Alexandra Kurland is the author of "Clicker Training for Your Horse" and "The Click That Teaches" video lesson series and step-by-step training guide.

Ms. Kurland earned her degree from Cornell University where she specialized in animal behavior. Today through her books, videos, clinics, and many articles, she has become a leading voice in the development of clicker training in the horse community.

I would like to thank Ms. Kurland for taking the time out of her busy schedule to discuss her clicker training method with us.

Before I answer this question, let me answer an even more basic one and that is what is clicker training?

Clicker training is a form of positive reinforcement training that uses a "Yes answer" signal to tell the horse when he has done something right.  We pair that signal with something the horse will actively work for.  We look for things that the horse wants, things he will "mug us" to get.  If a horse bangs on his stall door to get us to turn him out sooner, we know turnout is important to him.  If he drags us forward to get to his favorite sand pit to roll, we know rolling is highly valued.  We might be able to use these things as end of session rewards, but they aren't very practical to use during training sessions.  

So what else do horses mug us to get?  That's an easy answer: food.  With clicker training food is the reinforcer we most commonly use.  We link the horse behavior we want with the food reward the horse wants.  The click is the gate keeper, the rule maker, that makes the process work smoothly.  It says "yes" you just did something I really like.  Now I'm going to reinforce that behavior by giving you a goody.  

Clicker training sets up a win-win situation for both trainer and trainee.  The hallmarks of clicker training are eager, enthusiastic learners and delighted handlers.  That's a general description of clicker training.  You can clicker train anything: horses, dogs, cats, people, birds, even fish!  You name the species, and chances are pretty good someone has successfully clicker trained it.  Predator, prey animal, social herd species or solitary individual, all can be trained via the clicker.

So this brings us to your first question: 

1.  How did you discover the idea of clicker training horses? 

First, to say that I discovered something would imply that no one else had ever clicker trained horses prior to my doing it. That's not the case.  Karen Pryor, the author of "Don't Shoot the Dog",  writes about Clicker Training Horses in the late 1950s while she was working out the details of how to train dolphins.  And there have certainly been others who were familiar with the techniques being used to train dolphins and zoo animals who also had horses and began to experiment. But clicker training was certainly not part of the general horse community when I stumbled across it in the early 1990s.  

Clicker training traces its origins back to B.F. Skinners work in the thirties and forties.  It came to the horse world via Karen Pryor's work with dolphins and later with dogs.  

I read "Don't Shoot the Dog" on the recommendation of a friend who trained Irish wolfhounds.  Pryor's book wasn't a nuts and bolts dog training manual as the title would suggest.  Instead it was an explanation of the developing science of operant conditioning.  The language used by behavioral scientists can make your head spin. Terms such as positive punishment and negative reinforcement can be very confusing.  Pryor's book helped to sort out the terminology and to translate what the scientists were discovering into practical real world applications.  

My background was in animal behavior, so it made sense that after reading her descriptions of clicker training I would head out to the barn to turn my horse into a guinea pig.  There were no clicker training "how to" books available at that time.  I started experimenting, liked what I saw and just kept going. Over time I have developed a systematic, very detailed  training program for clicker training your horse.

The program can be broken down into four phases or levels.

The first phase is for all horses regardless of age, breed, discipline, training history.  This is your starting point where you and your horse are introduced to the fundamentals of clicker training.  Your horse learns how to use the information that the marker signal provides and he learns the rules of the game.

Those rules include a very basic one: mugging the horse treats pouch never results in a food reward.  Moving away from the treat pouch leads to goodies being produced.

The foundation lessons are: Targeting; The Grown-ups are Talking, Please Don't Interrupt; Head Lowering; Backing; Ears Forward; Stand on you Mat.

