games you can play

Practical Uses For The Clicker

Games You Can Play

By Alexandra Kurland

This article was originally written for the Natural Horsemanship List, November. 17, 1997.

A subscriber posted asking for some games she could teach her daughter's 4H group over the winter. This is a great opportunity to introduce the kids to clicker training. You could begin with a video night. There aren't any horse videos available yet, but there is a SUPER llama video that would be perfect for your 4H troop. It's Jim Logan's tape Click and Reward. (Go to the Suggested Reading List for more information on this tape.) Since people don't ride llamas, the video is all ground work, but everything on it can be applied to horses.

Here's a partial list of things you can train that he shows on the video: Basic handling: llamas are initially very people shy, so he shows a gentle way to get an animal used to being approached, touched, and groomed. If any of your kids have horses which are hard to catch, don't like being groomed, or won't let you pick up their feet, this is a great segment.

Haltering clicker style: This is really neat. Llamas hate being haltered, and the standard solution in the past was people herded the llamas into catch pens and chutes where they could grab them and force the halter on. Jim shows how you can use the clicker to teach the llama to basically put its own halter on. The end result is you can stand out in the middle of your pasture, hold your halter up, and the llama will approach from a distance and put its nose into the halter. Pretty neat, and something that could easily be taught to a horse.

Leading off lead: Jim takes his llamas through some complex leading patterns with some fun twists. Leading is easy to teach with the clicker, and it's something every horse can benefit from.

Trailer loading: This is a great segment. The end result is a llama who loads into a trailer at liberty from forty feet away. Not only that but the llama canters to the trailer, loads, turns around, and on cue, lies down. Really neat. We might not want our horses to lie down, but the rest would be fun to train.

Obstacles courses: This is somewhat like dog agility. Jim shows a llama working at liberty. On cue the llama steps up onto a wooden bridge, and then does a complete 360 spin before returning to Jim.

Fun tricks: The llamas have been taught to pick up wads of paper and put them in a trash barrel, pull a rope that rings a bell, pull a Kleenex out of a box and hand it to Jim when he sneezes, and some other fun things. The really fascinating trick was a segment he showed where he asked a llama to touch a particular color bottle. He had four bottles on the table, each a different color. He'd shuffle them around and then ask the llama to touch the red one, or the green one. The llama never missed. No matter how he rearranged the bottles, the llama accurately picked out the color he asked for. I haven't worked on this with the horses, but it would be interesting to see how they would do.

As you can see the video is packed with fun, and very useful things you can train. I'd suggest you share it with the 4H troop, and then give them an assignment: clicker train your horse. I've described in detail how you do this in other posts to the list, and the information is also in my home page. When you meet next month have the kids share what they have been shaping. Then you can spend some time refining what they've done, and offer suggestions about what to teach during the next month. If you need help thinking up ideas, by mid-winter my book on clicker training horses will be available. That will give you all kinds of very practical, and fun things you can train.

Since this is a 4H club, not everyone may own their own horse. You might want to think about having an All Species Clicker Class. That's something I've done in my barn. Our group has included horses, dogs, llamas, and a goat. This is a great way to include the kids who don't have their own horse, but may have a dog at home they can clicker train.

You can teach basic pet obedience using the clicker to both the horses and the dogs. Have everyone work on "heeling" patterns. You can also teach the dogs to sit using the clicker. In place of that for the horses you can teach them to square up. Work on this over the winter, and by next spring your kids will unbeatable in fitting and showmanship.

Working with other species in the ring is great distraction training for all the animals. It will certainly help prepare the horses for the county fairs come summer. Just make sure someone is on hand with a camera. You're going to get some great pictures when you start turning your barn into Noah's Ark. I wrote a piece for the clicker list on our All Species Clicker Class which I'll include at the end of this.

Another dog behavior that's great fun to teach, and easy to do with the clicker is retrieving. You can have the kids teach their horses first to touch a small plastic cone (or any other object which the horses can safely mouth and pick up). Once the horses understand that touching the cone gets them a click and a treat, it's easy to teach them to pick it up and hand it to their person. From there you work on adding distance. You can do all this on lead, so you can have an arena full of horses all learning to be overgrown golden retrievers. (For detailed instructions on how to teach your horse to retrieve see my book: "Clicker Training For Horses"

Retrieving is great fun, and it's something people really enjoy seeing. My two year old cleveland bay has two favorite games we play together just about every night. He loves to lie down and let me sit on him, and he also loves to retrieve. He brings the cones back to me at a trot, and he's gotten so good at handing them off to me that we've turned the game into a relay race. It's a great way to exercise him, especially now that we're in ice season and turnout is restricted to the in

This kind of work is a great change of pace for the horses, but more than that, it will really fine tune the training skills of your kids. It doesn't matter what they are teaching their horses to do, whether it's to touch a target, pick up a foot, lead, load into a trailer, etc., they have to follow good training principles to be successful. While they are playing games, you can be teaching them the rules of shaping:

1.) Train one element at a time.

