The more you look into modern horse training, the more you’ll find yourself in a confusing and contradictory sea of ‘methods’. You can try the Pat Parelli method, the Monty Roberts method, the Warwick Schiller, Buck Brannaman or Clinton Anderson ‘method’.

Most trainers will have their own training system, their own unique names for everything from their halters, their whips (looking at you ‘carrot stick’) through to their interactions with horses and the horses' responses. That horse has a ‘hard eye’. (What does that even MEAN?!)

Is it clever marketing? Absolutely. It makes each trainer seem so unique and makes your average horse owner feel like this one trainer alone could be the solution to all their horse problems if they just invest in their courses and clinics.

They repackage and rebrand traditional horse training to make it sound like it’s exactly what’s missing in your life.

Truthfully, once you understand HOW horses learn, none of their showmanship holds up.
Yeah, he can make a horse come and stand by the mounting block.
Yeah, he can make a horse run in a circle just with his ‘energy’.

But when you scrub away the gimmicks and look at what’s motivating the horse's behaviour, you’ll find aversives, and lots of them.

While I’m not a supporter of using aversives in your training, I am a huge supporter of knowingly and intentionally training your horse.
For as long as you believe that it’s your energy or your magical stick that’s creating or maintaining the behaviours you want, you’ll continue to struggle with every new problem with every different horse. 

It’s the old ‘teach a man to fish’ situation.
These clinicians give you a fish. A fish for if your horse bites and bucks, a fish for if your horse can’t be ridden alone, a fish for the bolter, the girthy and the hard to catch.
But they’re very careful not to teach you how to fish. Because once you can fish by yourself, their money source is gone.

Learning how to create and maintain behaviour with Positive Reinforcement changed the way I approach training situations.

When I learned how to lunge my horse I learned ONLY how to lunge my horse. I couldn’t take that lesson and apply it to many, if any other parts of my horse training. It didn’t help me learn how to get my horse to back up, to move sideways or to line up to the gate.
It helped me lunge a horse. A GOOD horse, at that. It didn’t give me the tools to troubleshoot if my horse decided NOT to go faster when I picked up the whip. Or what to do when she turned towards me and stopped moving entirely.

When I started learning about R+ and began using it in my own training, I still needed a step by step guide on how to train every behaviour.
I’d hop on youtube to search for a tutorial on how to set up the environment, what to click for and how to deliver the food.
Like with the traditional and natural horsemanship clinics and lessons, I needed my hand held through every early training session.
As time went on, I began to realise I could think through and plan sessions myself.
I could go out and just start clicking for stuff and see what happened. It was amazing and reinforcing for me to see my animals try different behaviours in real time depending on what’s being reinforced for them.
It felt like I had been blessed with a magical power, because, in many ways, I had.

I didn’t need a coach, a pricey clinic, or a course. I hadn’t just learned how to train one or two things with a new ‘method’. I had learned how animals learn.

With that power, I could actually teach ANYTHING.

Now, I still attend courses, buy training books and consume training materials from professional trainers. My imagination and creativity have been found to be somewhat lacking, at times.
The joy of attending a course with like-minded individuals to discuss and learn from each other isn’t just about the practical skills or the theory. It’s about the experience, the shared community and the training plans that only seem to pay off after some tiny little comment from a colleague makes you realise you’ve been overlooking a really important factor in your plan.

Collaboration is key. But just consider this before buying your next clinic ticket - is this trainer teaching me how to fish, or giving me a fish? One will help in the now, the other will help forever.

Written by Madi Holmes of the PPGA Equine Sub-Committee