Depuis les Gorces

Long neerdy blogpost to prepare for a coaching session for me and Amalhia. I know some might think I'm silly, over-bisounours or bad at creating a relationship with my horse... But this is who I am and where I wanna go.

My goal

My goal seems simple :

Having a calm and relaxed horse who’s happy to work with me. I don’t have big expectations regarding what “work” means.

If I reached my goal, most training sessions would look like this video in which I find her very relaxed and happy:

But for us, the reality is more complex / difficult and often, she is more grumpy, like on this video in which, to me, she starts on a 2/5 on our grumpiness scale to end at a 4/5.

In this video, we were at a place / orientation in which Amalhia usually isn't comfortable. I've edited the video to have the first minute, but she stays at this level of grumpiness for most of the training session (4 minutes).

Our problem – What's going wrong

I will start with what is bothering me the most in our relationship with Amalhia. Then I will describe other pain points that I can live with before describing also what's going well !

What's bothering me the most

1. Grumpy even before we start

Sometimes (I would say 40% of the time by now, but it used to be always, and then most often), she makes a grumpy face when I come to her for a clicker training session, despite nickering when I open the gate. When a training session starts like this, I don't manage to improve her mood during the session.

When I’m not sure of her mood at the beginning of a session, or during a session, I gently stroke her on the neck as in the video below:

• If she is relaxed, she won’t react and keep her ears forward, as can be seen in the first part of the video.
• Otherwise, she will turn her ears back, have a tense face, and even sometimes she goes as far as pinning her ears and shaking her head, which had not happened recently.

2. Grumpy during training

When she is “OK” to work, she can go back to a grumpy face after a click or during a behavior she doesn’t like, which is most of the behaviors that I ask from the ground.

In this video, she is perfect until I move toward her bucket. She then follow me while turning her ears back, as it is often the case in most horses I've worked with in stick to me... She can do worse !

What is annoying but I can live with:

3. Anxious with the farrier

She gets super anxious when the farrier picks up her feet : she might not give her feet, or she might paw or withdraw her feet, or even kick in the air. And when the farrier walks away, she would sigh. For the past two months, I’ve been the one trimming her feet, so problem solved as long as her mood is okay at the start..

4. Refusing to leave the paddock

She sometimes stops and refuses to move on when we are about to leave the paddock to go on a hack or to the riding center (I’ve stopped leaving our property)

5. Loading and travelling

She hates the trailer. It’s hard to get her in, and when I got her to travel in a lorry/truck (so supposedly more spacious and more stable for her), but on her own without a friend, she clearly was resigned, even refusing to eat food. (and I’ve spent a lot of time working on loading …).

What’s going great :)

• She canters over to me from wherever in the field when I call her.
• After being very spooky for 2 or 3 years, she has become a charm under the saddle at the riding center.
• She is very well mannered, never has bitten or kicked or …
• She is a master of “4 feet on the ground”. I can ground tie her nearly everywhere with large Distance, Duration and Distraction.
• She has many behaviors on cue (but with a grumpy face).

What we have tried to change so far

1 – Ignoring her when she is grumpy

About a year ago (or two ?), I re-listened to Shawna's podcast, and in one episode about frustration, she recommends to stay near the horse looking at your phone until he starts to relax. So I decided to apply this rule :

When Amalhia greets me with a grumpy face when I stroke her on the neck once, I stop interacting and wait until she gets bored. I can check her emotional state by stroking her. If she is still grumpy, I wait some more. When she is no longer grumpy, we can start a training session.

The first 3-4 sessions, I waited about 45 minutes with her by my side, not leaving, not moving, while I was on my phone. Sometimes, she would start licking my coat, and could do that for a very long time. She was also showing some “calming signals” : yawn, rub her head on her leg, ... She never tried to offer other “taught behavior” than 4 feet on the ground.

2 – Improving training

Last fall, I went to a conference with Ken Ramirez and I understood two mistakes I was making :

• Error #1, I wanted to phase out food by using an intermittent schedule of reinforcement. I would sometimes (maybe often) click without feeding when I decided that the behavior was well understood.
• Error #2, I was far from an errorless training, and I let her make many mistakes without reinforcement during shaping.

So I tried to apply 2 rules when she was not grumpy at the beginning of the session:

Always treat after a click

Try a ratio of 2 out of 3 requests are easy behaviors for her (behaviors where she has a happy face while performing them), and they are all clicked.

I realized that there were places and orientation (looking towards the fields) within the paddock where she was more often relaxed than others, so I tried to start our sessions there.

3 – Mane brushing

I also realized that me brushing her mane was her favorite “behavior” and sometimes, when she looked a bit upset, she would start to relax when I had brushed her mane for a while.

So I started to take her to places where she was not OK to work but seemed OK to have her mane brushed. I think that at that time I wouldn’t treat because she would have a grumpy face again when she heard the click. I added the rule :

If she is at a place / orientation in which she is not comfortable, only do grooming, then give a jackpot and bring her back to her paddock.

It's hard sometimes to follow this rule as I'm tempted to ask / try other things... And I often wonder whether I should feed her treats without click just to create a positive reinforcement history there. Or on the contrary, the food makes her frustrated so I should rather fade out the food until she is more relaxed...

