This year's clinic themes

Note: I hope you have a cup of tea, several sandwiches and a big chunk of time. This is a very long post. I began it during a train ride from one course location to the next back at the beginning of June. Five train rides later, plus a long flight home, and it is finally ready to send out. Enjoy!

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I've delayed writing about this year's clinics for quite a while. That's in part because I've been having so much fun giving them, I haven't had time to write about them. At the moment I am on a train looking out over some beautiful countryside and I have a few hour's journey ahead of me to think about what I have been learning so far this year.

Every year the clinics take on a general theme. Within that overarching theme every clinic is different. It's not just that the horses very much dictate what we cover. Every clinic is different because I learn from every clinic. They are a huge shaping process. I just finished up a weekend clinic that's a great example of this. The set up of one of the stables revealed a very neat pattern which I will be using in the future. Without that particular horse in that particular setting, I might not have seen that particular puzzle solution. Now I'll weave it into the mix and it will change how the overall lesson is taught to the next group of horses. So the clinics are constantly shifting both in their content and the degree to which we can tease apart the structure of a lesson. However, overall throughout the clinic season there is an over arching theme.

The themes evolve in part out of the work I do with my own horses over the winter. Robin and Peregrine always seem to point me in the direction of the next great layer in the training.

Last year's clinic theme was loopy training. If you are new to the list and aren't sure what I mean by that, I'll refer you back to the archives. I'm working on a loopy training DVD which I'll get out later this summer. I've been collecting some excellent video for it. It's a wonderful organizing concept for structuring clicker training.

At the start of my winter travel break I was very much focused on loops and was looking forward to exploring them further with my own horses. So that was my starting point. In February I presented at the "Art and Science of Animal Training" Conference which Jesús Rosales-Ruiz puts on at the University of North Texas. The keynote speaker, Dr. Robert Epstein, B.F. Skinner's last graduate student, gave several presentations on creativity and shaping. His work has a lot of relevancy to what we are doing. After the conference, I wrote a long post describing his talks.

(Just as an aside, I am working on a new web site. It was supposed to be done in January - oh well. When I get it up and running, I'll get these posts up on it so they will be easier to access.)

I thought there was a great deal in his talks that would be of value to extract for the horses so I headed into the spring clinics with his work buzzing around in my head.

People have lots of motivations for teaching. Some like to fix things, some like to understand things better. The pleasure I get from teaching is being in a creative process. Figuring out how pieces fit together - how understanding new puzzle pieces lets you see the next layer of the training more clearly is what I enjoy. Clicker training is such a perfect fit for this kind of puzzle-solving enjoyment. There's always another layer to explore, another way of tweaking the shaping process to make things easier or to create even more amazing connections.

Given this, it's no wonder I enjoyed Epstein's presentations. He showed us a short video clip from his research on "insight". The question was: how are puzzles solved? What explains the sudden "ah ha" that allows an animal or a person to solve a puzzle? His work evolved in part out of some experiments in the puzzle-solving ability in chimpanzees that the German psychologist Wolfgang Kohler explored.

Kohler was working at a primate research center in the Canary Islands when the First World War broke out. He was stranded there throughout the duration of the war. During that time he devised a series of puzzles to solve for a group of nine chimps. In one of set of puzzles he hung bananas out of reach in a cage which contained various crates and some long sticks. The chimps figured out that they could reach the bananas by standing on a crate and swinging at them with a stick. Kohler called this type of puzzle solving insight, but he couldn't explain what "insight" was.

That's where Skinner and Epstein stepped in. They demonstrated that insight was a product of component behaviors. Epstein taught a pigeon to peck at a target for food, to stand on a box, and to push the box. These behaviors were all taught as separate, isolated behaviors. He then hung the target out of reach, but with the box present off to one side of the experimental chamber.

It took the pigeon less than a minute to solve the puzzle. After trying unsuccessfully several times to reach the target, the pigeon spotted the box. It first hopped up on the box, discovered that it could not reach the target from that distance and then began to push the box in the direction of the target. It was quite obviously sighting the target to get the box lined up underneath it. So much for disparaging remarks about bird brains!

