Clinic was wonderful, with a great bunch of people who really want the best for their horses. We did quite a lot of well planned work with each horse, with breaks, over the day so good progress was made by all and by all accounts they also really enjoyed themselves. Making people feel better is a wonderful thing, such a privilege! Mostly ground work was covered, including introducing a youngster to the clippers for the first time, but one lady decided to do ridden work as well with her gorgeous horse Alfie. I've got an Alfie too, so he gets an extra gold star just for the name!
Sorry to go on about the weather, but, this is Scotland! We were incredibly lucky in that most of the weekend consisted of howling wind and torrential rain, but we stayed dry all morning and only got slightly damp in the after lunch session. I must also say a huge thank you to our host and to the participants who provided delicious home cooking for us all to do our best locust impersonations with!

Hatching plots and plans to make my intro to clicker training clinic next month as interesting and informative as possible! Really looking forward to it.
It's going to be a really good day, hopefully fun for everyone too, two legged and four legged!

I keep jotting down things to include at odd moments, so that I can give people a good grounding in understanding and training while keeping it easy to take in and apply.
Currently in the middle of writing enable-equine-aims sheets, so that everyone can elect a behaviour to aim for and break down the training into chunks which can be easily and discreetly understood and rewarded.

I know that many clicker trainers do not use any form of discipline other than the witholding of rewards. For some horses, most of the time, this works, however I have concluded that teaching a horse the meaning of "No!" is something that for safety's sake alone is very useful. My reasoning is that in a social situation with other horses there are a wide variety and severity of warning and aggression signals used by horses. It is not an alien concept to them and used responsibly will have no more detrimental effect on the horses trust than it does between a mare and foal.
Let me be clear, I am not advocating harmful or painful punishment in any way.
I am however saying that appropriate training of the command "No!" is a very useful addition to a horse's repertoire of commands. It means that in situations which could be dangerous to the horse or anyone else, the horse already has an understanding of a command which essentially means "Whatever you are doing, stop it..."
I came across a very pertinent example with one of my clients this week. A lady who is already very skillful in training her horses was working with a young mare who was experiencing her first season. The horse was working very well to begin with but then started acting exceedingly grumpy and was threatening with teeth and heels, essentially treating my client as one of the herd. This was one of those occasions when having taught "No" saved the day and enabled us to finish the training on a really good note. 

I had a day of perfect timing yesterday, each time I stepped out of the car, the house and the indoor school, the torrential downpour abated until I was undercover again!

I've started working with a couple of mares. One of which has been a brood mare for a few years and another who is new to the experience. Both are quite spooky, the younger one in particular. So I intend to do a lot of de-spooking work with them, so that they don't teach their foals to be worried about everything! Also, when they come back into work afterwards there should be no more spooking at scary fillers... as they are both showjumpers.
I did the introduction to the click on Wednesday with the younger one, her owner doesn't like to feed by hand so I'm using a feed scoop to put the treats into, which is working very well. She's a very lovely horse, who keeps trying, ever so gently, to steal my cup of tea!

Had a particularly good evening session yesterday with the delightful Oscar. 15 hands of charm and cheek, very good fun! He's been introduced to the first steps of clicker training by his owner, but she wasn't sure exactly how to take it on further, or how fast, it turns out that Oscar is very bright and in an hour of work with me picked up lots of new cues for various behaviours. I concentrated on working with calm concentration, loose schooling, standing still to order, giving to pressure and the beginnings of lateral work.
He was very funny during his lesson, to start with he would only go anti-clockwise, the right rein was, according to him, just too hard! So it took some patient work to persuade him that clockwise was not only possible but actually pretty easy. At that point, having learned this great new thing. He concluded that I really only wanted him to go on the right rein, so he refused to go round to the left for a while, I'm afraid I laughed at the poor chap, spent a few minutes teaching him follow-the-hand to get which direction you're supposed to go round and then he worked beautifully! At the end of an hour we were delighted with his progress, and he just wanted to carry on... A very good session.

I was very fortunate on Wednesday that Claire Finley, an excellent professional equine photographer was at the demo. She's taken some brilliant photos and I shall put them up on this site when I get them!
Many thanks Claire!

Well that was a brilliant night. We over ran on time by quite a margin, but that was because it was going well, and the last horse was quite nervous and I wanted to end on a good note for him. That and all the standing around chatting afterwards!
I really enjoyed myself and I've had some great feedback from people who came. The horses were great, There was a 2yr old warmblood colt who was fantastic, an absolute sweetheart and very enthusiastic! The final horse was an elderly gent and very nervous, he was too worried to be interested in food rewards but responded well to being rewarded with rubs and scratches, I thought at the start of his session that I would be lucky to make much progress with the succession of scary objects, as he found the plastic bottle I was using for targeting pretty worrying, but to my delight he accepted that, then increasingly large and crackly plastic bags, and even the golfing umbrella! Though I did need to go back to using a tongue click as he found the noise of the clicker too startling. I usually use a tongue click with horses as it leaves my hands free, but I wanted the audience to be able to hear the clicks!

Leaflets printed.
Carrots chopped.
Herb treats chopped into 4. (Recommend secateurs for this)
Hat, lunge line, scary plastic bag and umbrella packed.
Horses confirmed, also dog.
Now the really important stuff, like deciding what to wear ;o)
I'm really looking forward to this, there are one or two butterflies but nothing much. I hope everybody has a good time, animals included.

It's a pity, but selecting the third horse for the demonstration on Wednesday was cancelled because the owner of the horses I was going to see had lorry trouble while she was out with a horse. Hopefully she will be able to get is sorted soon without any trouble, though I doubt a garage will get her going again in time for Wednesday!