Equiosity

Science Camp was held over the weekend of Feb 19-21. What a wonderful, head spinner of an event that was! Dominique and I didn’t want it to end so we invited one of the participants, Lisa Clifton Bumpass to come share an afternoon’s conversation with us. Lisa is a dog trainer turned zoo consultant. She’s been a regular attendee at the horse clinics I give in Half Moon Bay CA. What Lisa learns from the horses she takes back to the teams she works with in zoos. It is so much fun to think that the work we’re doing with horses is helping giraffes and alligators and other exotic animals to live more comfortable lives.

Our conversation with Lisa began with a discussion of constructional; training - one of the main topics of Science Camp. That developed into a consideration of whose needs are being met in a training plan. Just because we are using positive reinforcement doesn’t mean the needs of the learner are being met. The overall training goals may still revolve around meeting our needs.

Or we can swing the pendulum the other way so everything is centered around meeting our learner’s needs - often at the expense of our own well being.

Or we can be truly constructional and meet the needs of everyone. As always, balance is everything. Good constructional training helps us to consider what each member of a training partnership needs to get from the interaction.

Just when you think you’ve said all you need to say about food delivery, you discover you’ve only begun to scratch the surface. The reinforcement patterns play an important role in teaching and maintaining behavior. So when Dominique said she wanted to talk about food deliver, we were off and running into an interesting afternoon’s conversation.

Last year I switched all my clinics over to a virtual format. This year I will be doing the same. Normally, we would never take an entire podcast to talk about these events, but these are not normal times we are living in. The virtual format has opened up so many more opportunities to reach out to people, I wanted to make sure you understand the format and the content of these clinics.

In a sense they are an online course that unfolds through the year. The format means that it doesn’t matter where you live. Geography doesn’t matter. Time zones don’t matter. You can sign up and participate with your horse. You don’t have the stress of travel for either one of you which is one of the many advantages of the virtual clinics.

If you have questions about the clinics, if you want to learn more about what each one covers, this is a great resource for you.

We’ll also be talking about the up-coming clicker expo and the demos I’ll be doing for that event.

To learn even more about the clinics or to register visit my web site: theclickercenter.com and check out the events section for more details.

We recorded this podcast on January 13, a week after the attack on the Capital and the day the House of Representatives was debating the Articles of Impeachment. We’re publishing it on the Martin Luther King Day Holiday, just two days before the Inauguration in what hopefully will be a peaceful transfer of power. We know many people reading this will be wanting to run away at this point. They’re thinking - enough! I listen to these podcasts to get away from the news. I don’t want to run into it here!

We absolutely understand that. This is an episode about training horses. But we were both really shaken by the events of last week. We don’t want to pretend that nothing has happened, that these events are not going on. We need to be paying attention, and so what we chose to talk about in this podcast was what to do with unwanted behavior.

This is a training subject. It seems like the most appropriate topic that we could pick at a time like this. It doesn’t matter which side of the political divide you’re on, the other side is presenting behavior you don’t want. As clicker trainers we’ve been trying to figure out what do you do when you’re presented with behavior you don’t want. That’s what we’ll be exploring in this podcast. The conversation is very much focused on our animal learners, but who knows, through them we may be learning skills that will ripple into our interactions with family, friends, work colleagues, and on into the broader community. Let’s hope so. These skills are very much needed to help calm these very turbulent times we are living through.

We’re in the middle of a fun conversation with Helene Lawler. Helene is a professional dog trainer. If you have listened to the previous episodes you know that she has become balance obsessed. Last week we ended with a question about loopy listening. If you’re familiar with my work, you have heard about loopy training. Helene has used this teaching strategy to develop what she refers to as loopy listening.

Loopy Listening adds more details to the Loopy Training cycle. It reminds you to make note of the small blips in your training. Those moments when your dog or your horse breaks the flow of the training to stare off to the side are significant. Why did the environment suddenly become so distracting? What was going on in your training? When your learner is with you, distractions fall away. Loopy Listening helps us to “listen” to our animal learners so we can respond better to their needs.

