No, to me, it depends on the horse. My last horse did really well with clicker training and responded to it. My current horse only responds to it when it’s a game. Dianna Reiss even said some animals-- she was speaking about dolphins-- can become anxious when it comes to clicker training.
I also read the scientific literature and even wrote an article about it concerning horses. There is very little scientific research on operant conditioning when it comes to horses, and the scientific literature is sparsely researched.
People like to say it’s “scientific” for horses when it’s purely hypothetical at this point.
What exactly are you saying - all training falls into one of these quadrants. The fact that there isn’t “research” doesn’t mean anything other than no one wants to pay for a study. Obviously there are hundreds of years of evidence showing that “operant training” works on horses. It is just called training.
But as for clicker training - it’s great for some things, and not for others. And yes, some animals respond better than others for lots of reasons. Some dogs are just smarter than other dogs, the end. It would take a lot more time to train a horse under saddle with a clicker and positive reinforcement only versus negative reinforcement.
To ask for a hoof, or to drop a head - sure, positive reinforcement might be a faster, easier way. To ask a horse for collection? Definitely not.
Clicker training is different for each species. It’s going to affect dogs differently than cetaceans and certainly affect horses differently. That’s all. I’m not trying to start a problem. Ha, I clicker trained my cat and it was a breeze!
There are plenty of free scientific articles online about horses and clicker training. One article examines how researchers used clicker training versus traditional methods (they define traditional methods) to load meat horses. The difficulty with the study is that they only use 32 horses, which is an incredibly small number, but clicker training reduced the stress of the meat horses loading onto the trailer.
And I completely agree with you. I love clicker training and it definitely works for some things. My Fjord is super smart, but she gets frustrated if she doesn’t get the “problem” immediately because she has a busy bee brain. I generally have to show her first and then she likes to figure out the problem.
Well yes sort of. “Clicker training” as a training method is exactly the same for all species. Whether it is effective will vary by species, and also vary on the task. Loading horses is definitely a situation where positive reinforcement is effective.
Much of the time we use these methods in combination and often without realizing it. Asking for a lateral move we might give a pressure/release and also a verbal reward (praise). So if we double the training method we might get faster learning.
All 4 methods are just tools in the toolkit. They are always available and should be used as the situation or task fits. If my horse bites me I will likely use some positive punishment. Maybe also some negative reinforcement until I get another desired outcome (e.g. horse backs up).
There is no way to use positive reinforcement to not be bitten.
I used positive reinforcement to train my girthy mare to stop snapping at me and biting. I taught her to stand still and even look away while I tightened the girth. It was very easy.
As far as the young mare and farrier especially with mares one big fight can really ingrain a fear or resistance into them. Farrier ethos is very much get the job done, since you can’t leave the job half done. But it’s a disaster for some horses. You might try a tranquilizer for a few sessions.
One symptom of low grade laminitis can be an aversion to having shoes nailed on, so rule that out.
Fighting tooth and nail tells me things were forced on her too much, for too long, making assumptions it was “just” a training issue, and not any comfort issue (mental or physical)
There’s a whole lot of behavioral psychology studying in horses. Some is formal research, some isn’t. For example, the “flooding” idea of training - immersing a horse in the fear they have, such as surrounding them with terrifying plastic bags - has been studied, and shown to be far less effective at producing happy, properly desensitized horses.
Rollkur has been studied enough to be shown to produce a shut down horse in a lot of cases, not to mention the physical damage.
Most of this isn’t hypothetical. The ODGs, the masters, Xenophon, etc, have all immersed themselves in the psychology of the horse and implemented training techniques that produce happy, sane, well adjusted, confident, trusting partners.
How does it affect horses differently from cats differently from dogs? You go through the same process - associate click=treat, then wait for the behavior, encourage the behavior, ask for the behavior, etc, click-treat as the reward. Over time, clicks start coming without treats, and “end stage” if you want to go that far can be click-only as the reward.
You can create a pushy horse/dog/cat by inappropriately treating. You can create unwanted “partner” behaviors in a horse/dog/cat by inadvertently rewarding unwanted behaviors that are done simultaneously with the desired behavior
Yes but you used R+ to train her to stand still and look away. You didn’t use R+ to teach “don’t bite” - that would make no sense.
The result may be the same but the method is not. Which is all that matters in horse training - the whole point is to get the result you want.
