We recently brought Tootie back to the ranch. He’s growing up fast, I think he’s double the size he was at the end of last summer! He’s also getting a lot darker. He should be a lovely dapple gray when he sheds out this spring.
Tootie has been handled since birth and he loves people–sometimes almost too much! He is very much a pocket pony, all he wants to do in the pasture is follow me around, sniff me, nuzzle me, bite me…
Since he didn’t get worked with much at all this fall or winter, he needs a review of some of the basics. Tootie will be two in March. We want to make sure this coming year will be the terrific twos, not the terrible twos!
The biggest thing he needs work on is basic manners–personal space and biting/nipping. This can be challenging with a young horse as many times this is attention seeking behavior. So, punishing the horse, shaking your hands at them or even driving them away can make it even worse–it just becomes a fun game for the horse.
One good solution is to teach the horse an alternative behavior. (or several alternative behaviors!) This gives the horse something positive and productive that they can do to earn attention and reinforcement. It also shifts the trainer’s focus to what they want the horse to do, instead of what they don’t want the horse to do to. If the horse has his head down, is backing up, or any other number of behaviors, you have a way to ask him politely to stay out of your space.
Tootie and I did some basic free shaping today. I worked on shaping him to turn his head away from me, which is a great way to start practicing self control!
He’s horrible about mugging so I started shaping this behavior from the other side of the fence. If you have a horse who enjoys crowding or nipping, it’s a great idea to start teaching the horse from the opposite side of a stall or fence. This keeps you safe and often makes it easier for the horse to be successful.
Once he was starting to get the hang of it, I went in with him and continued shaping the behavior. Considering that it’s been months since he’s had any training or work, he did really well today. Although we just started this, you can see in the short clip below that he’s a pretty quick learner. He knows exactly what he has to do to get that treat!
He’s very cute! Those little ones do force us to train 🙂
Tootie is a cutie and looks like he is getting the hang of it. I taught my horse the same thing when he started to get muggy when I first started clicker training. I love it when they catch themselves mugging and self correct! I saw Tootie do it in the video. So cute. I noticed Tootie’s ears were back in the video when he turned his head away but of course came up for the reward. My horse spends a lot of the training session with his ears back. I have contemplated what it means and have a guess. What are your thoughts?
Hi Molly,
Great question!
I think it really depends on the horse and what’s going on.
There’s the angry/aggressive horse with ears back which is definitely not what we want.
There’s also often ears back when the horse is thinking, trying to figure things out (although it can also be a sign of confusion or frustration). This is one place to be careful–in situations like these, the ears back often goes away over time. But, if it’s not going away, consider your training, is the horse understanding what you are asking?
But, some horses just keep their ears a bit more back than others. I find this question can really depend on the individual horse.
Alexandra Kurland has a happy ears game. So, you click and reinforce for ears forward. Gets you thinking about where those ears are, and gets the horse more likely to have ears forward, some people also say they’ve seen a change in their horse’s emotional state. This exercise is easy to add into others. Example– working on leading, and waiting to to click until the ears are both forward. (Sometimes you have to start with just one ear, or a hint of the ear moving forward.)
What do you think your horses’ ears back means?
Mary
what an adorable baby. He’s smart, too. He’s doing very well, considering he hadn’t been worked in a while. That’s what I really love about clicker training: whatever you teach the animal will stick with him/her.
These youngin’s do learn fast. For us it turned out to be so simple to stop his space invasion and nipping. We gelded him. Problem solved!
Good point Kerry!
This often is an easy solution to eliminate a lot of these types of behaviors in colts.
He’s already gelded, though, so I think I’m going to have to rely on training him to behave!
Mary
Great video! I love when you post about the young horses because it always gives me ideas of what to work on with Chrome. 🙂 Thanks!
so glad you enjoyed it!
Mary
I have an award for you. Stop by the awards page of my blog to pick it up.
This is a great example of Food Zen! The horses chooses to move away from the food it really wants!
Thanks Donna.
He was a brilliant child. It was hard trying to always stay one step ahead of him.
But we did seem to have everything working smoothly on this day!
Mary