When we clicker train, there’s lots of different ways that we can convert what we are doing on the ground, to ridden behaviours. I thought this video was a great example of true liberty work. No whips directing her shoulders or body, no need for extensions of my arm, no body pressure and no “do it or else!” cues. We’re having a conversation and we’re both a bit rusty at the start.
In the old days before clicker training, I used to do a lot of riding with Mercedes where she moved around based on where I was looking and where I turned my head, shoulders, hips and that influenced my weight distribution in the saddle, rather than using pressure rein cues. If I looked around and moved my shoulders, my hips followed and there was a subtle shift in the saddle from my seat and legs. Mercedes would turn and circle on these cues.
In this video, you can see the same cues on the ground, all trained with Positive Reinforcement and without any aversive pressure, whips or other tools. I am usually much more subtle than this, but we haven’t done it in a while. I’m ensuring she is successful and the most important fact is that these are appetitive cues. The consequence of her performing the behaviour means food is coming and if she doesn’t get it quite right, food still comes and I work on refining my cue.
When we transfer behaviours and their cues from the ground to under saddle, there’s always a bit of a transition stage, where we might need to use a target stick or exaggerate rein cues a little, or have a helper on the ground, until the horse ‘gets it’. But from there, we can refine the cues to whatever we want and for Mercedes, she remembers the feel of my head, shoulders and hips moving to indicate the direction and I can transfer big obvious cues for things like turns, such as an opening rein and transfer the cues back to what my body is doing. But this time they’re appetitive cues, because she gets food when she does the behaviour after the cue.
Watch the video and imagine me doing what I’m doing on the ground next to Mercedes, and lift me up and put me on her back and that’s what I do under saddle and Mercedes does the same turns and flexing and bending. She’s super smart and because of all the clicker training we’ve done, the old body cues no longer cause her any worry. Much like the mounting block video I took, all the old unhappiness from past training has disappeared and been replaced by all the enjoyment of the clicker training with food.
There’s also a lovely synchronicity in how our heads, shoulders, hips and feet match up.
Something else to notice as well and why taking video is so important. I saw things in my video that I kind of noticed at the time, but seeing Mercedes behaviour now, I am continually blown away with how clever and subtle she is!
Let me critique myself!
I can see some poor feeding technique, where I’m feeding out of balance (with the wrong hand), feeding too close to my body and there’s a few misfires because we simply haven’t done a lot of this type of training lately. I blame my back problems on poor feeding technique and the rest is simply lack of practice and doing lots of other training that’s been very different to what we are doing here. Oh, and it started raining!
What I like in this video, is that at one point early on, I noticed Mercedes wasn’t standing very straight and I glance at her feet. It was like she read my mind, although I know it was that mere glance I gave her feet, that prompted her to step across and straighten up slightly. It’s something we’ve worked on in the past and it was very cool that she pulled that out of her repertoire with very little thought or prompting on my part.
Then another time when I switched sides, I realised there was some latency, she was slow to respond and not sure what to do. We got stuck at one point and if we get stuck, I’ll give her a handful of food to keep her feeling successful and to prevent frustration and see if she can figure it out. What happened was she offered a small movement of the head and even though I didn’t click for it, I fed her and that was enough to tell her she was on the right track and she took a step to her left and we got moving again. I’m sure I only fed her to keep her ‘in the game’, but watching the video, it seems like I confirmed her idea that we were supposed to be turning left. It’s always good to practice equally on both sides and I’d say I’d been favouring one side too much, based on her response.
To recap, horses are all about their environment and where their body is in their environment. That means that they will see and feel subtle cues. Simply our shoulders turning and our body following either next to them or on top of them is going to elicit a response. We can use our body to communicate and it doesn’t have to be a threat, if the consequence of behaving is food, pure and simple.