Clicker Training Horses
Lanark Riding Club Equine Expo
Took place on 18 June 2011
The Equine Expo day was a wonderful success, lots of interesting people to meet, new therapies and ideas for horses to see and discuss and the demos were fantastic.
As part of the Lanark Riding Club Equine Expo this year I planned to do a clicker training demo. A few of the riding club committee members bravely offered to be guinea pigs for me and to be in my demo.
So I spent time with each person giving lessons in clicker training on the run up to the event. As usual, each horse brought something different to the sessions and out of what they brought to me evolved the ‘games’ that were right for them in their training and would be what they would play with in the demo.
Diesel was playing with Why Would You Leave Me (WWYLM) and in this lesson he was ready to let this evolve in to the start of lateral work (3-flip-3). It is so important to stick with exercises to see what evolves out of it. If you find yourself forcing something then the chances are your horse is not ready to offer that behaviour.
Below is a little compilation of pictures that were taken during the training and show Diesel’s first session with 3-flip-3. He was quite the star.
One of the other volunteers was Gem. Gem’s demo activity was the mounting block lesson. When these photos were taken she was very advanced with her mounting block game and you can see that she really owns this behaviour.
Amanda
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