By now you should be both smiling and having an even better time, so now we need to look at generalizing this behaviour just like all our behaviours. Perhaps you have encountered grumpy faces in your horse when you go to feed him. This behaviour is usually caused by the behaviour of ears back being inadvertently rewarded. The rule says that for a behaviour to continue it is being reinforced somehow. Perhaps, initially he had his ears back at his neighbour at the instant you t

The next foundation lesson is called Happy Faces. Whether it is yourself doing the smiling or being on the receiving end of a smile, smiles just make you feel good. Behaviour and emotion are neurophysiologically linked so when you change one you can change and influence the other (Antonio Damasio, Descarte’s Error). The smile tricks the mind into feeling better, as endorphins are released (Peta Haskell, Speech Mastery). So, now what does all this have to do with clicker train

I hope you played with mats and moving them to different locations last week and worked a bit on building duration as well after your horse was ok in the new locations. This week we are going to add in a couple more components. The first one is playing the targeting game on the mat to make the mat an even better and more interesting place to be. So, you will hold up your target while he is on the mat and reward for his touching the target with his nose as well as clicking and

Trailer loading, just like any other behaviour we would ask our horses to do, must have had been taught before we can ask, and expect, the horse to perform that behaviour. An even more important question to ask is have the component parts of the behaviour been taught, as this is usually why the ‘behaviour’ falls apart. So, what are the component parts of ‘trailer loading’ behaviour? What behaviours do we need to teach before even attempting to load a horse onto the trailer? S