Do please listen all the way to the end of this podcast. I’ve added some information about the format of this year’s clinics. I’ve changed the format of the clinics to meet the constraints the virus imposes. But it turns out some good thing can come from a bad situation. The new clinic format, schedule and topics are going to make it so much easier for you to attend the clinics with your horse - no matter where you live. So do check out the clinics at my web site: theclickercenter.com

We’re in the middle of a fun conversation with Helene Lawler. Helene is a professional dog trainer. If you have listened to the previous episodes you know that she has become balance obsessed. It’s so exciting. Once that genie pops out of the bottle, there’s no shoving it back in. Everything changes when you see your training and your learners through the balance lens.

I love talking about balance. Good balance - physical and emotional - sits at the core of everything that I teach. One of my central training beliefs is good balance doesn’t just feel good to us. It feels good to our equine training partners as well. Helene Lawler would say that applies to the dogs she works with as well. Balance matters.

This week we continue our conversation about how she has been applying the work that I’ve been developing for horses to her dog training. We share some fun stories, including one involving stilts and horses. You’ll have to listen to the podcast to find out what that’s about.

Helene Lawler is a dog trainer who has become fascinated by balance, so of course we had to have a conversation. What has she been learning from horses that applies to her dog training?

In this week’s episode Dominique asks the question “What is Balance?” Before you listen to the podcast, think about what would you say. Now listen to the podcast to find out how Helene and Alexandra answered her question.

Helene Lawler is a professional dog trainer. She shares her house with 14 herding dogs so to say that she loves dogs is an understatement.

Helene has been a regular listener to these podcasts. That’s what prompted her to attend our first virtual Science Camp which was held in Sept 2020. What ignited Helene’s imagination was the work we did on balance and rope handling.

The day after Science Camp one of her clients presented her with what she thought was a poisoned cue issue. The situation could well have become a poisoned cue if it had continued much longer. But Helene was looking at all of her training with fresh eyes. Her client saw poisoned cues. Helene saw a balance issue - not in the dog, but in the handler. A few changes later and the dog was performing beautifully.

Helene has continued to explore what equine balance has to offer the canine community, so of course we wanted her share what she has been discovering. We had a lively - and lengthy conversation - so this is Part One of a wonderful afternoon’s conversation about balance - what that means for horses, dogs and humans.

This is part three of our conversation with Mary Hunter. Just before Thanksgiving we spent a delightful afternoon catching up with Mary. We started out talking about gardening and the growing of cilantro. That led us to extinction and then to shaping and finding approximations that create early success.

We talked about Carol Dweck’s work on growth versus fixed mindsets. We described several strategies for becoming more creative in finding constructional approaches to training, We even talked about Dr Doug Tallamy’s backyard national parks and my other podcast - Horses for Future.

We came to a lovely stopping place. At this point we had talked already for a couple of hours. We needed to stop. But then I asked Mary if there were any other topics she had wanted to explore - possibly for another recording session.

Mary hesitated for a moment. Should she even bring this up? We had been talking for a very long time. It was the middle of the afternoon when we started and now it was getting dark. She’d just share this one idea - for later. But that didn’t work because the subject was helmets.

Helmets! Why helmets? What was that about? We needed to know more. We were too impatient to record it at another time, so here it is as part of this current conversation.

What is the connection between riding helmets, recycling and horse training? You’re about to find out.

Mary Hunter is a behavior analyst. She coaches people with their horse and dog training. She was our guide through the Listen and Learn Audio course on Applied Behavior Analysis.

Our conversation with Mary Hunter began not with horses, but with gardening. When Mary shares a story whether it is about gardens or horses, there is always a point it. She uses her stories to illustrate important training concepts. So our conversation about growing plants - and sometimes failing at growing plants - took us to a discussion of extinction, finding the right approximations to build success early on, and constructional training.

Dominique asked an important question - how do you become skilled at finding the right approximations for your horse? Her question led us to several useful strategies for developing creative training skills. They are described in detail in this week’s podcast.