Except for the last one, these are very simple behaviors.  Their simplicity is important.  You and your horse are going to be learning some complex concepts.  If the behaviors you were teaching were also complex, that could overwhelm the system.  So instead you will be learning about timing, free shaping, capturing behaviors, targeting, incorporating negative reinforcement into a positive reinforcement training program, breaking your training down into small steps, developing cues and bringing a behavior under stimulus control, chaining, training by priority and many other important concepts using these simple behaviors. 

At the same time your horse will be learning emotional control, space management, patience, and polite safe manners around people.  And he'll be having fun learning these lessons.  He's going to become an eager, happy student who doesn't even realize that he's having a "lesson".  Training simply feels like a wonderful game.  That's a great state both for learning and remembering a lesson.

These foundation lessons are not a check list:  "Yup, got my horse to back.  Did that one.  Next . . . "  These are lessons you will be using and perfecting through the rest of his life.

Once your horse understands these basic lessons, they give you tools for managing his emotions as you work on more complex behaviors.  You want to take your time with this foundation work.  The more you perfect these simple lessons, the easier everything else becomes.  That's good news.  Instead of tackling the hard stuff head on, you'll give yourself a huge head start with the foundation lessons.  By the time you get to the more challenging issues in your horse's training, they'll be much more manageable because you and your clicker superstar know how to work together to be good problem solvers.

The second phase of clicker training is also for all horses.  In this phase you broaden your training out to improve your ground management skills.  How is your horse for such basic things as grooming, accepting fly spray, taking a bath, picking his feet up, etc.?  You'll use the clicker to clean up any issues here.  This phase of training can be a lot of fun.  I refer to it as turning the ordinary into the extraordinary.  I also liken it to the different levels in dressage.  

Do you have a training level or a grand prix horse?  Before you answer, think about the difference between a training level horse for the behavior standing still while mounting versus the grand prix level horse.  The training level horse will go up to a mounting block and stand still - with someone holding him.  The grand prix horse is left in the middle of the arena while his rider walks over to the mounting block.  The horse then comes when called - at a canter - past buckets of grain - lines himself up next to the mounting block and waits patiently while his rider gets on.  Now that's fun!  And it's very doable.  So no matter what your riding goals may be, everyone can aspire to have a grand prix level horse.  It just depends upon what you focus on.  You can have a grand prix horse for grooming, for picking up the feet for the farrier, for loading onto trailers, etc.  It's fun training, and it's fun to share.  

The third phase is basic safety both on the ground and under saddle.  This phase is also for all horses regardless of your riding goals, but how much time you need to spend focused on these lessons depends so much upon the individual horse and the skills of the handler.  

Here you learn clicker-compatible rope handling skills that help you deal with those moments when your horse does horsey things - when he spooks at a hidden goblin or barges past you in his rush to get to his morning turnout.  This phase shows you how to build on the work begun with the foundation lessons to develop a safe, well mannered horse both on the ground and under saddle.

It gives you the safety-net lessons you need to handle those moments when things unravel: when the proverbial herd of emus comes charging up the road and all the other horses on the trail ride are panicking.  Your horse is probably panicking as well, but the safety-net lessons will give you the tools to get things back under control.  They are taught in a kind, systematic way via the clicker.  Clicker training does not rely on learned helplessness or fear to control horses.  That means that you can not only have a safe horse, you can feel good about how you trained him.

The perfection of the safety net lessons leads to phase four of the training: training for performance.  What are your riding goals?  What do you want to do with your horse? What skills does he need to learn for the discipline you've chosen?  Is it reining, jumping, trail riding, dressage?  

At this point in your clicker training you'll know how to break a lesson down into small steps so that it is easy for your horse to learn.  You'll know how to design a lesson plan for achieving your goals.  And you'll also be mindful of your horse's well being.  Growing out of the safety-net exercises will be an understanding of your horse's balance.  You'll know what it means to ride for a sound spine.

That's my major focus in the riding.  Clicker training develops the most amazing relationships with horses.  These aren't animals we are going to ride for a season or two and then exchange for the next, younger model.  These are horses we love.