In the study pigeons which were missing one of the component behaviors - pigeons that had not been trained to push the box, or to stand on the box - failed to solve the puzzle.

Clinic Themes
I've been thinking about component behaviors. What are the component behaviors that we need for a given task? As I think about the clinic horses I work with I would say: if the components are present, the training goes smoothly. When one or more components is missing, the training encounters speed bumps and snags. For example, I recently watched a horse being loaded into a side-loading horse trailer. For those of you who haven't seen these trailers, picture a normal two horse straight load. But instead of the ramp being at the back of the trailer, the whole long side of the trailer folds down to form a large ramp. The horse walks up the ramp, then swings itself sideways so an inner partition can swing across to close it into the inner stall. Once on, the trailers seem very comfortable for the horses. They travel backwards with lots of head room and space.

It's the "once on" part that can be tricky. The horse I watched was willing enough to walk up the ramp. He was even willing to turn so his head was in the right position, but he didn't understand the moving-the-hips-over part. He could move his hips, but only if his front end went forward - off the trailer. Hmm. He was missing a key component behavior which would have made the whole process much easier and less stressful both for the horse and his handler.

So I've been looking at the exercises we're working on with the various horses from the perspective of component behaviors. What needs to be in place for a particular lesson to be successful? Why was this lesson easy for one horse? Hard for another? What are the key elements that must be in place before you can expect a horse to be successful, and how does the lesson change when different component behaviors are in the mix? That last is a really interesting question. You can have two horses work the same exercise, "get" the overall pattern, but derive very different things from it because their core component behaviors have been built in different ways.

As the clinic season has unfolded I've seen that the concept of component behaviors is a fascinating area of study. It has very much become part of this year's theme. It's one of the "Cs" in the three Cs of this year's theme: component parts, creativity and concepts - all of which build up to cone circle creativity - the main subject of this post.

More Component Parts
Over the winter I finished two DVDs: "Whoa! Stop! Finding Your Horse's Brakes" and "Hip-Shoulder-Shoulder".

"Whoa! Stop!" covers one of the core lessons for understanding single-rein riding and snaffle-bit riding in general. It shows you, as the title suggests, where your horse's brakes are. If you don't have a good stop, or your stop only works when your horse is focusing in on you, this is a good lesson to know about. But even if you have reliable brakes, you may still want to review this lesson. "Whoa! Stop!" shows you how to build a stop without applying backwards traction to the reins.

I've seen so many riders who thought they had a good stop in their horse, but the reality is they were simply hauling back and digging a deeper and deeper training hole with each stop. The horse may have even gotten very light to the stop, but it was still built out of backwards traction. The riders got what they thought they wanted - a stop, but at the expense of the spine. "Whoa! Stop!" presents a simple lesson for understanding the component parts of a good stop.

The lesson continues in the "Hip-Shoulder-Shoulder" DVD which looks at stops, half halts, and rein backs. It shows you how to build safety and performance via the the hip-shoulder-shoulder lateral flexion exercise. Again, it teases apart larger goal behaviors into their component parts.

Building the Tools
Throughout the "Click That Teaches" Books and DVD series I've been layering, stacking behaviors, building new connections and creating new patterns out of component behaviors. We started this process with the first two books and the first four DVDs by teaching foundation skills. There was targeting, backing, and head lowering. They formed the basis of simple leading which in turn led to the duct tape lesson (DVD Lesson 2: Ground Manners and Chapter 9 of the Step-By-Step book).

The component behaviors we were collecting allowed us to move into the "Why Would You Leave Me?" lesson and to see the connections that would create the lateral flexion exercises of three-flip-three and hip-shoulder-shoulder.

This gives us a working tool box. It gives you the tools to problem solve and to develop a safe, well mannered, fun-to-be-around horse who is ready to move on in his training. In the hip-shoulder-shoulder DVD Monty Gwynne and her beautiful Andalusian Icaro showed how this work develops into performance-oriented training.

The Three Cs
So you could say that up to this point the main focus has been on collecting tools. Now we're moving into another very exciting layer of the training. We're using those tools to teach concepts.

So for this year the clinic theme is made up of several parts. The focus is component parts, creativity and concept training. And the tool I've been using to teach these three Cs has been cone circles. So I've been giving the overall clinic theme a general name: cone circle creativity.

