Dogs, horses, and rats. Birds, goldfish, cats. Dolphins, raccoons, and elephants. What animals can’t we train? In this section you’ll find lots of great training stories and tips. You will also get to meet many of the wonderful animals that I get to train. I hope that you’ll enjoy reading about my adventures (and misadventures) and that these articles and tales can provide you with insight that will help you with your own animals.
As I mentioned briefly in Friday’s post, Tex and I have been playing around with riding on a star. Well, we’ve been using cones tied to the round pen to ride a star pattern. He did absolutely wonderful with this last Thursday, so I need to come up with some ideas to make this even […]
Here’s an e-mail I got yesterday. It’s obviously spam, but it gave me a good laugh. Unfortunately, I’m all out of Baby Horse (Mustangs) right now, so Chris is out of luck. We do have a lot of great rescue horses who are looking for homes, but I don’t think most scammers are actually interested […]
Two short video clips today of Tex, the pony who I recently started riding. The first is a clip of him getting his ears scratched. He was absolutely LOVING this! I wish I had the camera zoomed in a bit more, it was pure bliss on his face. However, you’ll get the idea. I think […]
Tex is moving forward under saddle. At least, that’s the goal! Recently, I posted a bit of video footage from Tex’s second ride. He’s had about half a dozen rides now, most about 10-15 minutes long. We’ve been playing around with stop and go, as well as steering. I want Tex to be really confident […]
Tex the pony and I have been working on getting really, really good at backing up. This is one skill we’ve really been focusing on for the past several clicker training sessions. Backing up is good for Tex for two reasons. (Actually, there are probably a lot more reasons!) 1. Tex is quickly becoming a […]
It seems a bit counter-intuitive. If we break a training task down into more steps, it should take longer. However, the opposite is usually true. Smaller steps can get us to our goal quicker and often result in better quality behavior. This came in handy several weeks ago when we picked up Connor from the […]