We want them to be with us for years.  With good nutrition and medical care, horses can live well into their thirties.  I want my horses with me for as long as possible, and I want them living in bodies that are comfortable.  

We all know of cases where hard riding has broken a horse down, left him with arthritic joints and a painful back.  But riding doesn't have to end with the horse hurting.  Good riding can actually help horses remain sounder longer.  

Beyond specific performance-oriented goals, phase four of the clicker training program examines this concept: riding for a sound spine.  You don't have to be an Olympic-level rider to use this work.  It's good for all horses, all riders.  An understanding of the work is built step-by-step beginning with the foundation lessons.  That means that everyone can have their own clicker super star.

   

Yes.  Clicker training asks a very simple question.  What do we want the horse to do?  It doesn't look at what we don't want. We don't want the horse biting us, stepping on us, barging over the top of us.  You really can't train a "don't".  But you can train a "do".  What do you want.  If you don't want your horse biting you, what do you want?  Well, for starters the answer might be stepping back a foot or two out of your space and standing quietly with his head straight, looking away from your treat pouch with his mouth closed and his ears forward.  Those are all positive statements that you can train.

So the next question becomes have you gone through a teaching process to teach him to give you these behaviors promptly each and every time you ask?  If the answer is no, you've got the beginnings of a lesson plan.  Which of these many elements does he know?  And how well does he respond?  Every time? Promptly? In every environment? With distractions?  The answer to these questions takes you straight to a good starting point for your clicker training sessions.

When I start a new horse with the clicker, I use protective contact.  That means there is a barrier between me and the horse.  If I am dealing with a pushy, aggressive horse, or one who is simply over-excited by the training process, I can simply step back of his space to keep myself safe.  "Aggression comes from a place of fear". That's an important statement to remember.  And it isn't just horses who become more aggressive when they're afraid.  People do, too.  And that often means they end up choosing harsh training methods.  In clicker training we avoid the things that  might trigger our fear by making good use of protective contact.

By using protective contact, I can avoid the harsh corrections fear may trigger.  Instead, I'll treat my horse like a zoo animal, keeping us both safe until he has shown me that he has enough emotional control for me to be in close to him.  Clicker training follows rules that are common to all good horse training methods.  One of the primary rules is we want to break the training down into small enough steps so that we can find a consistent "yes" answer.  That means that finding a starting point is doable no matter what your horse is like.  All you have to do is find a small enough beginning step.  

If you have a fearful horse, you can click for exhaling, for flicking an ear, for muscles relaxing slightly, for a tiny drop of the head.  With each click you are building trust and relaxation into the core foundation of clicker training.

With most horses teaching them to touch a target makes a good starting point.  It's an easy lesson to teach and once your horse understands targeting, lots of other lessons will open up for you, including a huge array of fun tricks such as retrieving, dunking basketballs, even painting.

Age doesn't matter with the clicker.  I've used clicker training with newborn foals, with aged horses well into their thirties and every age in between.  Breed doesn't matter.  Sound versus lame, mare versus stallion, abused versus never been handled. None of this matters.  They can all be clicker trained.

 

Yes.  Clicker training goes with you as you advance your horse's training.  The basic ground manners and handling skills that you teach via the clicker helps your horse "learn how to learn".  He becomes a good puzzle solver, an eager learned.  Now as your training becomes more complex, you'll really put the clicker to work for you.  It becomes a precise marker for excellence, for differentiating for your horse why that little bit of extra lift he just put into his stride is so much better than the four strides that preceded it.  It becomes a teaching tool that will help you with all aspects of your training.  And it is something you always have with you.  

We may begin the horse's clicker training by using the box clicker, a simple device for producing a consistent clicker sound, but we quickly switch over to a tongue click.  This means that clicker training is conveniently always with you.  Tuck a handful of treats into your pocket as you head out on your ride, and you are ready for any teaching opportunities you may encounter. 

