I am THRILLED that you're doing videos on clicker training. I know you've done it for years, some pretty sophisticated behaviors, actually. But having you train it is going to be so much fun!! It will inspire me to move forward some more, I'm sure. Thanks so much!
It is so great to see you using positive reinforcement training, Warwick! It can certainly be a powerful tool in the right hands. Excited to see Rupert's future progress!
I was really into classic natural horsemanship and western riding and completely changed my ways 2 years ago. Now i only train with consent based R+ as far as possible. I stopped looking up to many big horsemanship trainers, because I started to notice how stressed and uncomfortable these horses often are and how little these trainers cared about keeping them under threshold. You are one of the only ones that I still watch. If there's any way to make natural horsemanship horse friendly again, it's probably your way.
Always great to see horse training that is positive-reinforcement based. Not to mention helping to break down the 'old school myths' of "feeding a horse by hand will teach them to bite!" Rock on!
In dog training, we "load the clicker". Meaning, you would make that noise you do in place of the clicker, then give a treat. Do this for about 10 times or until the horse gets faster at responding after the noise. This will make an association between the noise and the reward. Also, we usually start with the lowest value treat that the horse (or dog) will take and up the value later or for more difficult behaviors. I train dogs, but have learned quite a bit from your channel.
Yes, Thats something I could have done. I was told to do it with a horse thats not really engaged. This one is, so I decided to skip that step. Thanks!
So grateful for the content you are sharing Warwick. Though the world we live in today is so well connected, most people are disconnected.. showing kindness in any educational form should be a prerequisite. Thank you for helping us become more aware and connected individuals. We appreciate every snippet of gold nugget info!! Keen to try this with my Benny today!
This is so great. Thank you for sharing this uncut, and explaining principles once again. Plus this makes me feel a little better about how much trouble I have keeping my hands out of my treat pouch 😂. It's a lot harder than it looks!
its interesting how language can shape human perception when it comes to training. ive heard "needing to know the answer before you ask the question" described as "the subject should be consistently offering the behaviour before it can be put on cue" by Karen Pryor which made sense to me. I'm not a professional trainer, I just do it as a hobby, but I am really impressed with your skill of putting training concepts into words, which is something I find difficult. Great video!
I appreciate your willingness to try new things, (even though I know you told a commentor that you've dabbled with it for 6 or 7 years). I like when you're able to give examples of your principles using different training techniques. It'll be interesting and fun to see how you and Rupert get on.
You click as they take the treat, which makes them associate the sound with the treat. Using words as GOOD, also work, but the principle of the clicker, is that it's distinct and can be heard from a distance. When training dogs, hard means that if they try to steal the treat, from the bag, your hand or whatever, they don't get it. They learn that to get the treat, they have to wait. Click, treat. So: Click treat, repeat. If they start to be greedy/pushy, wait until they stop trying to get the treat, then click and treat. After a while, you can wait for them to give eye contact. Click treat. They start to figure out that they should look for answers. And give you different behavior, you can click and treat on those you want to reinforce. Then you can give a cue, like sit, and wait for the right behavior, then click and treat. As it progresses, they can start to offer more behaviors before treat, click as reward, but treat comes after doing two things perhaps. And that's how you keep building, so in the end, you can click and only treat after the session is over... 😊
Love the fact you're doing videos on this! 🙂 I've been clicker training dogs for over 20 years and LOVE the communication and enthusiasm of this method of training (I use a marker word rather than a clicker though as doing freestyle training rather meant I ran out of hands for a clicker as well!) A few years ago I was asked to help train a male cow, who was a couple of years old. He was fantastic and within 10 minutes of his first training session he was doing send aways to a cone marker (I think it was over 10m away) for the click to then come back for the treat he'd earned (apple I think.) I said all training needed to be done (at least initially) with us on the other side of the fence, and the treats went into a feed bucket for him rather than from our hand. I wanted to keep everyone, (including him) safe.
