Thanks for posting this and no, it has not been posted before as far as I know.
I really like that this man and his cute little mare are showing clicker-sceptical people something that might resolve their doubts and that after all the clicker is only a tool and that not the fact that you are clicking but the way you use it is responsible for the results you get.
For me personally though, the overall expression (not some of the exercises which I think were great!
) is the result that I do not want for my own training with my own horses. What I mean is that if you had told me that this little mare had been trained in the Parelli way, I would have believed that as well. That does not mean that I think it is not a wonderful achievement to have such a controlled horse - it only means that on the continuum between spontaneity, wildness and autonomy of the horse on one side and control, automaticity and calmness on the other side I am much more located towards the first end.
When I came to AND, I also did not want to clickertrain, although I was all for treats and postive reinforcement in general. I still don´t do it in most of our ineraction, but we have found a couple of exercises and tasks where I do click. The first reason for this is the reason why I had been hesitating to use the click in the beginning: the yes/not yes character of this reward signal. I find this quite handy in tasks that do have a yes/no outcome, like targeting. Either the horse has touched the target or not. For more gradual things I prefer to use more gradual markers though.
My second (and probably more important for me) reason for not wanting to use the clicker was my lack of ability to do both, give a proper emotional response and a click. When I am using a word I can mix both, but I can´t make the clicker be more or less content/happy/enthusiastic. Of course theoretically you can perfectly well add all your utterances of delight
after the click and when I watch Miriam train with the ponies I see how very well this is possible, but I noticed that I did not do it. My praise and emotional expression after I had already given a click was far less clear than when I had not clicked. As if I had already done my duty.
And that´s exactly what I see in this video, too. I never see this man tell his little mare that she is such a delight, such a wonderful cute little horse and that he is so happy to be able to train with her. As I don´t know him, I have no idea if this has to do with the use of the clicker or not - that is only the way it was for me.
What puzzled me a bit about this video was that in his argumentation about advanced CT he focused so much on the fact that rewards were not necessary in high doses anymore. I have heard and read similar opinions quite often and I find that highly interesting: Why is it that people often have the goal to NOT reward anymore? Not to add positive consequences anymore? For me it is the greatest thing when I can thank my wonderful horse for all the effort he is doing for me and when in return I can give him what he appreciates most.
I think I can understand the argument that people want the excercise to be self-rewarding or that they want to be loved by their horses in a way that he would do anything for them just because of their self. But is that negatively affected by the treats in any way? Does it make those exercises less fun when they are getting treated? Does my horse like me less when in addition to my presence and praise he gets a treat? And most of all - is it less joyful for the horse overall when he is getting rewarded (more)? Because that is my main goal for our training and this is why I try to choose my methods according to that.
Thanks again for posting this video, Franziska! It gave me some food for thought for sure.
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