4.  What are some of the advantages of clicker training?

Clicker training brings out the best in horses.  They become happy, eager learners who can hardly wait for you to get to the barn.  And it's not just the horses who are learning.  You're learning as well.  Your learning about good timing, how to break behaviors down into small steps, how to problem solve, how to balance one behavior with another to create good manners.  

By breaking training down into small steps, you make it manageable, accessible. That's wonderfully empowering.  Even a very novice handler can be effective with the clicker.  Break a lesson down into small enough steps, and both you and your horse can be successful.  Every time you click the clicker you are creating a step in your training.  So clicker training helps you find those small steps that lead to great success.

There are no disadvantages.  Now that may sound like a glib answer, one that overstates the claims of a training method.  I can hear some of you harrumphing - there must be disadvantages.  I suppose you could say there are disadvantages, they are the ones seen from the outside of the system looking in.  A non-clicker trainer might watch a horse going through his first couple clicker training sessions and point out lots of disadvantages. 

In clicker training we use food as a reinforcer.  We put the horse in a stall with a stall guard across the door and hold a target up to the horse to touch.  When the horse sniffs the target, we click and give him a goody.  As soon as the horse realizes that food is involved, he may lose all interest in the target and head straight for the treat pouch.  "You see," the nay sayer will say, "You're just teaching him to be muggy." But keep watching for a few minutes.  That horse is going to be learning that going straight to the treat pouch isn't what gets you offering goodies.  But touching the target - that consistently gets you to reach into your pocket and hand him goodies.  Your horse is going to think he has won the lottery!  He finally has you trained!  All he has to do is touch this funny thing you're holding and you give him treats.  Life is good!

The treats in our pocket start out as a distraction.  They get the horse to mug us.  But we've set the lesson up so we're safe. We're not taking unnecessary risks that might get us hurt.  And we're teaching the horse emotional-self control.  We're using the food to trigger behaviors we don't want so the horse can work through his emotions and find alternative behaviors that work better.  Mugging may be the natural response, but what he's going to learn is an alternative that serves him better.

We begin with a simple behavior, and safe set-up.  What we're teaching is something fundamentally important: emotional control.  So while others might see the food as a disadvantage, I see it as a strength.  The more I understand the use of food in training, the more powerful a training tool it becomes.  As your training progresses with the clicker, it's easy to get things out of balance.  Clicker training produces fast, eager learners.  The horse can get ahead of its handler.  Now someone might consider this to be a disadvantage. Suppose, for example, that you use the clicker to teach your horse to back.  He learns the lesson easily, so now all you have to do is look at him, and he's backing twenty feet!  You're so excited, you show all your friends at the barn.  They're certainly impressed.   None of them can get their horses to back more than a sticky step or two.  You're glowing with pride as they admire your horse's newly developed skills, that is until someone suggests you all go out for a trail ride.  They're all saddled up and gone, and you're still trying to get your horse to stand still long enough to get the saddle on!  Every time you walk towards him, he's backing away expecting his clicker treat!You haven't messed up and neither has he.  You've simply overlooked another of the training rules clicker training follows: for every exercise you teach, there is an opposite exercise you must teach to keep things in balance. You've simply swung your clicker training pendulum too far in one direction.  You got him backing beautifully, but you forgot to balance that with coming forward.

You've encountered a bump in the road, a bit of resistance, but don't worry.  If you don't notice a little bit of resistance, that's all right because it will get bigger.  And eventually it will get big enough to notice and that's when you'll do something about it.

Your horse will always tell you what you need to work on next. If you've been reinforcing lots of movement, you may find your horse no longer wants to stand still.  That's not a problem. Just go back into your foundation lessons and focus some attention on the stationary exercise of the grown-ups are talking, please don't interrupt."  Give that a high reinforcement value and your foot-moving horse will be happily standing still waiting for you to tell him when it's okay to move.