4 – Free interactions time

I’ve also started to spend some time in the paddock without food but with a brush to offer scratches, often after the clicker training session.

• I wait for anything she would do directed to me (or to herself like starting to “self-scratch”),
• Then I scratch for 10 seconds (or more if she makes THE happy face)
• Then I stop and wait until she moves towards me or makes a movement, since her default is standing very still.
• If she makes a face because I’ve missed the spot or gone somewhere she dislikes, I stop at once and walk away a bit .

I feel that she is starting to understand that she can communicate differently than saying nothing and threatening me when I make a mistake like scratching not where she wants.

5 – Free food

I've also noticed on Shawna's videos, but also on Ken Ramirez and Emilie Larham videos with dogs that these trainers give a lot of free food during training, and they barely talk about it. I've recently realized that for a long time I've mistaken the « click ⇒ treat » rule for its reciprocate : « only give food when there is a click ».

We also have a dog now that we obviously clicker train. With my partner, we have coined the expression « cuteness kibble » for treats that we toss to the dog when he is begging in a particularly cute way.

So I've started feeding treats to Amalhia during the training between two clicks when she is with an attitude I like. The truth is, I was already treating these moments, but I used to add a click before treating. I don't know which method is best...

Where are we now ?

I think we are making progress even though it seems so slow… I do 2 sessions of about 5 to 10 minutes each day while the other horse in her field eats her pellets.

Starting a training session

The most difficult part for me is starting the training session. I’ve realized that she is more relaxed if I follow a strict routine :

1. I feed her friend, 2. I ask her to go to her bucket, 3. I come to train, click and treat.

If I’m too slow, or I do something else like feeding her friend in another place than the usual one, I’m screwed.

So, when I walk to her :

• Sometimes I click the fact that she is at her bucket, and usually it leads to a grumpy face when I arrive with the treat, as if she were unsure of getting the treat… And then I’m unsure of giving her the treat and reinforcing this attitude… so I sometimes wait for a few seconds hoping that she will settle (it sometimes happens, like 50% of the times), and then treat;
• Sometimes I come to her and I stroke her on the neck before deciding on treating or not.

For both approaches, I then do :

• Happy face → Click, treat, start training
• Grumpy face → I try something in these 3 options :
  • 1. Put some food in the bucket and leave.
  • 2. Do some “manners” training, with a criterion of relaxation (wasn’t working) and recently, a criterion of behavior (immobility, like in the video below, seems better)
  • 3. Brush her mane until she relaxes, and I treat when she looks more relaxed.

Currently, she is grumpy / tensed about 50% of the time when I come to her. This is the hardest part for me because I'm not confident on how to deal with her being grumpy. I'm just convince that ignoring it doesn't work since it was my approach for the first 8 years of our relationship, and it had only worsen the situation.

During session

• While she is OK, I try to ask for 2 easy behaviors for which she doesn’t “frown” out of 3 behaviors, and I will cheat by considering that : having 4 feet on the ground while being brushed is a behavior
• When I see she is getting upset (ears go back when I click, …)
  • try to ask for easier things
  • After ~10 clicks with no marked improvement in her facial expression, I give her a jackpot and leave the session.

My questions

1. What should I do when I approach her and she is not relaxed (grumpy face) ?
2. Is it possible that I've reinforced her grumpiness, and if yes (I'm convinced I did), what might have been reinforcing ?
3. What should I do when she gets really upset because she didn't understand a cue? (I don't have video of this behavior, but it does happen.)
4. When should I feed without clicking ?
5. I know I'm not fun, and neither is she having fun. But it's so hard being around her I feel like I'm with a toxic husband and any error from me can cue the grumpy face which clearly is a punisher for me. What should I change ? Should I change ? 😢

Our story – you can skip it, I felt I needed to write it down

Amalhia arrived in our family when she was 6. She hadn’t been manipulated beyond putting a halter on and going from the stable to the field.

She was a very nervous horse, and I spent a lot of time just walking her in hand in her field to get her to relax before starting any training. We were lucky at the time to have a super large field with no mud. Training started smoothly mainly in positive reinforcement... except for feet picking. Her feet were horrible when she arrived and I felt pressure to be able to trim them quickly.

When we moved to where we live now, she was OK at walk under the saddle, I could trim her feet at liberty, but she was very anxious with the farrier. At our current place, we have smaller fields which get really muddy during winter and with loads of stinging insects during summer. But we can go to an arena a 15-minute-walk away. For a year or two, whenever we went to the arena, she would spook to something and make big swerves. I would stay calm, reinforce a lot when she was less tense. And she progressively settled until one day she became a very nice horse to ride : forward-going and relaxed. On the other hand, working with her from the ground was getting less and less fun. She was doing well with the basics, but with a very grumpy face, which got at me. Her arousal was counterproductive and she looked very upset when she mixed up some cues. One day she got violent colics, went to surgery, had a difficult recovery, and I decided that I would now prioritize creating a better relationship over riding. I have had a hard time figuring out what I was doing wrong.