Great to see this--I am video library subscriber for the past couple of years, but recently have learned clicker training from another coach. I can't wait to see how you incorporate R+ into your work, looking forward to learning.
Hey Warwick, I'm +R training with a horse who is terrified of the target. We did some desensitizing but he still does not want to touch or sniff it with his nose. Do you have any advice for this situation? Thanks for the video!
As Warwick says, "anything". Here's an idea, since "anything" is very broad and I know I got overwhelmed with choices when I was starting: I sometimes use an old wooden/bamboo spoon meant for cooking, because it's got a nice long handle and the round bit at the end can be the "target", but it's very bland and brown and un-scary.
You can also try starting with the horse just looking at the target & reward that first, then turn his head toward target & reward that etc till he gets closer & closer to actually touching it. Sometimes you need to break the steps down to help the horse, also important in these situations is to keep your rate of reinforcement high, reward even the tiniest of tries from the horse, do NOT withhold reward looking for perfection... I thank Peggy Hogan & Monty Gwynne for teaching me this, it has been a game changer in my training! Good luck.
Warwick, what is the pouch called that you’re using for treats? Excited to see you using some +R in your videos. I started dabbling in it the end of last year and it’s been a lot of fun for myself and the horses I work with. Would love to see you make this into a series with Rupert!
The timing of the click or noise is critical. Teaching tricks is all about timing and starting with things the horse does anyway. This horse could learn to smile in a few sessions.
Do you teach positive reinforcement aside from clicker training, or a mix? I can’t find much literature on positive reinforcement and I want to learn about it.
“Positive reinforcement” is a psychology term/ concept from B.F. Skinner’s Operant Conditioning Quadrants rather than an actual “method” of training. From what I have seen, usually clicker-training like this is considered the easiest way to apply the concept of positive reinforcement. I highly recommend reading into Shawna Karrasch, Karen Pryor, and Alexandra Kurland’s work if you’re looking into the method of clicker training as it applies to horses. Saint Louis Zoo also has some great videos how they use clicker training with other species.
Hi don’t know if you still need extra literature but Connection Training is also fun. They are on UA-cam and also wrote a book by the same name. Person below made good recommendations.
Hi Warwick I have been following you for years, I ordered your book and now I must say I am bit surprised with you doing clicker training. What made you even think about it? I would have had assumed that you would be the last person on earth doing this. I read some studies and discussed clicker traing with dogs - and I can relate to that - but certainly not with horses. My opinion.
If you've been a subscriber to my videos for a while you would know that I've played with it a bit for 6 or 7 years now, so its nothing new to me, I just haven't delved a long way into it. Thought I'd try it a bit with one horse and see how I go.
When training with food find something that is tasty enough to be a reward, but not so tasty they fixate and stop using their brain on how to get the next one. You teach the horse (or other animal) that the route to the foodreward always is a detour, never a direct line to the source. A bit like a vending machine : first insert coin then get cookie.
Yr bridge is not going to be effective because it requires to much organizing of your mouth and breath. Will always be too slow. Will also confuse the animal if you eat too many beans!
I am THRILLED that you're doing videos on clicker training. I know you've done it for years, some pretty sophisticated behaviors, actually. But having you train it is going to be so much fun!! It will inspire me to move forward some more, I'm sure. Thanks so much!
It is so great to see you using positive reinforcement training, Warwick! It can certainly be a powerful tool in the right hands. Excited to see Rupert's future progress!
I was really into classic natural horsemanship and western riding and completely changed my ways 2 years ago. Now i only train with consent based R+ as far as possible. I stopped looking up to many big horsemanship trainers, because I started to notice how stressed and uncomfortable these horses often are and how little these trainers cared about keeping them under threshold. You are one of the only ones that I still watch.
If there's any way to make natural horsemanship horse friendly again, it's probably your way.
Always great to see horse training that is positive-reinforcement based. Not to mention helping to break down the 'old school myths' of "feeding a horse by hand will teach them to bite!" Rock on!
