Clicker training continues to gain popularity and more people are becoming aware of it.
The more people that become aware of it the more reasons seem to emerge about why people think it is a bad way to train horses.
This definitely intrigues me as I have only experienced great success with the horses I have trained and I end up with highly motivated horses who have superior body awareness and go on to do high school dressage moves at liberty.
Why would people think that an end result like that could come from a 'bad training method'? Many of the reasons I hear for not using clicker training, which uses food as a reinforcer, are based around a lack of understanding of what it is and how it really works.
The most common one that I hear is; hand feeding horses is bad and makes them bite.
Hand Feeding Horses Makes Them Bite Hand feeding horses definitely can make them bite, if you don't know how to or take the time to teach a horse to politely take food from your hand.
Most people don't know where to start in teaching their horse to take food politely from their hand.
If they do hand feed their horse and the horse starts to bite or mug them rather than dealing with the issue they simply avoid hand feeding the horse.
Avoiding the issue does not make it go away.
Its His Breed! We have to ask why some horses are ill-mannered around food and others are extremely polite.
Many people would claim it is the nature or the breed of the horse, that some horses are more 'foody' than others.
Do we really believe that some horses were just born well-mannered? That theory can be eliminated when we think about horses who started out life well-mannered and after being at a certain yard, or with a certain trainer/owner things started to go downhill.
The same is also seen where some horses seem to be 'untrainable' yet in the right hands they become great equine citizens who are safe and fun to be around.
Mechanics Matter What this all leads to, and what I have experienced, is that it all comes down to our own body mechanics; how clear and consistent we are with our horses.
The horses read our behaviour so well, to a level of detail that most people are not even aware of, that to the horse we often must seem incredibly clumsy in our body language.
What we need to start out knowing is that the mechanics of our bodies matter to the horses.
That means they are seeing detail that perhaps we are not seeing in our body language when we hand feed them.
When a handler is largely unaware of their body language that is often when I see frustration build up in the horses (not just around food).
As soon as we make the mechanics of the handler clearer and more consistent the frustration levels in the horse drop and what we have emerging is a horse who is becoming emotionally and physically balanced, and polite around food.
The key to safely hand feeding horses and teaching them to be polite around food is about knowing what we want from them and understanding how our body language, or mechanics, are affecting the horse.
Hand feeding is not bad for horses, it does not create horses who mug us and bite.
Poor body language, lack of consistency and clarity from the handler create horses who mug us and bite.
Mechanics matter! Don't let poor body mechanics (body language) get in the way of good training.