This is why I say clicker training doesn't have disadvantages. That doesn't mean that your training will be problem free if you use the clicker.  You will encounter bumps in the road, training puzzles, frustrations, anxious moments, but if you follow the principles and rules of good training, clicker training will help you sort these issues out.  

You'll learn how to listen to your horse, to understand better what he is trying to tell you through his behavior.  You'll know when you have asked for too much too fast in too hard an environment.  And you'll know how to back up in your training to find a simpler, easier step where you both can be successful.

All of this will make you a better trainer and horse owner.  But I know someone reading this will be sputtering with outrage. How can you say that clicker training has no disadvantages.  I suppose, if pressed, I can think of one.  You will not be understood by correction-based trainers who will insist that you must "get tough" with your horse when he misbehaves.  You will have to listen to their well-meaning advise.  They want you to be safe after all.  And you will have to proceed with your training, knowing that nothing you say is going to convince them that feeding treats to train a horse is anything but lunacy.  

And when your horse has worked through all these baby, learning-how-to-learn stages and has settled in to being a polite good citizen and clicker superstar, you'll have to be content with them saying: you were just lucky.  He was always a good horse. He was just born this way.  And anyway, horses settle down when they get to his age!
Getting Started Clicker Training for Horses Kit

We introduce the horse to the clicker using the six foundation lessons discussed above.  All of the lessons contribute to horses being polite around food,  They are all important, but the principle "leave it" lesson is the "grown-ups are talking, please don't interrupt".  It's a simple lesson that teaches the horse that mugging you never gets treats.  Moving his nose away from your pockets, click!, that's what earns him goodies.  "Grown-ups" is a key lesson that can be used throughout a horse's training anytime you need to settle things down a bit.  The details for teaching this lesson are explained in my books and DVDs.  (Visit my web site: theclickercenter.com for details.)

7.  Is a horse ever to young to start with clicker training?

No.  I have clicker trained newborn foals.  Obviously a foal is too young to accept treats, but clicker training is not click and feed.  It is click and reinforce.  With very young foals, click and scratch works wonderfully well.  The key is to click and scratch just until the nose starts to wiggle.  Just as we don't click and feed an entire meal of grain all at once, we don't click and scratch until the horse is satiated.  It's click and scratch a couple of times only.  

If at any point in this the foal reaches around to nuzzle you, the scratching instantly stops.  He'll learn quickly.  Keep your head straight and you get to enjoy the scratching.  Nuzzle the human, and the pleasure stops.  You can see details of working with a very young foal on my DVD "The Click That Teaches: An Introduction to Clicker Training."  Visit my web site, theclickercenter.com for details.

8.  What response do you usually get from people when they first hear about clicker training?,

It's a mixed bag that ranges from people who understand the concept right away to people who are very skeptical.  What I know is clicker training works.  It's a great way to train that horses respond wonderful well to.  But I also know it's not everyone's cup of tea.  So if somebody doesn't want to clicker train, that's fine.  It's good to have different training methods.  Contrast teaches. I hope we are all striving to find humane training methods that move us away from harsher tactics.  There are lots of training methods in use today that produce obedient horses but at a terrible price to the horse.  I hope those fade away as alternatives such as clicker training become better known.  

Any training method, if not done correctly, can produce behavior you don't want.  Notice I don't use the word disrespectful. That's become an overused word that can distract you from finding good training solutions.  When someone says a horse is being disrespectful, what do they really mean by that?  What are the behaviors they are seeing?  Often what they mean is the horse is pushing into the handler's space.  That's a behavior we can do something about.  When the horse learns to step back out of the handler's space promptly every time it is asked, others might now say the horse is more respectful.  As a clicker trainer, I would say he is under better stimulus control.  Is there a difference?  It depends upon how the horse learned to move out of the handler's space.  Is he responding out of fear of bad consequences or anticipation of good things?  Both get the basic behavior, but what are the unintended side effects?  I'd rather deal with the consequences of positive reinforcement than the fallout from coercion.

