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All these things are possible with a clicker trained horse. With clicker training, you can teach your horse all the skills he needs and have fun at the same time. With clicker training, your horse learns faster because he is actively trying to learn what you are trying to teach him. You are truly working together toward a common goal. To learn more about clicker training and this site, please read the articles on the sidebar menu and also go to about this site.

Welcome to the site. For more information on what I have recently changed, be sure to visit the What's New page to learn about new members and features. I do try and add something new to the site every month, either an article or some pictures or updating some of the pages.

I am currently working on a few projects and could use some input from other clicker trainers. One is a page that is going to be the +R page for ways to shape behavior using only positive reinforcement. I think sometimes people get stuck and end up tagging clicker training on to whatever they are doing, or not using it at all for some training issues. Can we come up with a good list of ways to teach traditional behaviors using only positive reinforcement? This is part of a larger project on using the 4 quadrants of operant conditioning with clicker training, but it is a good place to start. You can email ideas or examples from your own training to me.

I would like to add more horse stories to my horse stories section. Do you have a special clicker trained horse you would like to share? If so, please send me an email. They can be short or long, just a story about one event or about a change over a period of time. People learn so much from stories and find them inspiring. Sharing is a nice way to spread the power of clicker training.

Clicker Expo registration is open for the 2010 Clicker Expos which will be held in Portland, Oregon (Jan 29-31) and Lexington, Kentucky (Mar 19-21. The Expo is an educational conference with lecture and training sessions that cover many aspects of clicker training. If you can get to one, I highly recommend it. For more information, go to www.clickertraining.com. I have written a few articles on my experiences at Clicker Expo and these can be found in the training section.

I will be attending ClickerExpo in Kentucky and love to meet other equine clicker trainers. There will be a number of other horse people going, so if you are going to be attending, let me know and we can get together.

Loopy Training

I didn’t write any clinic reports this year as the focus of Alexandra Kurland’s clinics this year was Loopy Training and it was so new that I was not quite sure how to share it. Now that I have seen Alex’s presentation a few times and gotten to explore it with my own horses, I thought it would be fun to share what I found of interest in Loopy Training and some practical applications. If you have not heard of Loopy Training, Alex has four posts that discuss it in detail. They are post 6476 (Jan 2009), 7852 (July 2009), 8226 (Sept 2009) on the_click_that_teaches yahoo group and post 77926 (Aug 2009) on the clickryder yahoo group. It is worth reading them one or more times as there is a lot of information in them. My effort here is to pull out some of what I considered the main points and provide some examples of how the Loopy Training model can improve the training experience for horse and trainer.

My intention was to write something short and to the point <smile>, but I guess I can’t do that anymore, so this is long. In an attempt to make people less likely to get bogged down, I have included a summary of key points at the end. My hope is that you can read the long version, print out or save the summary at the end and it will be enough to remind you of some of the important parts of Loopy Training.

Alex uses the term Loopy Training as a description of training that establishes and builds on “clean training loops.” A clean training loop is a training loop where there is no extra behavior between the desired behaviors, the animal gets clicked, gets its reinforcement and goes right back to work. She refers to them as training loops because when we are training, we are often doing more than one repetition of a behavior or repetition of a sequence of behaviors at a time. Therefore instead of looking at a training session as a series of isolated events each marked by a click and reinforcer, we should look at a training session as an ongoing stream of behaviors, clicks and reinforcement. A good training method starts with a small unit of behavior and progresses by creating increasingly more complicated loops. As Alex says, good training is Loopy Training, so she is not inventing something new, she is just giving it a name and looking more closely at what defines good training.

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Training Tip: Cues often evolve out of the training process, but if you want to see if your horse really understands about cues, try free-shaping some behaviors and then attached "unrelated" cues to them. See how long it takes to get the behaviors under stimulus control. Just doing this will teach both you and your horse a lot about cues.

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