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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.

It's summer and I am spending less time on the computer. I will probably not add a lot of new content in the next few months, but I will add new material when I can. In the fall, winter, and spring, I spend a lot of time on the yahoo clicker lists answering questions. I often don't have time to do that during the summer, or I can't keep up with current threads. But I do have some time to answer specific questions if I can do it over a period of a few days. So, if you have a clicker training question that you would like answered, you can email it to me and I will get back to you. What I might do eventually is post these as an "ask Katie" section on the web site so that answers to common questions are available to other people.

One of the regular features on the web site has been my clinic reports from the Alexandra Kurland clinics in Groton, NY. You can find them in the "clinics" section on the sidebar menu. Last year, I did not write clinic reports for each clinic, but I did write a "Loopy Training" report which was an article on the training strategy that Alex was teaching last year. This year I will also not be writing individual clinic reports as Alex is presenting new material and I want her to be the first one to get it out to non-clinic attendees.

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

Clicker Expo 2010

I was fortunate to be able to attend Clicker Expo 2010 in Lexington Kentucky in March of 2010. This was my fifth Clicker Expo and I was happy to see familiar faces and meet some new horse people too. The horse people are definitely in the minority at this event, but we stuck together and I think we all learned a lot. If you have never heard of Clicker Expo, you can read more about it on Karen Pryor's website www.clickertraining.com or read some of my previous articles on what I learned at Clicker Expo. My previous articles are listed in the training section. I think the name "Expo" is misleading because this is not a series of demonstrations or about vendors selling products. It is a three day conference with scheduled lectures and learning labs. In the learning labs, you can bring a dog and get hands-on help from the faculty and fellow clicker trainers or you can be an observer and get to watch some training.

The Expo has a core group of faculty and then there are a few new speakers each year. They run five sessions at a time and it is always hard to choose my schedule as I would often like to be in two places at once. Sometimes I have to choose between a topic of interest or a speaker who I particularly like. There is some repetition from year to year as some faculty members teach the same topics each time, but they often add new material and some review is helpful too. One thing I have learned over the years is that since learning to be a better trainer is an ongoing process, the same information can be interpreted or implemented in different ways depending upon a lot of different factors. Revisiting familiar topics is always a good thing.

With this in mind, I chose a mix of familiar faculty members (Ken Ramirez, Steve White, Jesus Rosales-Ruiz, Kay Laurence, Karen Pryor) and new presenters (Eva Bertilsson and Emilie Johnson Vegh). If you are noting that Alexandra Kurland is not on this list, it is not because I didn't want to see her presentations. We discussed this before the Expo and I opted to skip her presentations since I get most of the same information from attending her clinics. If you are not familiar with Alex's work and do get a chance to got an Expo, I strongly recommend that you attend her sessions. to continue reading, click here

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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