Learning Methods and Scientific Research Methods were my concentration for my BS in Psychology. It just makes me crazy when people say things like “you should only use R+ training” (so common in dog training). That makes no sense! It depends on what you want to train. You can’t use R+ to teach a behavior NOT to happen.
You can train something else so that it prevents (or reduces) the behavior. But if you’re going to target the behavior (e.g. biting) you would have to use a punishment (+ or -) which doesn’t mean it has to be painful or mean.
start doing it more often, and adding treats. You would be surprised what horses tolerate whent they know a mint is coming after lol the wheels start to turn.
She does behave for having her feet trimmed, it’s just the hammering she can’t/won’t tolerate. Although she now gets suspicious and tense when he puts her hoof between his legs, I think she feels trapped like that - she will try to pull away a little but eventually tolerates it, just doesn’t like it. I think she’ll get over that if we don’t try to put shoes on her again for a while. This farrier has been trimming her for nearly a year now, and I have had her for two years. She is three.
She’s very “dramatic” and yes, she was pushed way too far the first time she was shod. It could have been handled way differently, in hindsight, but now I know. She has had x-rays recently and no sign of laminitis or any other issues. She just flat doesn’t like it.
Thank you, I thought I was reinforcing good behavior and the desired response by allowing her to have her hoof back once she accepted the single smack. She just hasn’t gotten to the point where she accepts it the first time I do it, if that makes sense. That’s where we’re kind of stuck. I want to get to where I pick it up, smack it, she doesn’t react, and I put it down. I think trying that more often is a key.
She is also a belly scritch whore, so I always giver her a short scritch there while I have her hoof up. Trying again to make good associations. Very treat motivated too, but I haven’t figured out how to clean her hoof and give her a cookie at the same time, I’m not that coordinated. I will treat her after I finish cleaning all four though - a “good girl” for allowing me to do them all without issue. She also likes her pasterns scratched, and if she’s getting fidgety with a hoof up I can scratch the back of her pastern and she quiets immediately. Found that out by a happy accident, cleaning some crud off of them one time.
Do you put her foot between your legs? If not, start there. Is he pulling her leg out to the side? If so, maybe it’s too far for her to feel comfortable, or stable. Is he hiking her leg up pretty high? Ask if he will try keeping it lower. Does he use a hoof cradle? If not, ask if he can try setting her foot on the cradle, as she may like the stability a lot more.
rads won’t show laminitis, but all the extra info around all this doesn’t seem to point to that anyway
Yep, either a few more asks in that session, or another session in that day, or every day if you’re only doing it a few times a week. Repetition repetition repetition, with a lot of praise, both verbal and even nice scritches along her leg/fetlock/pastern, and treats as appropriate. If you can be safe, then your inside hand can reach up to scritch withers when working on the front feet, and that area next to her anus right under her tail where a LOT of horses really love light scritching. Try the latter without working on her feet first, just to see what her reaction is to it. And definitely the belly that she loves.
Treats don’t need to be for when you have a foot up. BUT, if you will first teach her about “carrot stretches”, then you can have a treat in your hand and right after you put a hind foot down, you can reach your inside hand around and ask her to come reach for it. Just be careful you don’t create a situation where she’s trying to reach around when you have a leg up
It sounds like you’re on the right track, just do more of it
Yes exactly. You need to teach what to do, more effectively than what not to do.
Even with children. Lots of parents are laissez faire until children embarrass them in public and then parents explode. Teaching positive models for behavior and manners is more useful long term.
It’s just SO much simpler for everyone to focus on the one thing TO do, instead of the 1000s of things NOT to do.
“stand quietly” automatically eliminates any need to converse about biting or dancing or shifting or pawing. You can’t hit a pawing horse into standing quietly.
Yes, stand quietly is a multipurpose concept plus once horses understand it they can start to feel comfortable in that stance. They can know its a safe attitude and they don’t need to be alert to your cues.
When I started with my current horse over 12 years ago, I was tying her to a ring in the wall of her stall to tack up and giving her a treat. She was busy minded and sometimes knocked into me trying to see what was going on outside if I worked with her loose. Then one day I opened the stall door and she parked herself in that corner automatically and I knew I could stop tying her. A few years later we discovered actual clicker training.
I am so tired of amped up tween girls shouting “stop it!” down the barn aisle at their pawing horses.
