Horse Training Blog

Is Negative Reinforcement “bad” and Positive Reinforcement “good”? There is always a lot of discussion that regularly does the rounds on social media surrounding the question, is Positive Reinforcement “good” and Negative Reinforcement “bad”? First of all, I would ask, for who? The trainer or the horse/animal? You are then assured that positive simply means […]

All behaviour is communication This subject is about another big, huge, challenging mind shift we go through when we move across from traditional (aversive/ forceful) adversarial style of horse training, handling and interactions. When we change over to a different, more positive, empathetic and co-operative way of being with and training our horses via force

What is Shaping in Positive Reinforcement (clicker) training? What is Shaping in Positive Reinforcement (clicker) training? “Shaping consists of taking a very small tendency in the right direction and shifting it, one small step at a time, toward an ultimate goal. The laboratory jargon for the process is “successive approximation”.” (Karen Pryor, Don’t Shoot the

A horse who feels safe, is a safe horse to be around 𝓐 𝓱𝓸𝓻𝓼𝓮 𝔀𝓱𝓸 𝓯𝓮𝓮𝓵𝓼 𝓼𝓪𝓯𝓮, 𝓲𝓼 𝓪 𝓼𝓪𝓯𝓮 𝓱𝓸𝓻𝓼𝓮 𝓽𝓸 𝓫𝓮 𝓪𝓻𝓸𝓾𝓷𝓭 I say this a lot. But how do we know when they feel safe and when they don’t? How do we help them to feel safe? How do we make them

Separation Anxiety? Buddy Sour Herd Bound Destination Addiction What do all these terms mean? Separation Anxiety is one of the most common problems that horse owners face. It is a natural behaviour for horses – millions of years of evolution have taught them to be very scared if they find themselves alone and to rectify

Do you have a horse or donkey that is really “in your face”? Do you have a horse or donkey that is really “in your face”? For example, are they always first to greet, even hunt you down, sniff, nibble, even push on you? But by the same token, they don’t seem comfortable when you

Click for Action and Feed for Position I think it’s important to show real life training, rather than carefully edited, scripted and captioned training. I also have to live up to my own encouragement to everyone to be brave learners, be prepared to make mistakes and that ‘the animal is always right, so how can