What is Equine Clicker Training and How do you Apply it to Horses?

Clicker training is a training method that uses operant conditioning. The name comes from the use of a conditioned reinforcer (the click or other marker signal) paired with a primary reinforcer (food or something the horse wants).  This allows the trainer to mark correct behavior with the clicker and use positive reinforcement  to help the horse identify the correct response.  Clicker training encourages the horse to take an active part in the learning process and provides a basis for creating a positive partnership between the trainer and the horse.

For some of us, our first exposure to clicker training is the dolphin shows at the aquarium, watching a dog perform agility work, or trained animals at the zoo or circus. While this seems fascinating and interesting, most of us do not interact with our horses in the same way. We don’t tend to send them off to work at a distance or need them to perform complicated maneuvers without any human contact. Most horse handling involves contact.  So how do we clicker train horses, and why does it work for them as well as it does?

First of all, one of the great things about clicker training is that it is very flexible. In a lot of cases, you can just add the click and treat to your current training method.  Adding the click and treat to many traditional training methods makes the lesson clearer to your horse and helps the trainer learn to build behaviors one small step at a time.  But if you want to go beyond that, clicker training also allows you to train your horse using other methods that would be difficult without the precision of the clicker and the motivation of your horse.  For example, it is ideal for training liberty work or any behavior where you are not in direct physical contact (through your body or equipment) with your horse.   It is ideal for building your horse's confidence and changing his attitude toward riding and other handling.  It allow you to communicate in a clear and positive way with horses that have emotional difficulties ranging from those that are aggressive to those that are scared. 

I will describe here a few different ways to teach your horse using clicker training. Most of us use a combination of these methods at different times, depending upon what we are trying to teach.

Free Shaping: This is what we tend to think of when we first think of clicker training. You wait for the animal to perform a certain behavior, and then you click and treat. This marks the behavior and makes the animal more likely to repeat it. When you teach targeting (teaching the horse to touch or follow an object) as the first step in introducing the clicker to your horse, you are using free shaping.  One important note about free shaping is that you need to be able to recognize and reward any steps that are in the direction of the desired behavior, and not hold out for the finished result. With a new horse, you  might have to reward the horse for looking at the target if he is scared of it, and then build from there.

Molding:  This is when you physically put the horse or body part in the position you want. If you are trying to teach a horse to step on a mat,  you could pick up the foot and place it on the mat. This would be useful for a horse that was being calm about the training and just didn’t seem to be offering any behavior.

Use of pressure and release of pressure:  This is probably the most common way that clicker training is used with horses. Most of horse handling in general, clicker training or not, involves physical contact with the horse either directly through our own hands, seat and legs or through the reins, lead rope, lunge line etc…  Clicker training allows you to continue to use these same aids, but without the need to increase the pressure if you don’t get the desired response. With a young horse learning to give to pressure, you can just apply a small amount of pressure and wait. It might just be a slight press of your hand on the hip to teach him to move over. If you wait and click for any small weight shift in the desired direction, you can mark that shift with the clicker and then build from there until he is smoothly yielding his haunches. This is a great way to teach horses to become light and responsive without the need to increase the pressure to a point where either you or the horse become uncomfortable and react negatively.

Targeting:  Although this is really a learned skill that is usually taught by free shaping, it is such a useful tool that I wanted to mention it separately. If your horse learns to target, you can use targeting to teach your horse other skills such as leading, trailer loading, moving body parts, touching scary objects etc..  It works better than luring would be the direct use of the food. Luring would mean that instead of teaching your horse to follow a cone around, you would use the treat itself to get the behavior.  Luring works if the horse knows they are not allowed to take the treat until you click, and you replace the food with a target at the earliest possible time. But targeting is usually a better choice as the food itself can be distracting and can make the horse overexcited.

As a final note, people often say that they can see how this works on the ground, but what about riding?  You can clicker train from the saddle in the same way you train from the ground. Your horse will learn to stop at the click and bring his head around for the treat. You do need to choose treats that can be given easily from the saddle and you need to give your horse time to figure out how to eat with his bridle on.  It is actually a great way to increase flexibility and your horse’s behavior when accepting the treat can provide useful information about his mental state. And yes, your horse does get to stop, but remember that this is during the teaching process, where going through the process of restarting and getting the behavior from scratch is more useful to learning than continuing a behavior that the horse is already in. Once the horse is reliably offering the behavior, then you can go for longer duration and stretch the time between clicks. 

I hope this explains a little bit about how to apply clicker training to horses. If you want more information, there are other web sites with more detailed explanations.  You can find them on the links page.  Don’t restrict yourself to horse training sites. A lot of the information for training dogs and other species can be directly applied to horses.