Clicker Training For Horses - Teach Your Horse Anything

Clicker Training for Horses - Teach Your Horse Anything! is an ebook that teaches you everything you need to know about how to train your horse using a clicker.

When it comes to teaching an animal to behave well, or to perform certain desirable actions, clicker training is one of the cheapest and most effective options available. Rather than paying for expensive lessons at an obedience school, with a clicker and a little knowledge you can just train your animal yourself during your free time.

Technically speaking, clicker training is a kind of operant conditioning. It is not a form of classical conditioning. Unlike classical methods, which make use of aversive control (i.e., punishments), the emphasis with a clicker is on getting the animal to behave in a certain way through positive input.  In other words, clicker trainers encourage the target behavior.

A clicker trainer will use nonverbal signals, verbal signals, clicks, and rewards as encouragement to perform target behaviors. Rewards are important, because a reward is the clearest way to indicate to an animal that whatever it just did was desirable to the trainer. With consistent training, the animal learns that a reward will always come if it performs that action.

Of course, it’s not the case that clicker trainers never make use of punishments. In order to get an animal to learn, some type of corrective action is necessary. However, scoldings and physical pain are not among the choices used by a clicker trainer. If an animal fails to correctly do some intended action, the trainer gives a neutral verbal sign to let the animal know that it has not performed well enough to receive a reward.

Simple, but powerful and effective

The simplicity of this system makes it easily understood by any animal.  The reason? All animals have and understand the concept of reward. Clicker training (operant conditioning) is also distinguished from classical conditioning because it will require quite a bit of patience during training.  There is no step that cannot be broken down into smaller steps, and small steps are the soul of operant conditioning. Also, no step is so small that it cannot be rewarded.

So if, for example, you want your horse to trot out and fetch an orange traffic cone from the middle of a field, you will need to give it a reward for any action that seems like it might be a step in the right direction – even just looking at the target during the initial attempts.

Teaching any sort of complex target behavior will require you to break it down into smaller steps or segments that the student (i.e., your horse) can handle. You can then lead the animal into successive phases. Every success, no matter how small, is to be met with the positive reinforcement of a click and a reward. Incorrect or extraneous actions (non-targeted behavior) should receive a neutral word or gesture. This way, the animal gets the idea and will eventually opt for the target behavior over other actions.

Clicker training is effective, and remarkably so, because it is founded in this sort of positive reinforcement,.  Through positive reinforcement, you can quickly enable your animal to understand what specific actions result in a reward, and weed out those actions that do not. An animal will always naturally choose the action that results in a treat; it’s simply in the animal’s best interests to do so.

If your horse has already received classical conditioning, you can still use clicker training to make further progress. In fact, the progress may well be faster. Research has shown that equines crossing over from traditional methods of training still enjoy excellent results.  This is particularly true when the trainer assists the animal during the initial sessions (which can take as many as twenty to fifty training cycles to achieve success). Later, when the horse has acquired sufficient mastery of the target action, training can be augmented with both verbal and non-verbal signals.