But let's suppose a novice trainer has tried clicker training and produced an over-eager horse who is becoming frustrated by his owner's clumsy timing and even clumsier rope handling skills.   He's feeling frustrated because he doesn't understand why sometimes she's clicking and other times she isn't, and his frustration is coming out in a bit of displacement aggression.Remember what I said earlier about resistance?  If you don't notice it when it's just a little bit of resistance, don't worry, it will get bigger.  This novice handler didn't notice her horse's frustration when it was just a little thing, so now it's gotten bigger and potentially more dangerous.  That doesn't mean the handler should abandon clicker training.  It simply means she needs to backtrack back to the foundation lessons.  

Clicker training, especially in the beginning stages, is a wonderfully forgiving training method.  As she reviews the foundation steps, she'll sort out her own timing mistakes and help her horse figure out what she wants.  She'll learn how to pace her lessons so she isn't going too fast for her horse or skipping critical steps.  She'll learn to read him better, and to diffuse his anxiety faster through simple training strategies.

So what may have seemed like a total mess, is just another learning opportunity.  People often rush through the beginning steps of any training method.  They don't yet have the experience to know how valuable those foundation steps are.  

Think of the concert musician who continues to practice scales, or the ballet dancer who takes class every morning at the bar. They know how important the foundation exercises are to their success.

As this handler continues to review the foundation lessons, the behaviors she's not liking will disappear.  Clicker training isn't just producing a well mannered horse, it is also empowering her.  Step by small step it is teaching her how to be an effective trainer.

At this point I'm going to put a plug in for my books and DVDs. People get into trouble with the clicker because it sounds so simple.  They see someone's youtube clip on the internet showing a horse doing fun tricks.  The training looks pretty straight forward.  You just click and give your horse goodies every time he does something you like.  So they go out to the barn and give it a try.  

Many of these people are successful.  They have a good relationship with their horse.  They've always fed treats, so that's nothing new.  Using treats for training causes no emotional upheavals.  They may run into dead ends though, thinking up ways to use the clicker.  They have this amazing tool and they have no idea what to do with it.  "Yeah," they'll say.  "I tried clicker training.  I taught my horse to fetch and to kick a ball.  But that was about it.  I don't use it much any more."

My horses who live in a clicker-training world would think this terribly sad. Others ching that same youtube video will try clicker training be overwhelmed by their horse's response. Their quiet, non-reactive horse is suddenly all over them with enthusiasm.  It's as though a long dormant switch has just been turned on.  Their horse's eyes are sparkling with excitement. They LOVE this game!!!!  This sounds like a good thing, but it can feel overwhelming.  The handlers quickly get into a muddle. Their response to clicker training: "Yeah, I tried that.  It doesn't work with my horse."Again how terribly sad.

Clicker training requires very little equipment.  Clickers cost just a couple of dollars and targets are easily made out of things you have in your tack room.  You don't have to buy special halters or bridles.  What you already have, (as long as it  fits and isn't hurting your horse) will work just fine.  

What you need to be successful with the clicker is not equipment, but information.  If you want, you can certainly reinvent the wheel.  I certainly went out to the barn and with no blue print to follow worked out a way to use clicker training.  But if you are a novice handler, or you are working with a difficult horse, you would be well advised to follow the blue print that almost twenty years of clicker-training experience has worked out.

The books and DVDs take you step by step through a progressive training program.  They show you how to teach the foundation lessons with the clicker.  They introduce you to free shaping, and they teach you about stimulus control, chaining, poisoned cues and other important training concepts.  

They teach you clicker-compatible rope handling skills.  They give you problem-solving strategies that empower you to become your own trainer.  They show you how to develop a safe riding horse, and how to develop your feel through microriding.  The books and DVDs begin with simple lessons so no one is left out.  

