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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 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.

I try to add new information to the site every month. My goal is to provide information to help people be successful with clicker training. If there is a topic that you would be interested in reading about, or you have suggestions for articles, please let me know.

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.

Please note that my email address has changed from katie.bartlett@att.net to kabart315@gmail.com.

Thinking Outside the Box

Tips on capturing, shaping and getting your horse to offer behavior using +R

This article is the third in a series on understanding how clicker training uses the quadrants of operant conditioning to train behavior. In the first article, I discussed the 4 quadrants of operant conditioning and their place in my toolbox as a clicker trainer. In the second article, I discussed how to use positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement together to train behaviors in such a way that the spirit of positive reinforcement training was not affected by the use of potential aversives such as pressure. In this article, I want to share some ideas for how to train with positive reinforcement as the main training tool, as opposed to intentionally combining it with other quadrants.

I originally titled this article "How to Train Using +R Alone," but that title never worked very well for me. For one thing, I think it's pretty hard to be sure that you are using +R alone and somehow the topic brings up various debates about what methods can be used if the training is still going to be labeled as +R. Referring to training as only +R also seems to create some divisions between people and leads to moral and philosophical debates over which quadrants they are using. I didn't want to get sidetracked by those issues because which quadrant you use is not the point of this article. This article is just a closer look at what training strategies you can use if you choose to train with +R.

By focusing on +R in this article, I am not pretending that a horse working on its own to get a click and treat is not under some kind of pressure, because it is. And I am not saying that only using +R is better. For some horses, the absence of input from the handler is actually very frustrating and an approach using only +R in a training session creates frustration. But there are times when I do want to train using only +R as much as possible, and if I want to do that, I need to have a +R toolbox of ways to get behavior started. Just as I have a toolbox of ways to use pressure and release to jump start behavior without creating an uncomfortable training situation, I need to spent time developing my +R toolbox.

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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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