You are exactly right about the farrier ethos - he was kind of at the point of no return and had to get the shoe on no matter what. He even told me not to worry, that “The first time is bad, the second is awful, but by third time they get better.” We never made it to the third time, I just couldn’t fathom putting her through that again. I did ask my vet about sedating her and she said she didn’t need shoes badly enough to warrant that. What she didn’t say is what it would look like if she did. So how exactly does that work? Does the vet have to be on site to administer? Do I take her to the vet office and have the farrier meet me there? I truly have no idea how one goes about sedating a horse for hoof work.
If she’s reactive the first time you smack/slap the hoof, I would not even do that at this point. Break it down into even smaller pieces until you find the one she doesn’t react to, then build up from there. Can you pick up the hoof and gently tap the sole with a fingertip or two? If you have long nails - you could tap the hoof with your nails so it makes noise to prepare her for the same thing with a hoof pick and eventually a hammer.
With horses who are anxious about their feet I’ve found the thing that helps most, besides a patient farrier, is just handling their feet constantly. I’ll take horse out of stall, pick feet, groom/tack, pick up all four again before I bridle, then go ride/lunge/turn out/whatever. Come in, untack, lift all four again to check for rocks. Bring to wash stall, lift all four again, hose off. Back to crossties, put on fly sheet, lift all four again. Add in some little tap taps with your fingers or nails once or twice a day and work up from there.
The idea is we don’t want to put the horse in a position where they practice the behavior we don’t want, which means we have to back off before they raise their head, yank their foot, run backwards, etc. I had forgotten that aspect of this.
The tapping/slapping might even be farther up the leg, with a flat hand.
Funny, but telling story:
Many years ago where I boarded, there was a mare who you “don’t mess with her hind feet, she kicks”. How literally true that was, I don’t know, because obviously she got her feet trimmed, I was just never there to see that.
However, all the lesson people were told to just not groom lower than gaskins or so, don’t brush her tail, etc. And you could see the mare get a little anxious as they worked their way back there, but she never did anything (because they didn’t go there).
One day, one girl who never got the message, or forgot or ignored it, was happily picking this mare’s hind feet. Mare was relaxed as could be.
Someone went quietly over and asked her to come out of the stall, and asked how this happened.
The girl said “I don’t know, I just asked her if it was ok and asked her to give me her leg”
How many times do we approach a horse when we are behaving as a predator? How many times do we think “if I move too quickly she’ll spook, so I’ll just tip-toe and move quietly and keep my eye on her” and BOOM off the horse goes. How many cougars just walk up to a horse and lick them? No, they sneak around, sketchy eye contact, circling.
WE have to consider how WE, a predator with eyes that face forward, who love to LOOK at things, appear to a horse, a prey animal, to whom direct contact can be intense mental pressure.
Before I write anything, I just want to state that my views on this are as impartial as I can make them. I teach science writing, so I don’t have opinions (I mean, I do, but I also try to remain factual) so a friend of mine recently told me that when I discuss this stuff I sometimes sound callous. I don’t mean to sound callous. I think it’s years of studying it. I’m actually switching fields because it’s taken a hard toll.
Yes, you’re exactly right, clicker training as a method is the same. How it affects the animal as a species is a bit different. My work doesn’t approach this, but I understand how the articles are written, meaning the research is very new as opposed to studying operant conditioning and cetaceans, which dates back to the 1940s (maybe even earlier). So, anthropologists, biologists, and other scientists have a good handle on how operant conditioning affects cetaceans. The same goes for dogs. The studies on horses are new and small. Horses’ brains are quite different and they are going to react differently. A similar example is that vets have started studying how operant conditioning affects livestock, meaning cattle and even bison. These are two very different species but are often lumped together. One could even break down domestic bison and wild bison, which there are a lot of differences. I was just chatting with a friend about conducting field research on bison skeletons to see how they are gradually becoming feral (another scientific term sadly misused).
I presented at an academic conference back in 2014 on the rhetorical use of the word rollkur. So, 95% of veterinarians agree that rollkur for an extended duration has negative repercussions on the horse, but 5% said that rollkur for less than five minutes does not have negative affects on the horse. Personally, I am against rollkur, but I found that interesting. The vets also distinguished between terms, how rollkur was used, what horses it was used on, who was riding the horses, etc. So, the scholarship was pretty decent.
As far as putting the foot down, the horse will associate the positivity with putting the foot down, not relaxing the foot. So, the horse will try to put the foot down upon command. I treat my mare when she relaxes her foot and now she picks her foot up when I say, “foot.” That’s all, but a personal preference.
Ha, I clicker trained my cat and it was a breeze!
