Scottish Clicker Centre

What is clicker training?

Clicker training is a system by which you reward your horse for work well done. You press a “clicker” to make a noise the exact moment he does something you like, and then you follow it with a reward.

Once your horse has learned that the click means “right answer – you’ve just earned a treat” he will be motivated to work out how to make you click again. He will offer behaviour that he knows will work, so that he can earn a click and treat. This creates a very willing participant indeed - clicker trained horses love to learn!

Once you and your horse have mastered the basics, you can go on to use the clicker to help you train anything, such as:

Ridden work, de-spooking, tricks, problem solving, etc. And even dressage at liberty!

Using a marker signal

By using a clicker, you can let your horse know WHAT he’s getting the reward for. An example that works well is imagining you are riding your horse in canter, and you get a beautiful moment that you capture with a “click!” Even though your horse has to come back to a trot, walk and then halt to get his treat, he knows it was for back in the canter that he earned it. So he can go and reproduce that wonderful moment again, and earn more goodies. Without a clicker you usually end up rewarding whatever he is doing when he gets the treat (like standing still). For this reason a clicker is sometimes referred to as “bridging” or “marker” signal. It bridges the time gap between correct behaviour and reward, even if it takes a while.

Teaching new behaviours

You can use clicker training to help you train whatever you want. By using “shaping” you can move in small steps towards your end goal. This means you can break your desired behaviour down into achievable parts, and reward your horse along the way. So, for example, if you wanted to teach your horse to retrieve, you might start by teaching him to touch a target, and once that was happening, you might only click the tries where he mouthed the target. Once he was consistently mouthing the target, you might click on the moments where he picked it up slightly…. And then build up until he was lifting it higher and higher each time – and so on until you had a retrieve. So you will have used shaping – breaking the behaviour down into small steps so your horse continued to be successful.