In dog training, we "load the clicker". Meaning, you would make that noise you do in place of the clicker, then give a treat. Do this for about 10 times or until the horse gets faster at responding after the noise. This will make an association between the noise and the reward. Also, we usually start with the lowest value treat that the horse (or dog) will take and up the value later or for more difficult behaviors. I train dogs, but have learned quite a bit from your channel.
Yes, Thats something I could have done. I was told to do it with a horse thats not really engaged. This one is, so I decided to skip that step.
Thanks!
He looked to love the snack! I enjoyed his big ‘ol smile😊
Love this! Thank you.
So grateful for the content you are sharing Warwick. Though the world we live in today is so well connected, most people are disconnected.. showing kindness in any educational form should be a prerequisite. Thank you for helping us become more aware and connected individuals. We appreciate every snippet of gold nugget info!! Keen to try this with my Benny today!
You have a great pedagogical talent, thank you very much!
This is EXACTLY what i needed for my next session with my friend's lovely but bargy and kinda spoiled gelding. Thank you!
Hey Warwick!! Just got to say...LOVE THE HAIR!!!!!!! TOTALLY LOOKS GREAT ON YOU!! 😃😃😃😃😃😃😃😃😃😃
What a brilliant way of demonstrating that good training is good training regardless of the method used.
I love that you are doing clicker training. I started my mustang with clicker training and also using your principles.
I would love to see more of this!
The reason I love watching WS is I always learn something new.👍🏼
This is so great. Thank you for sharing this uncut, and explaining principles once again. Plus this makes me feel a little better about how much trouble I have keeping my hands out of my treat pouch 😂. It's a lot harder than it looks!
its interesting how language can shape human perception when it comes to training. ive heard "needing to know the answer before you ask the question" described as "the subject should be consistently offering the behaviour before it can be put on cue" by Karen Pryor which made sense to me.
I'm not a professional trainer, I just do it as a hobby, but I am really impressed with your skill of putting training concepts into words, which is something I find difficult.
Great video!
I totally enjoyed this book
I appreciate your willingness to try new things, (even though I know you told a commentor that you've dabbled with it for 6 or 7 years). I like when you're able to give examples of your principles using different training techniques. It'll be interesting and fun to see how you and Rupert get on.
Excellent! Thank you Warwick for venturing out into clicker training!🎉
Looking forward to more! 😊
Clicker training! . It’s totally enhanced my relationship with my horses. Glad you are trying it.
You click as they take the treat, which makes them associate the sound with the treat.
Using words as GOOD, also work, but the principle of the clicker, is that it's distinct and can be heard from a distance.
When training dogs, hard means that if they try to steal the treat, from the bag, your hand or whatever, they don't get it.
They learn that to get the treat, they have to wait.
Click, treat.
So:
Click treat, repeat.
If they start to be greedy/pushy, wait until they stop trying to get the treat, then click and treat.
After a while, you can wait for them to give eye contact.
Click treat.
They start to figure out that they should look for answers.
And give you different behavior, you can click and treat on those you want to reinforce.
Then you can give a cue, like sit, and wait for the right behavior, then click and treat.
As it progresses, they can start to offer more behaviors before treat, click as reward, but treat comes after doing two things perhaps.
And that's how you keep building, so in the end, you can click and only treat after the session is over... 😊
Actually. The click marks the behavior. It tells the animal the behavior earned them a treat .
I taught my cat a lot of tricks with clicker training and positive reinforcement, so it definitely works wonders with any animal! :D
Love the fact you're doing videos on this! 🙂 I've been clicker training dogs for over 20 years and LOVE the communication and enthusiasm of this method of training (I use a marker word rather than a clicker though as doing freestyle training rather meant I ran out of hands for a clicker as well!) A few years ago I was asked to help train a male cow, who was a couple of years old. He was fantastic and within 10 minutes of his first training session he was doing send aways to a cone marker (I think it was over 10m away) for the click to then come back for the treat he'd earned (apple I think.) I said all training needed to be done (at least initially) with us on the other side of the fence, and the treats went into a feed bucket for him rather than from our hand. I wanted to keep everyone, (including him) safe.
