to perform.

Release yourself from it for a short period of time, give yourself that grace and your animal friend as well. Give them that respect, that courtesy and watch them respond in like. They will open up to you, if you are open to them.

If you are taking a lot of video of your training, reduce or stop that for a while. Don’t put that extra pressure on yourself, that extra pair of eyes on the delicate silken thread of communication and trust you are trying to build between you and your animal friend. Let it be just between yourselves for a while, just the two of you, together as one, in heart and mind, just for a brief moment in time.

Try to avoid perfectionism. As in art, there is no perfect, there is only expression. We say about our animal friends, behaviour is never “wrong” or “right”, it just is, give yourself that same forgiveness and compassion as well. You risk never starting or continuing, if you want it to be perfect. Perhaps aim for fun instead. It can be fun to be goofy, to drop things or trip, to mis-time things and to make mistakes, it’s all fun for both of you, if there’s food and no pressure.

Starting R+ training slowly and mindfully and being more compassionate to yourself and your learner, is more rewarding and pleasurable than rushing or trying to be perfect and all knowing. 🧡

Separation Anxiety – what not to do

Separation Anxiety, also known as Buddy Sour, Barn Sour, Herd Bound, is not a vice. It’s not something to punish or ignore, or worse, keep them alone to prevent the unwanted behaviour. Doing that makes their worse nightmare become a reality and then they live it day in, day out, in lonely misery.

I had a gorgeous little pony called Grace once upon a time. She used to live at a riding school, but could only be ridden by one person and just barely. She was a traumatised and deeply troubled pony with endless hoof problems and abscessing from previous laminitis and she also had severe Separation Anxiety. They would lock her in a stable when she “carried on” when her friends were taken away to be ridden.

I asked if she could come and stay with me to keep my new horse company and they let me take her. She was such a gift and I miss her a lot, especially as she was a little clicker training star.

I spent a lot of time, effort and love on helping her overcome her Separation Anxiety. It took the time it took to overcome the trauma of her being locked up away from her friends.

All I can say, absolutely ignore advice that seems to work against the horse or tries to change the horse’s feeling of wanting to be with other horses. Or worse yet, advice that tells you to lock them up and let them freak out, struggle, fight and paw a hole in the ground until they give up in sadness and resignation.

There is an answer, a training solution, but it doesn’t involve the horse continually re-experiencing that dreadful fear and panic. It’s done in a humane way and in a way the horse can actually enjoy the process!

Be brave, smile and walk away from any advice that involves “work” or isolation. Think about how your horse would feel, how traumatising, for being locked up and punished for being a herd animal, a horse.

Feed for Position

I find that when I train a new equine, I focus on feeding *out there* and work on delivering the food with my out-stretched arm, away from my body and my food pouch. This is to prevent a horse trying to sniff, nudge or forage on you or try to help themselves to the food. This is part of how we teach a horse to behave in a way we like, how to behave “politely” around food.

If we are having problems with a horse that’s too close, is pushing us, nudging us, sniffing us or is riveting on what our hand is doing, ‘feeding for position’, ie. feeding ‘out there’ is how we combat this.

I also love it when I train a ‘naïve’ horse and I can see how swiftly behaviour changes and they follow the flow and placement (position) of reinforcement (food). They see a glowing red dot, which is where the food is given most often and they put their head where they ‘see’ it, in order to get the food. Even a horse who is not clicker savvy, can learn to change their behaviour in order to continue to receive positive reinforcement. It’s so exciting and I love it and I have to admit that as much as I love my horses and donkeys, there is something super exciting about communicating via R+ with an equine for the first time.

There is also the phenomena that learning and behaviour doesn’t end after the click with clicker savvy equines. Animals are still learning and behaving after the click. They’re continually learning and behaving!

Time doesn’t stand still between the click and the food.

That means the food acquisition stage not only reinforces the marked behaviour, but it reinforces all behaviours after the click, up to and including the actual acquisition of the reinforcer (food). That might mean that after the click, which also functions as a cue, not just a marker signal, the horse learns where to be, to get the food. This could also mean the horse learns to perform a behaviour in order to acquire the food. They may have to do something, walk somewhere, perform another behaviour, or just keep their head and neck straight, facing forward, not curved towards us, in our space.

Behaviour never stops. 😊

Self Haltering Your Horse

It’s always nice to re-visit simple but important behaviours such as self-haltering.

It’s nice training to do if you don’t have much time, the weather’s not great or you’re not feeling great yourself, but would still like to do something with your horse.

All Positive Reinforcement training is money in their ‘Trust Account’ and in particular, building value in haltering and the halter itself is extremely valuable.

