I hope you all had fun playing with transferring the head down cue from the lead to a lifted hand. Now let’s look another cue transfer. I now want Oli to put his head down when I turn on the clippers. Once again, I go through the same process and would not do this transfer until the old cue of hand above head was solid. Clippers turned on as new cue for head down… …followed by presentation of old cue of hand above head. Remember to present the new cue of the sound of the clippers followed quickly with the old cue of hand above head until he starts to drop his head at the sound of the clippers. Very soon Oli would drop his head at the sound of the clippers alone. To review – when he dropped h

Now that you have head down using a lift of the lead rope, make sure it is solid…that you get head down promptly every time you lift the lead. Now we can have some fun and play with cue transfer. Many people ask how to put a behaviour on cue. Remember that you shouldn’t put a cue onto a behaviour until you can reliably predict that the behaviour WILL happen. So, if you wanted to put a verbal cue onto head down you would give the verbal ‘down’ or whatever distinct word you want for this behaviour a split second before asking for it with your lead. Soon you can fade the lift of the lead and have a verbal cue for the same behaviour; this is what is called cue transfer. Let’s look at some fun cu

I hope you have all tried the up for down method and are having some success. There are usually three ceilings that the horse will stop at. To get them past this sticky level first make sure you are allowing him to go as far down, but releasing both hands fully so the belly of the rope is on the ground. You can also try at the ceiling re-cuing head down with another lift of the rope rather than clicking and treating. This is also how you build duration in the head down. As he starts to lift his head you re-cue the down and click for that little bit longer duration. If neither of these works, try feeding lower so he gets the idea that he can go lower. You may have accidently reinforced this h

With clicker training, we teach head down a bit differently. Head down is taught by lifting up on the lead rope. At first, this seems rather counter intuitive, lifting up to get down. Why not just ask for head down by putting downward pressure on the lead? Or by pushing down on his neck behind his ears? Actually you want to teach the same behaviour as many ways as possible to make it as solid in an emergency as it can be so definitely feel free to teach it all the ways you can think of but make sure you teach it this way too! There are some good reasons to teach head down by a lift. Teaching it with a lift is safe. Eventually, if you pull down for head down to get the head all the way to the