Protective custody!
Are you going to do more of these types of videos, I love this sooo much!! ❤
By George ! I think he’s got it !
Great to see this--I am video library subscriber for the past couple of years, but recently have learned clicker training from another coach. I can't wait to see how you incorporate R+ into your work, looking forward to learning.
Hey Warwick,
I'm +R training with a horse who is terrified of the target. We did some desensitizing but he still does not want to touch or sniff it with his nose. Do you have any advice for this situation? Thanks for the video!
Use something he's not scared of. Anything.
As Warwick says, "anything". Here's an idea, since "anything" is very broad and I know I got overwhelmed with choices when I was starting: I sometimes use an old wooden/bamboo spoon meant for cooking, because it's got a nice long handle and the round bit at the end can be the "target", but it's very bland and brown and un-scary.
Lay it on the ground
You can also try starting with the horse just looking at the target & reward that first, then turn his head toward target & reward that etc till he gets closer & closer to actually touching it. Sometimes you need to break the steps down to help the horse, also important in these situations is to keep your rate of reinforcement high, reward even the tiniest of tries from the horse, do NOT withhold reward looking for perfection... I thank Peggy Hogan & Monty Gwynne for teaching me this, it has been a game changer in my training! Good luck.
Warwick, what is the pouch called that you’re using for treats?
Excited to see you using some +R in your videos. I started dabbling in it the end of last year and it’s been a lot of fun for myself and the horses I work with. Would love to see you make this into a series with Rupert!
I'm not sure if you are being a bit deadpan by replacing the clicker noise
There's a name for that expression Rupert gives at 4:03, but I'm blanking on it presently.
It's called the flehmen response, horses do it to smell things better :)
He's upstaging you!
The timing of the click or noise is critical. Teaching tricks is all about timing and starting with things the horse does anyway. This horse could learn to smile in a few sessions.
Do you teach positive reinforcement aside from clicker training, or a mix? I can’t find much literature on positive reinforcement and I want to learn about it.
“Positive reinforcement” is a psychology term/ concept from B.F. Skinner’s Operant Conditioning Quadrants rather than an actual “method” of training. From what I have seen, usually clicker-training like this is considered the easiest way to apply the concept of positive reinforcement. I highly recommend reading into Shawna Karrasch, Karen Pryor, and Alexandra Kurland’s work if you’re looking into the method of clicker training as it applies to horses. Saint Louis Zoo also has some great videos how they use clicker training with other species.
Hi don’t know if you still need extra literature but Connection Training is also fun. They are on UA-cam and also wrote a book by the same name. Person below made good recommendations.
I think Ray Hunt said
Make the right thing easy and the wrong thing difficult
But not hard
Hi Warwick I have been following you for years, I ordered your book and now I must say I am bit surprised with you doing clicker training. What made you even think about it? I would have had assumed that you would be the last person on earth doing this. I read some studies and discussed clicker traing with dogs - and I can relate to that - but certainly not with horses. My opinion.
If you've been a subscriber to my videos for a while you would know that I've played with it a bit for 6 or 7 years now, so its nothing new to me, I just haven't delved a long way into it. Thought I'd try it a bit with one horse and see how I go.
When training with food find something that is tasty enough to be a reward, but not so tasty they fixate and stop using their brain on how to get the next one. You teach the horse (or other animal) that the route to the foodreward always is a detour, never a direct line to the source. A bit like a vending machine : first insert coin then get cookie.
Now I understand what clicker training is! 🤔
Yr bridge is not going to be effective because it requires to much organizing of your mouth and breath. Will always be too slow. Will also confuse the animal if you eat too many beans!