I like to offer the halter in different positions, to make sure Flash is actively putting his face into it.

End of Session Signals or “Jackpots”

I hear a lot of discussion about using end of session signals and I’ve heard them described as jackpots as well.

End of session signals and jackpots are controversial and there is not a lot of science backing up their use.

There is lots of reasons not to use them, such as using a signal indicating a lack of opportunity for reinforcement potentially being a Time Out or NRM (No Reward Marker) Punisher. Who wants to punish the behaviour you’ve just spent a whole session reinforcing?

Similarly, jackpots lie in the realm of gambling vernacular. It’s a very large and surprising windfall. In order for a jackpot to have any impact on behaviour, it needs to be contingent and delivered contiguously. This means it needs to be delivered dependent on a certain behaviour being performed and delivered in the very moment it was performed. So why would we deliver a jackpot at the end of a training session? If we do it every time, we become predictable, the animal expects it and they can potentially end up looking forward to the end of the session (where they get a windfall of reinforcers) more than the actual session!

I had an interesting and surprising conversation with Ken Ramirez about end of session signals many years ago. It had been drilled into me that we must use them! But Ken was of the opinion that they were not that important and potentially punishing. When we finished sessions with his goats, donkeys and alpacas, we sometimes dumped food and exited quickly with the goats (they are fast), or switched to scratches with the donkeys, or with the alpacas, they were still ambivalent about people and food and our departure appeared neither here nor there. Although we always left a parting gift to keep them busy and distracted when we left their area.

So although a clear cue may not be recommended, leaving some food, a puzzle, a distraction, is still a good idea. We don’t want an animal chasing us to the gate and pawing or or getting frustrated as we walk away with food.

Sometimes a cue may not be what we intend either. For example when I train more than one animal in a row, my verbal end of session cue for one animal, is heard by the next animal in line. For them, it is a start of session cue and I can hear them verbalise their excitement that it’s their turn next!! 😀

I have a cheap doormat I like to use, as a station. It also has little dimples and is great for trapping chaff or pellets. I sprinkle some on it and it becomes a fun and enriching game for the animal to hoover up all the little crumbs. Meanwhile I have departed and they are happy and busy and I haven’t had to tell them the fun is over for now.

Check out my video of Seymour the donkey enjoying every last crumb that I’ve sprinkled on his mat:

“Consent Training” versus Horse Training

I love this photo of Mercedes and me. It was the first clicker training session we filmed. I can see Mercedes’ body language, she was not sure what was going on and I was naively confident it would all go well.

It was a bright new clicker training world back then.

I’m very lightly touching her shoulder to reassure her, but we are training with food and she’s pretty keen to figure out how to get the food, so it seems like she doesn’t mind, but I don’t know and I don’t assume. Even back then I was very generous with the food and she always enjoyed her clicker training.

People make jokes about mares all the time, but I don’t ‘mare shame’. I don’t, as I can empathise with her, because we have both had similar experiences. Our bodily autonomy disrespected, our boundaries crossed and ignored, our choice and our power taken away, our personal dignity trampled. We’ve been touched in ways we didn’t like, made to do things we didn’t want to do and our protests were ignored, sometimes even punished, we often had no agency at all.

Worse, people have shamed us for protesting, for expressing when we didn’t want something done to us, we didn’t want to do something, we didn’t want to be touched, when we felt violated, when we *were* violated.

Because of this, I am very much triggered and my skin crawls when I hear people talking about “consent training”. I don’t want to be trained to give consent and I can’t imagine Mercedes does either. Basically, that is the definition of grooming and I don’t want to do that to anyone. By trying to “train consent”, it feels to me that people are actually promoting the idea that consent is something we teach or make happen and that’s not consent imo.

If I need an injection that will improve my health or prevent illness, I can look at the pros and cons and make a decision, Mercedes can’t. That means I don’t train her “consent”, because no way is she going to agree to having a needle. But I can train and condition in a way that it is the most positive and least aversive experience possible for her. I can watch her body language extremely closely and adjust my training and conditioning appropriately to make it the best experience possible for her. I don’t need her “permission” to do things to her that benefit her wellbeing, as a good caretaker and trainer. Things that involve her health are not optional, but I do prepare her in a way that it’s as pleasant and pleasurable as it can be and it can be surprisingly pleasurable for her sometimes.

We can clicker train behaviours and we can condition emotional responses. These are not conscious decisions they make, based on an animal’s personal beliefs, these are ways they interact with their environment, an environment *we* create.

I like to use my understanding of learning and behaviour, to describe what I do.

I avoid making up stories or constructs about the training and conditioning I do.

I avoid trying to mind read or assume horses are like people in how we make decisions.