New books
Karen Pryor, "Don't shoot the dog"I should have read this book long before I started training my horse
but it also helps understand people and some "social games". Great introduction for clickertrainers (even obligatory for them!) and interesting perspective for everyone.
Then, I was reading two books about dogs,
Turid Rugaas, "Calming signals. How dogs avoid conflicts" (I'm not sure if this is English title) and
Gwen Bailey, "Puppy school". The first one explains how to interpret dog's behavior, but soon I started to look for calming signals also in horses... I'm not sure what they are, but I think that they exist
and the book by Gwen Bailey is great and beautifully illustrated for owners of puppies, who want to teach them in positive way, but don't want to read too much
the only book about this, that my sister and my aunt have read
it was also useful for me - just "how to make things simple". I tend to be too precise in my training, even if it is only something as simple as standing still. This book shows how to teach everything in simple and positive way. Right now I can't recommend any older book, because they all talk about domination and punishment. Also, dog training is very similar to horse training.
And these two will arrive soon:
Alexandra Kurland, "The click that teaches: riding with the clicker"Well, I'm preparing for my first ride
although it will take a lot of time before we will be prepared with my filly, not only because of her age
this book is my first one about clickertraining with horses, before I was reading only about dogs. Which is very similar, but last time when I entered the arena with my filly, and she started digging in a heap of sand, I wondered if she isn't too much like a dog
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I'm reading it right now... a lot of new informations! And what a surprise, many ideas from John Lyons. Great book.
and last but not least:
Alexandra Kurland, "Stimulus Control: Putting Behavior on Cue"This is a video. Of course I have putted a lot of behaviors on cue, during these nine months that we are together with my filly
but not always it was really planned. And sometimes the learning process has stopped on offering the behavior, like our spanish walk for example... or canter backwards... to my experience, training videos can explain everything better than any book, or can be very long and explain nothing
I hope that this will be a good one.
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The "clicker stars" are two Alexandra's private horses and the guide horse Panda. The things I like most was one horse doing collected trot in perfect circle around his trainer, and another one ridden in beautiful collected walk, with movement forward, backwards, right, left and in place, without loosing tempo or impulsion. I'm not sure if it wasn't passage, but as far as I know, in classical dressage this is called collected walk; something between walk and passage, with the same rhytm as backwards movement. Great lesson.