Equiosity

Lucy is a horse owner and a clicker trainer, and as you know by now she is also a special ed teacher. At the start of this school year she was assigned all the repeaters for freshman year, that is all the students who had failed ninth grade. Through her horse Lucy connected first with me and then through Science Camp with Dr Claire St Peter. Claire has been helping her develop a mastery-based system in which her students can thrive.

In this part of the conversation we move from the classroom back to the barn to find out what Lucy what she has learned from her students that she is taking back to her horse.

Lucy Butler is a horse owner and a clicker trainer. Lucy is also a special ed teacher at a high school. At the start of this school year she was assigned all the repeaters for freshman year, that is all the students who had failed ninth grade.

Lucy is going to take us into her classroom to see how her students are learning how to celebrate success. Some of you may be thinking - what has this got to do with horse training? I will answer with: everything is everything else.

Horses influence every part of our lives and the connections are worth celebrating. It’s a loop that goes in both directions. Lucy explored positive reinforcement teaching and constructional design first with her dogs and her horse. She took the principles to her classroom. She’s working with a challenging group of learners, and they are thriving. In this podcast Lucy shares the discoveries she’s been making. What she’s learning from her students can help us all be better teachers for our own learners, no matter the species.

Enjoy

We are literally off to school in this conversation with Lucy Butler.

Lucy is also a horse owner and a clicker trainer. She is also a special ed teacher in a high school. At the start of this year she was assigned all the repeaters for freshman year, that is all the students who had failed ninth grade.

I met her last summer via my virtual clinics. In the clinic and then in Science Camp Lucy was introduced to the constructional approach to training. She has taken the concepts and run with them - both with her horse and with her students. She describes her classroom as a bubble of joy. Her students are seeing themselves as individuals who can do well, more than that - they want to do well.

There are so many stories in the news these days about the problems in schools. It’s a bleak picture, so it’s a refreshing change to be able to talk to a teacher who is excited to be in school.

What Lucy is learning is definitely relevant to our horses. So bringing her work from the classroom back to horses via this podcast is a fun loop to explore. I suspect there will be many ripples going out from this conversation.

Enjoy!

Dominique has been intrigued by the incredibly subtle discriminations animals are able to make. That took us to a discussion of cues, rules, teaching processes, procedures and principles. What is the distinction and how does this help you get past a sticky point in your training? A discussion of core principles brought us to the importance of teaching wait. Wait is a behavior. Animals can’t “do nothing”. Waiting is not an absence of behaving. An animal is actively doing something, even if that something is standing still. Teaching a solid understanding of “wait” helps to bring stability to training. So thinking about the distinction between rules and principles brought us to a practical training solution for a training hiccup.

Dominique has been intrigued by the incredibly subtle discriminations animals are able to make. In this episode she wanted to talk about cues and the rules that trainers create around them to bring some consistency to their training. I wasn’t sure of the context in which she was using the term so her starting point for the conversation raised some questions for me. The rabbit hole we plunged into was a discussion of cues, rules, teaching processes, procedures and principles. What is the distinction?

This week we are shifting gears completely. Michaela is going to tell us about the stallion project that she and Anja Beran are working on. The stallion project refers to work that Anja and Michaela are spearheading to bring about changes in Germany in the stallion testing process. In this episode Michaela describes the stallion tests and the damage that results to the horses that go through them. Anja was saddened by the number of beautiful young stallions people wanted to send to her to “fix” after going through the stallion testing. She and Michaela are working to get changes instituted.

The web site for the stallion project is: https://karrierestart-mit-respekt-hengste.de/.

The site is in German, but it is it very much worth visiting. Anja and Michaela have included some of the images from Anja’s new book. The example/non-example contrast is very powerful. And you can use google translate to give you a reasonable approximation for what is being said.

The stallion project is actually very related to the work Michaela is doing with Blondie. Blondie was originally trained to be a reining horse. She would have been started young and pushed through the training fast. When Michaela took over her training, the hard push was revealed in the many loud “no” answers Blondie gave to even simple requests such as haltering.

Many of us take on horses like Blondie and these stallions. The good news is the constructional approach that we’ve been talking about can go a long way towards creating a good life for these horses. The even better news would be that horses are seen as the individuals that they are, that they are no longer treated as expendable livestock.

In Part 1 I introduced Michaela by saying our conversation was a present to all of you. Her work offers such valuable insights on how to use the training for the benefit of our horses. The Holiday season seems like a good time to be sharing this work because it’s a time when the presents we most want to unwrap are those that create positive changes in the world.

