trick training

Practical Uses For The Clicker

Trick Training

By Alexandra Kurland

This article was originally written for the email Clicker List, Aug. 1, 1997. It includes a general discussion of trick training and instructions for teaching a horse to lie down.

Trick Training: Warning Labels.

Before I talk about tricks I have to attach my warning label. Horses get very eager to perform the tricks they've learned. Before you teach your horse to "count" or to shake its head "yes", you want to ask yourself is this behavior I really want? Do I really want to teach my horse to rear or to lie down? Will I be able to control the behavior once I have it?

The first thing I ever taught with the clicker was a simple trick. I taught my horse to touch his nose to a target, and that's still where I begin with most horses. But, once they are giving me a consistent response with the cone, I move right into leading exercises. There's a reason for this. I want the horse to respect my space. If I'm using food as a motivator, I'm going to build enthusiasm fast.

Clicker trained horses are eager to work. If you start teaching tricks before you have established a good working relationship, you can easily lose control of your horse. Tricks don't always follow the same rules of respecting space that other ground exercises do. Teach your horse to follow a target stick, and he could easily knock you over trying to do just that. Enthusiasm is a good thing, so long as basic manners are solidly in place first.

Before you begin trick training, your horse should lead politely from both sides on a slack lead. He should work at liberty, and on a lunge line. He should move out of your space easily, and be totally at ease when you handle him. When he can do all that, he's ready for tricks."

I apologize for sounding like such a wet blanket about tricks. I know many people have had great success with the clicker starting with tricks. They haven't worked the leading exercises, and their horses have done beautifully. That's the real joy of clicker training. It's so tremendously flexible. We don't all have to do things exactly the same way to get great results. There is no one set way to use the clicker. Once you understand the principles of shaping, you can use it to teach anything you want. I attach the warning label primarily for people who are either novice handlers, or who are starting with a pushy horse.

Tricks can so easily fall into the category of Pandora's box behaviors. Once you let them out, they're hard to stuff back in. If your horse isn't thinking about rearing, do you really want to bring up the subject? If your horse doesn't paw on cross ties, do you really want to teach him to count?

Trick behaviors can very easily turn into nuisance behaviors. Shaping the behavior is only part of the process. Bringing the behavior under stimulus control is the other half of the equation. So pick your behaviors carefully while you're learning how to do this step. Think of it this way: when a dog stands up on his hind legs and "begs" off cue, it can be cute and endearing. When a horse does the same thing, it can be dangerous.

Teaching Down.

To get a horse to lie down is very different from teaching a dog. Dogs are easy. Both Karen Pryor and Gary Wilkes have shown us all how to do it on their excellent videos. You lure the dog into a sit with a bit of food over its head, and then you lure them into the down by taking the food lure down to the floor.

If only it were that simple with horses. Mechanically horses lie down very differently. First they circle around looking for just the right spot. They may even paw a little. Then they bring all four feet closer together under their body. They relax their joints, and sort of buckle at the knees. They go down front end first onto their knees and them collapse their back end down. That's a very complex sequence, and not one that's easy to shape directly. And unlike dogs, horses don't lie down very often. Some horses almost never lie down when people are around.

There are three main ways you can teach a down. The standard, non-clicker way is to hobble up a front leg at the same time you're making the horse bend his head around to the side. Eventually the horse becomes so fatigued that you can pull it over. Once you've pulled it down a couple of times, you can lift the front leg without hobbling it, and the horse will go down fairly quickly.

I've been aware of this method for years, and, personally, I would never use it. I want my horses to trust me. I may get their obedience by hobbling up a leg, but I'm not going to develop the kind of relationship I want with a horse. Plus it's potentially dangerous. If a hobbled horse panics or protests, or loses it's balance and falls, you run the risk of serious injury.

Hobbling creates a very unnatural position to lie down from. When I was teaching my young horse Robin to lie down (through shaping, not through hobbling), he got himself into some awkward positions which were very similar to the ones a hobbled horse gets into. Robin looked like he was playing the equine version of twister.

In the traditional methods, the horse would be pulled over at this point, but Robin told me this wasn't the way to the ground. He was thinking about lying down, but he had to get himself reorganized and go down from a more natural position. When I look at the expression of horses who have been taught with hobbling, I see resignation. That's not what I want to see on my horse's face.

So if you don't use hobbling, how can you get them down?

A second way is to wait for a horse to lie down and reinforce it when it happens. The problem with this technique is many horses almost never lie down when people are around.

So the third method is to tip the odds in your favor and get them thinking about lying down.

Everyone who has ever bathed a horse and then turned him out knows a sure fire way to guarantee that your horse will roll. Don't they always rush to the nearest dirt patch? You've just given them a shampoo bath. They're looking absolutely beautiful, and now two minutes later they stand up covered in dirt and looking totally pleased with themselves.

I reinforced Robin a couple of times for rolling this way, but I really didn't like this as a training method. I didn't want to encourage the sweaty coat roll, so I used a different approach. I thought of a different way to get a horse to think about rolling, and that's by getting him to walk with his head on the ground.

One of the most important riding exercises you can teach a horse is to drop his head on request all the to the ground. What you are teaching is a demand cue to calm down. When you go through this exercise to the point where the horse is walking with his nose literally pushing dirt, you will notice that almost all of the horses begin to think about lying down. If you let them, that's exactly what most of them will do. Why? Because there are only two reasons a horse would on its own walk like this. One would be when it's grazing, and the other would be when it's looking for a place to roll.

If you're working in a dirt arena, there's nothing to eat, so the horse starts thinking: "I must have my head down here for a reason. I guess I want to roll."

In other words to get a horse to lie down, all you need to do is shape the pre-roll behaviors, and let the horse's nature do the rest. To do this you're going to shape several separate behaviors. When you put them together, your horse will start thinking he wants to lie down. When he does, click! he gets a jackpot.

With Robin I taught him to lower his head, then to leave it down longer and longer. I taught him to walk a small circle the size of his body, then to walk a small circle with his head down. That's part of the pre-lying down behavior a horse goes through. This was a good start, but he still wasn't thinking about lying down. I think we could have walked circles for weeks, and he would never have thought about going down, so I added some other pieces.

I taught him to bow down on one knee with his head bent around to his side. Hobbled horses will give a full bow like this, but with Robin I taught it using a target stick. Once he was bowing, he started to think about going down all the way. This is where a hobbled horse would be pulled over, but with Robin I let him stand back up, and we went back to circling with his head down. Only now he was definitely thinking about lying down.

I like this approach even though it took a while to get the final behavior. We worked on a lot of useful behaviors on the way to lying down. Head lowering, circling, are all useful training exercises for his future career as a riding horse.

If you need help with the shaping recipes for head lowering, etc. both my book, Clicker Training For Your Horse", and "The Click That Teaches: Lesson 3: Head lowering" video coverhis in detail.