Did you know that horses could be trained with clicker training? In this section you’ll find lots of information about how positive reinforcement training methods can be used to create horses that are smart, brave, athletic and enthusiastic about training. If you’re skeptical, I recommend starting with this blog post, which summarizes a research study that examined whether clicker training causes horses to bite.
Social distancing means that all of the conferences and other events I had planned for this spring and summer have been cancelled. However, the conversations are still continuing virtually! If you’d like to listen in on some of these conversations, you can listen to the Drinking from the Toilet episode about shaping that I did […]
Several years ago, Ken Ramirez gave a talk at the Art and Science of Animal Training Conference which was called “Training when you’re not training.” You can read my notes from Ken’s talk in this post. One of Ken’s main points was that training is always going on. We have many informal interactions with our […]
Occasionally when I am at the barn, I realize that I have forgotten something that is still in the tack room. Apollo, of course, can’t come in the tack room with me. Until recently, I have had two options for what I can do in this situation. Option 1: I can give him some feed […]
Apollo and I have been working on Alexandra Kurland’s “the grown-ups are talking” exercise. This is a polite manners exercise that teaches the horse to stand calmly next to you for an extended duration of time with his head straight ahead. (Note: If your horse is new to clicker training, please start your training with […]
I have some exciting news to share…. This summer and fall, a friend and I did some volunteer work at a local horse rescue. At the end of November, I adopted one of the horses from the rescue. Apollo is a middle-aged Arabian gelding. He’s been at the rescue since this past spring. Other than […]
I have been catching up on the Equiosity podcast, which is a collaboration between Alexandra Kurland and Dominique Day. In Episode 49, Alexandra tells a story from when her horse Robin was very young. At the time, Alexandra had been working with Robin on many different things using clicker training. However, she had often been […]
