Scottish Clicker Centre

Frequently asked questions

Won’t using food make my horse mouthy?

Not if you are using the very predictable rule of CLICK – TREAT. You only give a treat if you have clicked. That’s the deal. Your horse will not take long to realise that going directly to your pockets gets nothing. He will instead offer you a behaviour he knows will work, like Grown-Ups are Talking, with his head out of your space – click!

This is why it’s important to spend time going over the foundation lessons, to make sure you and your horse understand the rules around clicker training. Good clicker training produces calm, polite and mannerly horses that are a joy to be around. And what’s more, it can help horses that don’t yet have these attributes, to get there.

Does this mean I will always have to click and treat?

To me it makes sense to reward nice moments. This makes me feel good, my horse feel good, and increases the chances he will offer the nice moment again. It makes good training sense. So whenever I am with my horse, I have a bumbag on, and am ready to reinforce the things I like. Even if I am mucking out, there are going to be different things my horse can do, some desirable, some not. He may stand politely in a dressage pose at one side of the stable, or he may crowd into me and knock the wheelbarrow over, or a whole range of other behaviours. To me it makes sense to be ready to click the things I like, whether it’s during a “training session” or not. Remember, if you’re around your horse you are training him, intentionally or not.

How can I use the clicker for riding?

This is very easy to do. You simply click the moment you want, and your horse will stop and bring his head round for a treat. You don’t have to leave the saddle or do anything differently.

Won’t my horse always keep stopping when I click?

Yes. That’s the deal you set up with your horse, click – treat. But remember, you won’t always be clicking straight away, once you have a behaviour you like, you can add duration into it. So initially you might click the trot transition, but later, you might require two circles of trot before you click. And then you may decide that your horse must be in trot, and also in a nice bend before you click. So your criteria will change as your horse’s training evolves.

Do I always have to treat when I click?

Yes. You want your horse to have faith in the process, which means you have to stick to your side of the bargain. Every time I click, I treat.

My horses isn’t interested in food, Will it still work?

The concept of clicker training is click and reinforce. This doesn’t necessarily mean click and treat. Food is effective with most horses, but sometimes you may have to use another reinforcer. Is your horse scared? Would having the handler click and then back away from the horse be a better reinforcer to use just now? Or maybe your horse is a foal, and is too young to manage hard food, so a scratch on the neck might work just as well. The key is to find a reinforcer that will work for your horse, and go from there. Remember, if a behaviour is not improving, it’s not being reinforced, so it may be time to reassess what will motivate your horse.

When I go into the barn, my horse starts offering all the behaviours he knows, even when I don’t want them.

Once you have a behaviour established, you can get it under “stimulus control”. This means putting the behaviour on cue, so that it only happens when you give the cue, and not when you haven’t asked for it. The best way to do this is to get the behaviour happening first, and then introduce a cue. There may be a pressure cue that has already evolved out of the process, or you may want to add a verbal cue. Once your horse knows behaviour will only be reinforced when the “green light” of a cue has been given, he will stop offering responses off-cue.