2.) Get a response, get it consistently, then improve on it.

3.) Raise your standards in small enough steps that the horse continues to be successful and can be reinforced.

4.) Once the behavior is established shift from a fixed to a variable reinforcement schedule to improve response.

5.) When adding a new criterion, temporarily relax the standards of the old.

6.) If behavior deteriorates, go back to a previous step in the training process.

7.) If one training procedure is not creating progress, find another. There are always many different ways to build the steps to the desired behavior.

Your kids can learn what these rules mean, and how to apply them at the same time that they are having fun. These are rules that go beyond horse training. You'll be teaching them skills they can apply to any project they take on.

A couple more thoughts: I always attach a warning label to trick training. Before you teach your horse to "count" or to pull your hat off your head, ask yourself is this something I *really* want my horse to learn. Horses get very eager to perform and tricks do not always follow the same rules of respecting space that leading grooming manners do. Teaching your horse to paw, or to shake its head may sound like a cute idea, but if don't develop the trick all the way and get it to occur only on cue, it can become a nuisance behavior.

It's important to discuss with the kids that first night what sorts of things they'd like to teach their horses to do. I teach target training because I've found that it's a really easy way to introduce the horses to the clicker, but then I move on to basic leading exercises. I teach John Lyons' college level leading, head lowering, and his East, West, North, South exercise using the clicker to reinforce correct responses. That's my basic starting point, and from there the horses tell me what they need to work on next. Some of your kids may have trouble bridling their horses, or picking out their feet. Take that as your starting point. For example, teaching a horse to pick up its own feet is a great thing to do.

Also, if you do decide to include other species in your group, there are several great videos available for dogs, in particular Gary Wilkes' Click and Treat, and On Target., and Karen Pryor's Clicker Magic . The Clicker Journal has had a great series of articles on goats, as well as articles dogs, horses, and llamas. (See the Suggested Readling List)

I'd suggest that you start with just one or two dogs at a time, and have an adult assistant available for each dog that comes into the ring. We found the horses didn't mind the dogs at all, but the dogs who weren't used to horses got really excited. One dog who did therapy work embarrassed her owner by becoming totally hyper. It took a couple of sessions for her to settle down and become her usual well-trained self.

THE ALL SPECIES CLICKER CLASS

Here's the account I wrote last winter about the first meeting of our All Species Clicker Class:

"Friday night we had the first meeting of the "All Species Clicker Class." In attendance were three horses, one dog, and a goat, plus their owners and four spectators/helpers. Everyone except the goat was already clicker trained. The horses included Magnat, an Arabian who was handled by his blind owner, Crackers, an appaloosa who is learning to line dance using the clicker, and Robin a 23 month old cleveland bay cross who is the newest member of my equine family.

"The dog, Penny, belongs to one of my riding students. They've been doing obedience work together, and this fall they added clicker training into the mix. The goat was being handled by a teenager who owns a very rambunctious husky mix. I've been helping her with her dog, and she's become a very good clicker trainer. She had the most difficult job of the night, holding onto Oakie. If you think a dog can pull, you've obviously never gone water skiing behind a goat.

"Our mission is first and foremost to have fun, and second to work on all the skills all these different animals would need if we were to enter them into a dog obedience class.

"We sent the goat off to the side to be conditioned to the clicker, while the rest of us worked on heeling patterns. We used our helpers as traffic cones and worked on figure eights. Penny, our canine representative, worked off leash, but for this first session we kept the horses on leads. We also worked on extended stays (ground tying for the horses), and then moved onto retrieves.

"Penny won the bravery award for the night. At one point she was heading for her dumbbell, when Robin saw it. He wanted to pick it up, too, and made a face at Penny. Penny is a very timid dog, but when her person asked her again, she went ahead and retrieved her dumbbell. Magnat and Crackers did an excellent job picking up their horse dumbbells, and Robin got to show off his retrieving skills by chasing down a plastic cone. I can throw it out twenty or thirty feet, and he'll retrieve it.

"Crackers took a break to play with his buster cube, and then we finished off the night with a little equine line dancing exhibition. I put Robin through the pattern for the first time. It included some lateral work, and quick changes of direction. He did it with ease. How wonderful to be so young and limber."

I'm sure there will be people reading this who will think I've gone over the edge. They'll be saying: "Aren't you carrying this clicker training a little too far? I can understand why you might want to train with dogs around, but why would you want to teach a horse to retrieve a dumbbell?" The answer is the same one people give for climbing Mount Everest: because it's there. If you can teach a dog to pick up a dumbbell, why not a horse?

If nothing else, these games are making our horses much harder to spook. They proved their worth to me when I took Robin out for one of our first long walks together last winter. The barn where I keep him lies right on the edge of suburbia. We had to pass a teenager shooting basketball hoops. I saw Robin hesitate for about half a second, and then he walked right by. He understood about balls. That kid couldn't scare him.

Treating our horses like overgrown golden retrievers stretches us and gets us thinking in new and creative ways. It's good for our horses, and the bottom line is: it's fun.

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