Concepts
To understand how all this ties together I need to go back and collect a few other pieces. The first is concept training. This is a term that comes via Ken Ramirez, the director of training at the Shedd Aquarium. Ken is also part of the faculty of the Clicker Expo. From his first presentation on, he's been stretching our thinking about clicker training. At one of the early Expos he shared with the faculty a short video clip of some work he had done over a weekend's time with a shelter dog he had just adopted. She was a middle aged puppy at the time without much, if any, training. Ken taught her a match to sample game and then, just for fun, added in the modifier cues of left and right.

Either one would have been impressive enough. Putting the two together and getting the behavior solid in just a weekend's time with an untrained dog is just, well, showing off. For the video he prepared, Ken had hidden a collection of toys out of sight behind a sofa. He sat on the floor in front of the sofa with a small ottoman between his position and the sofa. He showed the dog a toy that matched one of the toys he'd hidden behind the sofa. He then gave either a left or right cue.

The dog responded by turning away from him and going around whichever side of the footstool Ken had indicated. She then went behind the sofa, found the match to whichever toy Ken had shown her and brought it back to him. I remember at the time several mouths dropping open. None of us could quite believe what we were seeing, especially not done so reliably with just a weekend's training time behind it.

So Ken started teaching concept courses. For several years he taught modifier cues - how to teach left and right for example. This year's concept presentation was on mimicry - teaching a copy cue. That was fascinating. The animal, a dog in this case, learned a copy cue which meant: do whatever the animal next to you just did. The dog doing the mimicry could not see the handler for the other dog, so it was relying solely on what the dog did to tell it which behavior to offer. Ken started with behaviors that were in both dogs' repertoire, before asking the mimicing dog to copy what was for it a new behavior. The novel behavior was "bark". What he got was a feeble woof, a good attempt by a surprised dog to copy the other dog's more vigorous vocalization.

Concept Training for Horses
I was thinking about concept training as I went into my winter break. I'd been working with Robin on concept training using the structure of the loops. I'm trying to keep this post somewhat short - though I suspect that's not going to happen - so I'm going to abbreviate my description of this.

When he was younger, I included quite a bit of mat work in Robin's training. We played with basic mat manners, and then I went on to use multiple mats, setting different puzzles for each one. For a while mats were a major focus of our training, then we shifted onto other things, and they dropped out of current repertoire. The winter before last I brought them back into active use. I began with a review of mat basics. I confirmed the component behaviors that are needed for solid, polite mat behavior. That meant I could use the mat as a tool to explore other layers of the training.

Mats function very much like food. Food is initially a distraction. It triggers all sorts of emotional-control issues. So the initial use of food in clicker training is focused on establishing some rules and expectations about the availability of food. Food only becomes a useful tool once the emotional control issues are sorted. But of course, the sorting of those issues is in itself a useful process. So food begins as the trigger for emotional-control exercises and ends up as a phenomenally useful tool. In clicker training we use it to reinforce the horse for desirable behavior. Instead of being a problem food enhances our training. It makes it more efficient and tons more fun!

Mats function in a similar fashion. At first many horses are worried by them, but once they discover that they are not only safe to stand on, but doing so generates a very high rate of reinforcement, mats can have a tractor beam draw of enormous proportions. At clinics people will often comment that they did a little mat work, but they gave it up because their horse got so excited by the mat. Pawing, dragging the handler to the mat, and then refusing to leave the mat were all common complaints.

These handlers had not realized that mat training is a process. Getting a horse to step on a mat is only the first part of this process. Just as with food, there are emotional-control issues that must be dealt with before it becomes a useful tool.

Mats are initially something horses are afraid of. Then they switch and become something the horse wants to drag his handler over to. Both sides of the pendulum let you address emotional-control issues. It is because they have this two-sided effect that they are such an interesting and useful tool to explore. Mats let you learn about a wide range of rope-handling skills and applications. And just as food shifts from being a distraction to a useful reinforcer, so too, does the mat. Once good manners are established, the mat becomes a useful reinforcer for the horse. Just how that works was something I wanted to explore in detail with Robin.