Whispering Horse - Clicker Training Equines

10/06/2026

As a donkey lover and a donkey trainer, I have noticed that equestrians have some funny ideas about donkeys and what you can do with them.

Rather than considering them as sentient herd animals, much like horses, there seems to be a lot of misinformation and rather strange ideas about what you can do with them.

As a donkey lover, I’d like to put this out there.

When NOT to get a donkey:

❌ to tie your horse to them for halter training

❌ to tie a bell to them for your blind horse

❌ to guard or protect your other animals

❌ to keep a horse or any other animal company

❌ to mow your lawn

❌ as a toy for your kids to play with

❌ for any reason that doesn’t acknowledge that they are sentient and does not meet their species specific needs.

I recommend getting donkeys because they are wonderful in their own right!

With the right training and care, they are smart, funny, sensitive, inquisitive, sociable and very tactile, which means they enjoy being touched, massaged, brushed and sometimes even hugged.

You can do all kinds of fun activities with them, much like you can with horses.

Don’t get them as some kind of an inanimate object to be used without care for their feelings or physical safety.

They are extremely sensitive animals.

There is also something about them that is good for one’s soul. 🧡

10/06/2026

I have two horses who are nearly the opposite, like chalk and cheese. Flash in the video has a very unhappy history as an ex-racer, as a Standardbred, the throw away breed here in Australia. I can't imagine the things he's been through that have so deeply affected him.

I have to be so careful and train him in such thin slices, such small successive approximations, in such a slow and methodical way, to ensure his comfort and enjoyment.

The most important thing for him, for anyone who's experienced trauma, is to feel safe, to know what to expect, to not be asked to do things that are outside of our comfort zone and to build and stretch our comfort zone so slowly and carefully, we barely even notice.

If you have a horse you are training with R+ and they struggle and get tense and offer too much, if they drop, or they race ahead or cut you off or just look tense, this video might be helpful.

If I start to "lump" which means asking too much too soon, Flash will do more, offer more, trot rather than walk, overshoot the halt and cut me off, trot around the reverse round pen rather than walk. But he does this not because he's "high energy" or "young" or "flighty" or "excited". He does too much because he get's tense and scared. He wants to stay out of trouble. He wants to avoid correction or punishment because he has so much history of that happening and from what I can gather, it's often unexpected.

If you have a horse like Flash, I suggest you become a master of thin slicing, observing YOUR behaviour, not just your horse's and find ways to bring them back to you. Bring them back to earth. Bring them back to routine and predictability.

Basically I'm doing a pattern with Flash. Walk 4 steps, mark, feed, stand while I stroke him to ground him a little, mark, feed, walk 4 steps, etc. He learns it very quickly, but I also want to stretch it out a little into more steps and him feel ok about it and feel ok if he gets it wrong as well. It’s a balancing act between staying with what he knows and is comfortable with and asking that little bit more.

Note the "standing while I do something" behaviour was his introduction to injection training and vet checks and he's a star at that because I worked so hard on that with him at the start. When he first came to me he was terrified of the vet and was quite unmanageable at the start and I was so worried he was going to hurt himself and the vet couldn't treat him. To cause him to feel safe and comfortable standing still while someone does something to him, something painful, took years of training for a horse like Flash. Now I constantly re-visit that behaviour with simple touches to build the positive reinforcement history and positive emotional conditioning.

Look at him c**k his leg at one point! He says I've got this! ❤

If I get it right and am really predictable and rhythmic in my training and raise criteria really slowly, then he relaxes and he's a fun horse to train.

Video in the comments.

09/06/2026

Building trust with your equine is a dynamic ongoing process. We don't just get it and have it.

Trust can build beautifully through lots of positive experiences.

Or it can deplete dramatically with even just one scary or bad experience.

The aim is to be continually building trust into our trust accounts to build a beautiful relationship, but also for emergencies. Trust can carry us a long way when things go wrong or something has to be done.

