Equiosity

This week’s podcasting launches a long conversation with Jane Jackson, one of my Click That Teaches coaches. In Part 1 we talk about ponies, eventing and what drew Jane to clicker training. We’re heading towards a tremendous teaching strategy Jane has developed for helping a super vigilant, very reactive horse to be able to cope with new environments and distracting conditions. We’re beginning by first letting you meet Jane as she shares her early background with horses.

What goes into a great relationship? We explore one of the key ingredients. The conversation is led by Patience, one of my young goats who is learning how to “get dressed”, how to put on her collar and harness.

The click ends a unit of behavior. When you click, your horse breaks off what he was just doing to get his treat. From the outside looking in this can seem like a huge nuisance. How are you ever going to get anything done with all this stopping? But when you start clicker training, all that stopping begins to make sense. You discover that it’s the keys to the kingdom for creating outstanding performance. In this podcast we’ll explore how this works.

Outstanders is the first a of two part conversation that we recorded on Dec. 31, 2018. A look back over our year of podcast began as we began the very first Equiosity podcast with a goat story. Three of last spring’s babies, Patience, Felicity and Verity, are growing up at The Clicker Center. Patience is excelling noticeably beyond the performance of the other two. Why? What would your guess be?

To find out if you’re right, listen to the podcast.

We’ve finished out this conversation with Mary Concannon with a longer than usual podcast. We cover two main topics.

We start out with a request to Mary Concannon to wear her “other hat”. Mary is a microbiologist. I ask her how she helps her students learn how to read and evaluate scientific literature.

For many years Mary had the care of her own horses plus her daughter’s competition horses. I asked Mary how she navigated the tricky waters of managing multiple horses when not everyone was on the same training page. How do you keep peace both at home and in the barn? Mary offers some great tips on working with multiple horses, especially so they are safe at feeding time.

What do you do with a grumpy horse? You scritch him! Find out what that means in this week's Equiosity podcast in which we continue our conversation with Mary Concannon.

The question we ended with in last week’s podcast was “how did you shape that?” This week we find out. The answer takes us to a sharing of stories about our creative horses. Clicker training means you can take a supporting role. You don’t have to direct and control everything. You can let your horse “lead the dance”. When you do, you often find that the behaviors that pop out from their good ideas are much better than anything you had in mind at the start of the session.

This episode begins a conversation with Click That Teaches coach, Mary Concannon. Mary is from Ireland, but she is currently based in the UK. In Part 1 of our conversation Mary introduces her thoroughbred, Newby. She tells the story of how Newby came into her life and the hour long bucking fit he surprised her with the first time he was saddled.

Newby is a hard luck horse. He's one of those horses who always seemed to have one health issue after another. It was through these various ailments that Mary learned to listen to her horse.

Part 3 of our conversation with Cindy Martin shifts to a focus on emotional behavior. Our conversation centers around a thoroughbred mare participating in the fall 2018 clinic at Cindy’s place. Targeting quickly shifted her out of a state of extreme anxiety. This raises the question: what are we reinforcing when we click? Why don’t we get more anxiety instead of less?

One of the many reasons I so appreciate the contributions Cindy Martin makes to our understanding of clicker training is the very clear way in which she explains things. She transforms what are often very complex and seemingly incomprehensible concepts into very understandable terms.

In this second part of our conversation with her, she tackles a concept that has gained a lot of traction in the training world - dominance. And then she uses MP3 players to help us to understand why training a large repertoire of behaviors can help us get along better with our animals.