Posts Tagged ‘Clicker Training’

Little less conversation, little more action

Energy and communication

This is a point that I have touched on before, when I talked about animals and their ‘names’, it concerns the role that energy and body language play in communication between all animals, – including humans. Let’s start by taking a look at body language:

body language is the external representation of the thoughts and emotions that are going on in the mind. Read more »

How positive reinforcement training works

And why it works so well…

I believe positive reinforcement, and training methods based on it’s principles, are the next stage in the evolution of the long relationship between horses and humans. Here are the reasons why I make this claim… Read more »

Positive side-effects of brushing a horses mane

This is a quickie post just to show you the power of positive reinforcement and how you can use it every day in simple ways so that both you and your horse get what they want. Read more »

Compliance or Learning to be Helpless

This post deals with the third reaction to coercion in the form of negative reinforcement and positive punishment (threats and increasing pressure), it also deals with coercion in the form of negative punishment, where something positive, usually a ‘freedom’ is taken away. Different causes but the reaction to these coercive methods is always the same. There are many names for this reaction, such as freeze, learned helplessness or, as I put it, compliance. Read more »

Parelli’s Catwalk Nightmare

No nothing to do with fashion but, well it’s the talk of the internet, Pat Parelli’s own-goal at the Royal Festival of the Horse on the 10^th of July at Stoneleigh. When Pat tried very unsuccessfully to get a bridle on a stallion called Catwalk. Well as most people know it all went horribly wrong. Lots of people walked out and were quite shocked at what they had seen. The 2 hour demonstration involved Pat using what English riders would call a ‘twitch’, – a rope around the horses upper lip and bringing the horse down with ropes around it’s legs. You can see the early highlights at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gf7w_1ifus (if you want to). Read more »

Clicker Taining Principles 3

How to do it

When we clicker train an animal we are using two types of learning. Don’t worry too much about the names but it is important to understand the principles here. Read more »

Clicker Training Principles 2

Clicker training is something that has been around for many years, it is also known as positive reinforcement training, (PRT). This is a more accurate name that describes the basic mechanism. We have three elements here: Positive, this means that PRT works only with positive emotions. Reinforcement this means that behaviors that are reinforced are likely to reoccur and training which implies some form of learning is taking place. Read more »

System Thinking

Systems thinking is something that is very popular in human society and something that simply does not exist in horse society. We humans love to buy into a system when we buy a horse we usually decide somewhere along the line which particular system we are going to put the horse (and ourselves!) through. It might be a very traditional and specific approach such as classical dressage or it might be something more general such as ‘English riding’. It might be a Western system or it might one of the growing number of alternative ‘natural horsemanship’ type systems. Systems are great aren’t they? Just follow the individual steps in the booklets, DVDs or podcasts and hey presto! At the end of the process you have a perfectly trained horse and a perfectly trained rider. Well actually no, that usually is the opposite of what happens. Read more »