Hi Becky,

Ki-Lin’s behavior sounds pretty normal to me for an enthusiastic, young clicker horse. They do love the game and they sometimes get ahead of themselves, and us.  An important skill for a clicker trainer is to be able to put together a balanced training program so that each exercise has one of more complementary exercises that can modify it and keep the horse at an appropriate energy and interest level.

First of all, I would like to say that clicker training can create the kind of horse you want, and it all depends upon what you click and how you balance out the exercises you choose to work on.   Clicker training does build focus and interest and in some horses, this translates into a kind of excitement that is a bit overwhelming because they are so anxious to get the right answer that they don’t take the time to listen to the question. As soon as you think it, or even before, they are off.  This is actually a good thing and it is why shaping works so well with them.  So we don’t want to squash it. 

But we do need to redirect it and teach them that waiting until we are ready is going to pay off more than jumping the gun.  This is one reason Alex spends so much time on emotional control exercises in the foundation lessons.  Head down, grown-ups, and mat work all work together to teach the horse about how to calm down, stay in one place and wait for the next request.   Doing some duration work on them often makes big changes in a horse’s attitude during clicker training.   Once the horse understands the foundation lessons, I use them to balance out the increased energy that can come from starting new behaviors.

Since it is easy to spout theory and not always easy to apply it, here are some practical ideas for your specific issue (unrequested trotting). Hopefully once you see how to approach that issue, it will give you ideas for ways to modify your work sessions to more generally address what is going on.

I have started 3 horses under saddle with clicker training and they all did what you are describing. Starting the trot was like opening a whole new and exciting world for them and they just wanted to practice trotting all the time.  I think, to be honest, that they did that with other behaviors, but it was easy to redirect them and there was not quite the safety issue.   With the trot, it is so obvious that the horse is not paying attention to what you want and just offering the newest and most fun behavior.  And there is the safety issue too.  The horses I started were all mine and I knew them well. They all had a good “whoa” and I was fairly confident of my ability to ride them, although with young, green horses, one does always have to be prepared for the unexpected.

My horses all knew how to trot on the ground and in-hand so they had a good voice cue for trot.  The first day when I worked on trotting under saddle, my goal was just to show them they could trot under saddle. I work alone so I don’t have the advantage of a helper but they usually caught on pretty quickly once I reinforced for any semblance of a trot.  So, my initial goal was just to get them to trot a little.  Is it really on cue? Well, sort of – I have a way to get them started, but it is not my final cue and it is not under stimulus control, but that’s ok. I just do it in little bits and pieces. Between trots, I will work on a behavior that is more likely to calm them down (head lowering, mat work, whoa, any simple and recognized pattern I have worked on before). 

At some point, with some it was the first day, with others it took a few sessions, they start to offer the trot.  I am ok with this, but please, remember you have to evaluate your own situation. If you don’t want any unrequested trotting, then don’t allow it. You have to put stimulus control on early.  Why do I allow it?  Part of it is that I don’t want to squelch their enthusiasm. Part of it is that I want them to figure out how to get their own bodies into trot, and part of it is because it gives me a chance to try and get the cue in there.    At least for me, what usually happens is I have some way to ask for the trot, but since I am now sitting on them, they don’t figure it out right away.  Then the horses figure out I want something different than a walk so they offer all sort of variations between walk and trot.  What I really want is a nice clean trot and I want to give the horse a chance to find it without a lot of direction from me.   A lot of extra movement or distraction on my part can interfere with the balance on a young horse and I am ok with letting them experiment a bit on their own. 

But once they are consistently offering it, I want to have a good working cue and I want to start putting it on the part of stimulus control that says don’t do it unless I ask.  One way to do this is to add the cue before they are going to trot anyway. I sometimes use cones for this. I will set up some cones and have the horse trot at a cone. Once the horse starts to offer trotting at a cone, then I add the cue before the cone and reward the horse for trotting off the cue, and not using the cone as a marker.   Once I start doing this, I don’t reinforce trotting when I didn’t ask. Remember that because you are using reinforcement, you don’t have to get all flustered or make your horse stop if it trots off cue.  Just don’t reinforce uncued trotting, ask the horse to walk again and then ask for trot and reinforce only those trots that you cue.

But what if the horse really just wants to trot and you feel it is getting frustrated? You can do what you did which is go back to walk, halt and just take trotting out of the list of possible behaviors for that session.   That would be working on the part of stimulus control that says the animal doesn’t offer the behavior off cue.   If the horse really wants to trot and I don’t want to allow it at all, I might do that.

Or I might switch gears and teach a new and completely different behavior so that the new behavior is now the new one the horse wants to offer.   I would leave the trot for a bit and then when the horse has forgotten about it (maybe within that same ride), I will ask for trot and reinforce the horse for trotting on cue. Then go right back to the other behavior or something else.  I just might not trot two times in a row. I do something else, sneak in a trot and then switch gears again. That way the horse doesn’t get fixated on the trot. I might Premack it (the Premack Principle) and ask the horse for head lowering. If he does it well, he gets to trot.  There are lots of ways to mix things up so that you can practice a bit of trotting without the horse taking over.

I will say that if my horse really wants to trot and I feel it is safe, I will give him lots of opportunities to do it one cue.  But that doesn’t mean I have to do it every day or throughout every session.  I might work on trotting one day and then not do it all the next day. I am not sure if this is true of most clicker trained horses, but my horses seem to carry a mental list of behaviors that are likely to be reinforced.   They have a lot of standard things I reinforce on a regular basis but then they add things as you ask for them within a session.  

For example, when Rosie learned to canter, she never offered it at all until I started asking for it.  Then she offered it when I didn’t ask for a while, but then she got some level of stimulus control so that when I came out and got on her, she had a mental list of possible behaviors: walk, trot, halt, back, baby give…  She would not offer canter at all in the early part of the ride. But at some point, I would cue the canter and reinforce it and her list would now be: walk, trot, canter, back, baby give…  - sometimes I think her list was: canter, canter, canter, walk, trot, canter, back, canter, baby give…

My point is that until I had asked for it once on cue, she didn’t offer it so if it was a day when cantering seemed like a bad idea, I just never asked and she never did it. If it was a good day, I would ask her to canter and recognize that cantering was now on her list (maybe a lot) and I needed to set things up so that I was prepared for unrequested canters and I balanced out that tendency with lots of exercises that kept calmer and more connected to me.

You asked about head lowering from the saddle. Alex teaches head lowering from a lifted rein cue on the ground so that you can do exactly the same thing from the saddle. It helps to do it a lot on the ground, then get on and ask for it right away. Most horses go “hey – I was just rewarded 50 times for dropping my head on the ground and now my rider is doing this new and strange thing, so I think I’ll just do what has the most recent strongest reinforcement history and drop my head.”  Head lowering is helpful to balance out exercises that generate energy. If you are not comfortable giving a horse that length of rein, mat work works too.  I also use lateral flexions to encourage a horse to soften and drop his head so that might be something to work on too.

Ok, I am running out of steam here. Hopefully this gives you some ideas.

Katie

Elverson, Pa.

www.equineclickertraining.com

p.s. I keep referring to the parts of Stimulus control:  Stimulus control has 4 parts:  the animal does the behavior on cue, the animal doesn’t do the behavior when not asked, the animal doesn’t do some other behavior when cued for the desired one, and the animal doesn’t do that behavior for some other cue.

The Premack Principle (simplified) states that a less likely behavior can be reinforced by permission to do a more likely behavior.    Horse wants to move:  I reinforce standing still by giving the horse permission to move off after he stands still.  According to Premack, the horse is now more likely to stand still.