Home » Plants & Animals » Horse Talk » Clicker Training

Clicker Training

© Patricia Celley

Step aside Monte Roberts, Pat Parelli, John Lyons, and other "natural" horsemen; there is a new training fad on the scene -- clicker training.

Clicker training involves using a small hand-held device (the clicker) and treats. When a horse performs a desired action or behavior it is immediately followed by a clicking sound and a treat. This type of training is usually associated with training other types of animals for television productions.

G.B. Jones-Santagate, a licensed Equine Behavioral Specialist in MA (USA), calls it the "Positive reinforcement training sweeping the horse world."

I tend to be extremely skeptical of fads. I have stated before that in my experience the best trainers will use a combination of many methods, adjusted to the particular horse they are working with. Most of the "new" training methods have been used by good trainers for many years.

What annoys me most about these fads is the incessant ringing of the cash register. When searching for "clicker training + horses" eight of the top ten matches were websites designed to sell the fad. G.B. Jones-Santagate offers a six week online training course at Equi-click101. Shawna and Vinton Karrasch offer a variety of training kits at On-Target-Training.com. Their deluxe kit sells for $145.00. Click Ryder offers everything from t-shirts, to buttons to instructional material on clicker training. Their products are offered in German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish and Icelandic, reaffirming the world-wide scope of this fad. Click Ryder links to Alexandra Kurland's web site which also offers clinics, videos and books. However, these are all good sites. I encourage you to visit them because they contain a lot of general information for free, and are very well done. While I still heard the ringing of the cash register, I also started hearing a lot of things I liked about clicker training.

Another reservation I had about clicker training is that it uses treats as rewards. If you read my article "Sweets and Treats" you know I am an advocate for limiting the use of treats. I was encouraged to learn that the click becomes a "bridge" between the behavior and the treat. The reward actually becomes the sound of the clicker, not the treat. The treat is used to reinforce the "bridge" as needed.

I was pleasantly surprised with the results of clicker training on a nervous mare at our barn. She was the alpha mare in the pasture, her ground manners were pushy, and she was very nervous and distracted under saddle. If any mare had the potential to become aggressive or all consumed with the treats it was her. I worked with her after her first three sessions of clicker training and found her to be less pushy, and much calmer. It certainly seems to work with her.

The copyright of the article Clicker Training in Horse Talk is owned by . Permission to republish Clicker Training in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.