Training BLOG

Training horses is an often solitary pastime. Sometimes we crave that solitude but at others it would be nice to have someone by your side: to offer advice, to bounce ideas off and occasionally just to remind you that tomorrow is another day. Sometimes just knowing that other people have frustrations and setbacks can be quite reassuring. Other trainers may act as a source of ideas even if they only provide a living list of what NOT to do! In this BLOG you can follow along with us as we try and achieve our training goals; succeeding at times, failing at others and generally just making mistakes and trying to rectify them in the way that those of us who choose to spend our lives with the horse generally do.

So we decided that it might be fun to train Jasper to do the Spanish walk - One of those decisions made when the sun was slowly setting behind the eucalypts, the beer was cold and every conversation had, as its backdrop, the murmur of happy birds. Things always seem easier from the patio, with the day mostly over but the challenges of the next yet to be contemplated. In the cold light of dawn the practicalities had to be decided upon. We opted to use a combination of positive and negative reinforcement - a choice that probably upsets both the clicker trainers and the classical purists but satisfied us in our quest to both apply and learn more about the science of horse training.

The negative reinforcement aspect would come from the tap tapping of a dressage whip to produce the movement of the front leg (which would be ceased the instant the result was acheived) and the positive reinforcement would come via a conditioned reinforcer - we use the word "good" followed by a small food reward. Jasper has already been taught to take food from our hands gently - a simple exercise that takes no more than 10 minutes and prevents a great deal of stress for those of us who already are a little bit challenged in the finger (or number of fingers) department. Just present the treat in your palm but when the horse lunges with wide open jaws turn your hand over so he meets hard knuckles instead of juicy carrot - do be careful not to get your hand bitten - a gentle nudge against his lips is usually enough to deter even the most determined food snatcher.

Jasper is also pretty clear about the use of the dressage whip - he is trained to go forward, stop and yield his hindquarters using the whip. If we were starting this exercise with another horse we would spend a few weeks making sure their responses in groundwork were well consolidated and that the whip elicited no fear responses. It was hard to decide exactly where to use the whip on Jasper's leg - would the back of the cannon bone or the back of the upper leg be the best place? Maybe behind the knee would be best? We decided to try the back of the upper leg (just below the elbow) first but were prepared to change positions if that failed to work effectively. Surprisingly it took only a few little taps before he moved his leg forward slightly. So I stopped the tapping immediately, said "good" and gave him a bit of carrot. Several repetitions later I could get the leg to life a little with just one small tap, so we called it a day.

Next day we were in a bit of a quandary - what were we to do if we couldn't get a larger leg movement with the little taps? With no preconceived ideas in mind we started out the training session, the leg movement was reliable and we could produce it with just a little tickly tap but it didn't look like any intermediate stage in the evolution of Spanish Walk. My subconscious was like a Fundamentalist insisting that the giraffe didn't evolve because a giraffe with a medium length neck is no better off than a antelope but my logic suggested that a itty bitty step is better than no step at all. So I called it quits and went for a canter and was just about to lead him back to the paddock when I thought I'd try again. Bingo! He pulled out a great big forward reaching step on the first attempt - lucky there were still some carrots in the bottom of the bucket!! The next session he produced the big step first and I was really excited. Unfortunately my human-ness kicked in and I reinforced a couple of lesser steps in the next attempts. So back to, not square one but maybe square three and time to curse my rotten timing. Arghhh!! The next session he produced nice big steps from light aids and it was time to try them while walking. Talk about a challenge for my timing. I have to try and tap the back of the leg as its about to come off the ground. It seems to work best when the walk is very, very slow. I'm not sure if this is because it gives Jasper time to process or if it allows my coordination a little bit more leeway.

The really nice thing about positive reinforcement is that the horse quite often offers the behaviour without the cue and that makes it seem less coersive and more like co-operation. I'm ignoring the steps that I haven't asked for at the moment and hoping that time and repetition will produce stimulus control.

Once the near fore was reliable; that is one or two light taps produced a nice, generous step each time, it was time to add some forward progression. This was the trickiest part in the process to date. Timing is everything as I had to learn to ask for a little forward step just as the leg was in the air. The goal at this stage was to be able to do a few steps of spanish walk with one leg only. Its really interesting how even behaviours like these adhere to the Australian Equine Behaviour Centre training scale. Once you have a clear basic attempt, (or one single step) you can ask for a whole stride. Then multiple strides, multiple strides on a designated line, multiple strides on a designated line with a nice contact and then outline and then everywhere. Jasper caught on pretty quickly and I think the addition of some positive reinforcement in the form of carrots and the bridging stimulus "good" was effective. I have opted to use a word as a bridge instead of a clicker or whistle as I am not co-ordinated enough to handle the clicker and the reins and the whip and I always lose other apparatus, so it seemed the simplest and most reliable method. Once Jasper could do about 6 one legged strides I started to train the opposite front leg. He trialled picking up this leg quite high heaps quicker than the near side leg. It probably took about 4 minutes to get the step shown here.

One of the most exciting bits was putting the 2 legs together. Funny thing was he seemed to learn this part pretty quickly except he forgot to bring his back legs too and ended up standing in a very peculiar way with his back legs out like a saddlebred. Now I know for a fact that men can't multi-task!! Anyway, I'm leaving the back legs until the front ones are well under stimulus control. In this photo and the next you can see Jasper's first two consecutive spanish walk steps. As it falls into the category of behaviour chains I'm cueing him for the least well practiced behaviour first (off foreleg) so that the most practiced behaviour comes at the end of the chain when things start (occasionally!) to fall apart.

Its definitely starting to look a little bit like spanish walk now. You'll notice that I haven't asked for this movement anywhere other than along the long side of the arena - same place every time. This is to take advantage of the horse's excellent spatial memory and predisposition to behave the same way in the same place. Next I'll work on rhythm and straightness.

Once the horse can do Spanish walk in a rhythm and straight the next logical step seems to be doing it with a rider on board. The first response is pretty small as expected but with plenty of repetitions and lots of rewards it very quickly gets bigger and bigger.

Give the cue on both sides so you can control both front legs. Its easier at this stage to have two whips (one in each hand) so you don't have to swap constantly. Strangely enough its quite hard to feel how big the steps are - they feel really small. So, someone on the ground to report (and hand out carrots) is really useful.

Now, put it all together, one step after the other. Its quite straight forward and Jasper really appears to be quite enthusiastic. This is what behaviourists call 'instinctive drift' - the tendency of trained behaviours to drift towards hard-wired ones.

Shame about the wonky rider but apart from that I think this is o.k. This is the third step in a sequence of four or five. Now... if I could just figure out a way of using it in a practical way!