Over the weekend, I had the privilege of presenting as part of the R+ Horse Summit. It was a fun three-day event, all about positive reinforcement training for horses.
Today, I want to share one of the video clips from my lecture.
When I adopted Chewie in February, she was basically okay with having her feet picked up. But, I wasn’t able to trim her feet without us both getting frustrated.
In order to keep both of us safe, happy, and relaxed, I wanted to teach her grand-prix level hoof care behaviors.
So, over the past months, hoof care is, by far, the behavior that Chewie and I have spent the most time training.
One thing that has helped is building routines that create a dialog. We have opportunities for Chewie to say “yes” and “stop” while I am trimming her feet.
One behavior to watch for in the following video clip is Chewie’s ready response. When she is done eating and ready for me to continue, she turns her head toward me.
Her ready response allows her to control when the next repetition starts. Without this response, if I were to pick up her foot before she was ready, she might ignore the cue. She might also be off balance or annoyed!
Instead, she cues me when she is ready for me to continue. You’ll see that we alternate between practicing one repetition of our reinforcement system and one repetition of rasping. Alternating gives both of us a little break and allows me to think about what I’m going to do next.
The following video is from earlier this fall, at the old barn. In the video, we were working on building more duration for rasping her back right foot. Note: I’m not actually rasping in the video. I’m pretending to rasp with the back side of the rasp.
In my lecture for the summit, I talked about how it is important to examine what happens as reinforcement ends and you and your learner transition back to training.
How do you know when your animal is ready to begin again? How does your animal know when you are ready to begin again?
Horses tend to chew for a long time, and they are often ready to keep going with more training before they are done chewing. For Chewie’s hoof trimming routine, having an easy-to-identify ready response has definitely helped improve our communication with each other.
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