Happy Holidays Everyone!

This is part 2 of our conversation with Dr Michaela Hempen. I began this series by saying that this is our Holiday present to all of you. In Part 1 Michaela shared the details of the research project she’s been conducting on cribbing. The subject of that study is a quarter horse mare named Blondie.

Just when Michaela was reaching a critical stage in the study, Blondie’s owner decided he wanted to sell her. Through the generosity of many in the clicker training community Michaela was able to buy Blonde and continue on with her study.

It was a good investment because Michaela has been taking what she learned from the cribbing project and applying it to other aspects of Blondie’s training. You may not be dealing with a cribber, but you could well have a horse that came to you with a lot of unwanted baggage. That was certainly the case with Blondie. Michaela was discovering some huge-crater sized holes in her training.

Blondie said no to just about everything. She said no to haltering, to leading, to saddling, to bridling. Michaela could have done what her previous owner had done - just ignore the pinned ears, the swishing tail, the snapping teeth. He could ride Blondie. He could make her “behave”. We’ve all heard it - “Oh she’s just being a mare, she’s just testing you. You just need to show her whose boss.”

But that’s not the relationship Michaela was looking for, nor does it produce the kind of ride she enjoys. So she took Blondie out of the command-based world. She’s been offering her a very different training connection. How you go about doing that is what we’ll be exploring in Part 2 of our conversation with Michaela. This second present that you’re about to open: the details of the saddling project.

This episode is the first of several Holiday presents we have created for you. Our guest is Dr Michaela Hempen. She will be sharing the work she’s been doing with her quarter horse mare, Blondie. Blondie is a cribber. If you aren’t familiar with that term, cribbing, or crib biting as it is also called, refers to a stereotypic behavior in which the horse closes its teeth around a surface such a fence board or a feed bucket and then arches its neck so it can suck in air.

Cribbing has been viewed as a pathology. People try to prevent horses from cribbing by putting cribbing collars on them. The collars make it uncomfortable to crib, but most horses end up cribbing anyway.

Michaela decided to look at cribbing through a different lens. With the help of Dr Jesús Rosales Ruiz she was able to show that cribbing responds to changes in the environment. It’s not something pathological in the animal. It’s a habit you can change. In this episode Michaela describes the procedure she used to teach Blondie a new repertoire of behaviors to replace her cribbing habit.

Her work is exciting not just for owners of cribbers, but for anyone who has habits they’d like to change. That refers to their horse’s habits and even potentially to their own. So when the calendar clicks over into 2022 and you’re thinking about your New year’s resolutions, think about Blondie and the work Michaela is describing in this podcast.

I started out calling this episode “Come on in the water’s fine”. But I think ‘Creating Our Own Mainstream” is really more to the point. You’ll understand why as you listen to this episode.

This is part 3 of our conversation with Dr Sarah Memmi. Sarah is a behavioral scientist. She teaches at the University of Louisville in Kentucky where she’s an Assistant Professor of Marketing in the College of Business. Her main area of research is how people pursue goals; how they handle conflicts between multiple goals, and how they manage their personal resources (time, money). She also teaches in the University of Louisville’s unique equine business program.

In Part 1 of this conversation we talked about control and choice. In Part two we talked about two paradoxes - the paradox of choice and the paradox of control. This led us to the consider how ideas are spread through a community and that in turn brought us to marketing. Since Sarah teaches marketing at the University of Louisville, of course we needed to head in that direction. So that’s what we’re going to do in Part 3 of our conversation.

I think you’ll find that this is a very different kind of conversation than what you might expect given the subject. The definition Sarah gives us for marketing - a value exchange relationship has so many parallels with training. So yes, we are talking about marketing, but we are also talking about constructional training. We explore a powerful metaphor - what it means to create our own mainstream.

This is Part 2 of our conversation with Dr Sarah Memmi. Sarah is a behavioral scientist. She teaches at the University of Louisville in Kentucky where she’s an Assistant Professor of Marketing in the College of Business. Her main area of research is how people pursue goals; how they handle conflicts between multiple goals, and how they manage their personal resources (time, money). She also teaches in the University of Louisville’s unique equine business program.

In Part 1 of this conversation we introduced the topic of control and choice. Now in Part 2 Sarah will explore with us the paradoxes these concepts create for us.