Even if you are a novice rider with a very green horse, you'll be able to follow the lessons.  They give you a road map to follow and to return to if you encounter snags in your training. Inventing the wheel can be fun, but once it's invented it makes sense to move past that step and to use what others have already worked out.  Following a well tested training program gives you a solid starting point.  The books are designed to give you the overall road map.  The DVDs then look in greater detail at specific steps in the training.  I can't come to your barn to help you get started with the clicker.  The DVDs serve that purpose.  So the first step in clicker training is not going out to the barn with a clicker in hand.  It's learning a bit about the training so you can be a better teacher for your horse.  If you would like a recommendation for how to get started, I suggest you begin with the book "The Click That Teaches: A Step-By-Step Guide in Pictures" and the DVDs "An Introduction to Clicker Training" and "Lesson 1: Getting Started with the Clicker."  That will tell you if you are going to enjoy this style of training.  If you decide this approach is for you, you can treat yourself to more lessons in the DVD series and to the other training books.

You can learn more about clicker training and the books and DVDs at my web site:theclickercenter.com

Have fun!  Oh, and one more quick comment.  There's a wonderful phrase which I have borrowed from John Lyons: "Go to people for opinions and horses for answers".  I use that a lot in my training.  It helps me decide what is fair and reasonable: which training ideas and methods should I borrow from other people and incorporate into the clicker training, and which should I pass by. 

You have only to do a quick scan of the hundreds of books, DVDs and webs sites that are available on training to know that there is a huge range of ideas to choose from.  If you are new to horses, it must make your head spin.  Who do you listen to?  How do you decide which approach is best? Is clicker training the way to go, or should you listen to the trainer down the road who is telling you you should never use food with horses.

"Go to people for opinions and horses for answers."  Ask your horse what he thinks.  But before you try these different methods out on him, you might think about this simple rule that I follow.  I never ask my horse to go through any training lesson that I can not stand to watch.  If I can't bear to watch while a trainer forces my horse onto a trailer, for example, I shouldn't make my horse go through the process.  Notice, that I say that I cannot watch.  It's not that I can't do.  I may not yet have the skill to take my horse through a particular lesson.  My horse might be much better off learning the lesson from a more experienced trainer.  If my timing is off, I'll only make it harder for him to learn.  But I should be able at least to watch my horse go through the lesson. And if a trainer says to you that you can't watch the session, for your horse's sake, do suddenly remember that you have an "urgent appointment" elsewhere and you and your horse need to leave.  Your horse shouldn't have to endure any lesson you aren't allowed to watch.  You don't have to confront the trainer.  Just find a non-threatening reason to take your horse away.

In my clinics we do rehearsals of training lessons.  This means we work out any of the mechanical skills needed before we go to the horse.  If there's rope handling involved, we have one person hold the snap end of the lead while the other person works on her clicker-compatible rope handling skills.  So with the clicker training, you not only get to watch everything that's done to your horse, you also get to experience what the lesson is like from the horse's end of the rope.  Until things feel clear, understandable, and fair, we leave the horses alone.  Rehearsals are a great way to judge both the fairness and the effectiveness of every lesson we teach via the clicker.  And if someone is not comfortable with a particular strategy we are using, that's no problem.  

One of the rules of good training states that there is always another way to train any behavior you are after.  So with the clicker we can always find a way of explaining to the horse what it is that we want in a way that the handler can be comfortable with.  That's great news if you are a novice handler.  We can break the training down into small steps so the lessons stay in sync with your handling and riding skills   That's what keeps training fun.  

And that really is a good place to leave this rather lengthy introduction to clicker training. Have fun with your horses! All the best!Alexandra Kurland theclickercenter.com

This article is copyrighted by Alexandra Kurland. Permission to use it has been given to Melinda Westrope for use only on www.greenhorn-horse-facts.com. Please ask me for permission to use this article outside of this web site..