It’s really starting to cool off here–it’s actually fun to be outside in the afternoon with the horses! The ponies and I had a great weekend.
Boomer and Apollo (the two paint horses in the picture to the left) are doing AWESOME learning how to pick up their front feet for handling and cleaning. I worked with both of them on this on Saturday and again today. Picking up a horse’s foot can be pretty strange or scary for the horse, as you are taking away part their balance.
I try to progress in pretty small steps to help the horse feel confident and successful the whole way. Slow progress at the beginning often means faster progress later on. (These are the steps I use for back feet, picking up the front feet is fairly similar.)
These are both sweet little gelding and it’s fun to see them making progress so fast. I had a couple of sessions with each of them over the summer where we started working with feet, but we hadn’t really done much with it consistently until now.
Today they both let me pick up both front feet about a dozen times each. I could hold each foot for 3-5 seconds and could use the hoof pick to clean all the dirt and grime out. Both stood calm and relaxed and let me hold the foot loosely and move it around.
This was in sharp contrast to Saturday. On Saturday, Boomer kept trying to shake his foot away and had quite poor balance–he was trying to lean on me the whole time. And Apollo, while he would pick up a foot, was pretty unconfident about letting me hold the foot up for any length of time.
It’s amazing to me how fast horses learn with clicker training. Sometimes, literally, overnight. I’ll end a session one day when there are still a lot of rough edges and pieces that need to be taught. I’ll come back the next day and the horse will be far ahead of where we left off in the previous session.
Why this happens, I don’t know. I know some clicker trainers say the horses must stay awake at night, going over their lessons and thinking over what they learned. Whether horses do this or not, I don’t know. Incidentally, parrots are known to do this. In her book Alex and Me, researcher Irene Pepperburg describes taking audio recordings of Alex when he was in his cage at night. In the recording, he could often be heard going over his lessons from the day.
Still, it seems somewhat mysterious to me that performance on a behavior can sometimes improve drastically between sessions. It doesn’t happen all the time, but it does enough that trainers take note when it does occur.
Have you ever had this happen in your training? How do you interpret or explain this phenomenon?
I don’t use clicker training, but had a similar experience with foot training. I have an 18.3 (honest) TB who was badly injured in a fall as a three year old. He was lame on the right hind for four years (he is now 7). Innumerable vets said he had suffered permanent nerve damage, but an alternative therapy practitioner has now restored him to soundness and I am starting him under saddle. One of the residual effects of the problem is that he would not pick up his left hind foot. My farrier, a hugely powerful and uniquely gentle and patient man, can get it up long enough to trim it, but I have not been able to pick it for years. However, I decided last week that since he is now sound, the behavior (being unable to pick up that foot) I always thought was due to pain had now become habitual and his resistence was emotional, not physical.
I always pick my horses feet when they are standing at liberty. Max’s other three feet were no exception. I did a traiing session twice a day for about 5 minutes each time. At first, I lifted the right hind with a rope because there was no other way to get it up. Max was free, so the fact that he did not move away told me he was not too upset. As soon as the leg lifted, I put it down and gave Max a cookie. The next session, I kept the leg up a bit longer. The next session, he lifted it for me, just for an instant, without the rope. The rope, at that point, was permanently retired. The phenomen you noted, of steady progress and improvement from session to session, was very much in evidence. In a week, Max was lifting his foot and holding it up long enough for me to brush it out (In Florida, the sandy soil brushes out easily). He still won’t let me support it, but just balancing on the other legs and lifting it for me is huge progress. I can see the light of normal behavior at the end of this tunnel.
Thank you for sharing your experience with this. I think that when we are consistent and patient (and make sure that we don’t ask for too much!) we get this steady improvement.
I’m sure you must be thrilled to be able to clean Max’s feet out now!
Mary
I’ve seen that “overnight effect” too – and it’s really helpful to make progress in training.
very cool.
Although I talked about it in the context of clicker training, I think it has less to do with clicker training and more to do with good training practices in general.
Yes, I have learned to be very patient and not expect a whole lot at first. I think it takes time to make the pathways in the brain.I think that unhandled horses have been working from lower levels, more primal protective responses. When they start into training, they are using areas they haven’t before. Could you call them logical areas? They are learning to over come their flight responses, and that is a reward in itself, isn’t it?One time I was trying to teach a horse to longe. He was very stubborn about it. I knew he knew what I wanted. So I dropped it because I knew that I could come back in a month and have more chance of success. Sure enough, that is what happened. I think the important thing is to drop expectation. They learn at their own pace. I was listening to an interview w/ Edward Gal, rider of that superb dressage horse, Totilas, and he remarked about how easily Totials is to understand new things. But not all horses are like that. The best learning tools are patience and consistancey.
Thanks for commenting!
I agree with you that horses learn at their own pace. Sometimes what we think we should be working on is not what the horse is ready to be working on yet.
I’ve had good results too with dropping something and then coming back a week or a month later. Often I haven’t spent enough time on the basics or components that are needed for whatever it was that I was trying to teach.
Mary
Maybe it’s because they don’t have 8 gajillion other things on their mind like we do and they have plenty of time to think about stuff while they’re just standing around eating. Who knows, I’ll take it though 🙂
Glad the boys are doing so well, keep up the good work!
I don’t know about staying up at night going over the lessons, but I absolutely believe that horses mull things over in their minds long after we’ve left for the day. Those two look like a fun pair :o)
They are a fun pair!
Boomer is 2, Apollo is 3. They are both rescued paint horses (with papers), although neither had had ANY handling before this spring. It took awhile to convince them that people were friendly, not scary. However, they are both now friendly and as goofy as can be.
Both are looking for their forever homes, if you know of anyone who needs a horse!
Mary