Episode 308 In Conversation Pt 4 From Foot Care to Round Pens, Relaxation Or Learned Helplessness

This is Part 4 of a 4 part conversation. In November Dominique and I spent a delightful afternoon going through a list of topics Dominique has been accumulating. We talked the afternoon away, so I’ve split our conversation into four episodes.

In Part 1 we talked about trailer loading, the microshaping strategy and what criteria we use to decide when to end a training session.

In part 2 I described a procedure for teaching a horse to lift his feet that uses body part targeting. This lesson helps develop skills in the handler that are needed for teaching lateral work.

I also described a fun lesson where instead of round penning horses, we round pen people. The lesson teaches handlers the choreography of ground work.

In part 3 we consider another critical handler skill and that’s fast decision making. Often we look at training progressions with the focus on what the horse is learning. Of course the question that interests people is: What am I going to be teaching my horse?

In order to teach well, there are skills the handler needs to learn. Many of these are obvious physical skills such as learning good rope handling techniques. What is less obvious are some of the “invisible” skills such as fast decision making. These invisible skills are the “grease” that makes all the physical skills work smoothly.

So in this episode we focused on flexible thinking and fast decision making. We review the progression of lessons that develops this skill for the handler and we consider why this is such an important skill.

We also look at shaping on either side of the click and more details about teaching foot care, especially related to handling the hind feet of potential kickers.

In Part 4 we continue this discussion of teaching horses good foot care manners. We share some farrier stories and then consider if, when, and how to fade the click and treat out of the foot care process.

Our discussion takes us to listening to horses and how that phrase is interpreted by different trainers. What gets normalized in our training expectations? When trainers talk about relaxed horses, what does that mean? We make a distinction between relaxation and learned helplessness. Do we recognize the difference? This brings us back to the earlier conversation about round pens where the end result in many styles of round pen training is learned helplessness. We want to keep the sparkle in the eye and that’s what we see with clicker training.