Take little Paddy my mini donkey. It took a long time to build any trust and it is easily lost.

But this video shows one of the first obvious signs of trust developing. He used to run away from me in fear a lot, he was very scared of people, of everything! But thanks to Classical/ Pavlovian Conditioning, I conditioned myself to be a bringer of good things and a safe place.

In the video, you'll see Paddy become afraid and he ran towards me and not away from me towards the other donkeys. This is also the beauty of true liberty, where there is alternative food, hay, friends and space and instead he chooses me.

I could be my own devil's advocate and suggest that he's just coming for the food as per the reinforcement history on that behaviour. But in the past, he's walked slowly and mindfully from point A to B, he doesn't run towards me normally. Based on his past behaviour, he values his safety over food.

Notice when he runs to me, it's to me, not immediately to the food and then when he feels safer he eats, but then he moves closer to me. This is about more than just food, this is trust and safety that I have consistently offered him.

Something else that always happens with Paddy. He's still very scared of strangers, but if I stand between him and the stranger, he'll approach, because he trusts me. This is how I introduce strangers to him, to teach him other people can be kind and can be trusted too.

I also train in a way that they have some choice and it's never about facing the scary thing in order to get the food.

This is how training with food is not transactional or simply bribery, this is where trust and a real relationship is developed.

Watch Paddy's behaviour in seeking me out. 🧡

I'll put Paddy's videos in the comments.

09/06/2026

There is always a lot of discussion that regularly does the rounds on social media surrounding the question, is Positive Reinforcement “good” and Negative Reinforcement ("pressure and release" training) “bad”?

First of all, I would ask, for who? The trainer or the horse/animal?

You are then assured that positive simply means adding and negative simply means removing, that’s all, phew! But that’s not the full story, that’s only half the facts. If you see someone suggesting that Negative Reinforcement is ok or fine or benign, because it’s not bad, it’s just removing, it's just "removal reinforcement" - RED FLAG! 🚩

I’ve said this many times in the past, always question and verify information and not take things at face value on social media. We are all learning and at different points in our learning journey and that includes me, so this is not a criticism. This is me trying to help people understand and disseminate information about training and behaviour change.

We can all have opinions, but there are also facts and sometimes the absence of certain facts, can change the very nature of the message. You can ask questions and have a discussion here, I won’t gaslight or block you like other trainers do.

There’s an important difference between Negative and Positive Reinforcement. For them to actually affect future behaviour, one involves an aversive (unpleasant) stimulus and one involves an appetitive (pleasant) stimulus. Think about that for a moment, one stimulus feels uncomfortable enough for the horse, physically, mentally or emotionally, to elicit some kind of behaviour change, that we can then reinforce by its removal. We might like to tell ourselves it's just “mild pressure” but it was still strong enough to get some kind of response from the horse to attempt to escape or avoid it. Horses are super sensitive and emotional beings and they feel things strongly. They can also feel a fly land on them!

Negative Reinforcement is also called Escape and Avoidance Learning! If it were that “mild and gentle” and non-aversive, it would be neutral and the horse wouldn’t change their behaviour in order to escape it.

It's also important for me to point out that we don't get to decide how unpleasant or not the aversive stimulus in Negative Reinforcement can be. The animal decides how aversive something is.

A good Negative Reinforcement trainer should also know how to put behaviours on cue, on an aversive cue, so that the horse doesn't re-experience the aversive stimulus every time. Hopefully they are giving a cue that gives the horse the opportunity to avoid the aversive onset.

I also need to emphasise that there is more than the “4 quadrants” involved in learning. This is important to know, because we need to consider not only how horses learn, but also what is being paired or associated with the behaviour, how they feel while they are learning.

There is Operant Conditioning and there is also Classical (Pavlovian) Conditioning and there are also other ways we learn. Classical Conditioning means that along with the stimulus and the response, there is an association being made between two stimuli. That can be a feeling, an unpleasant, a neutral or a pleasant feeling or anything in between and that becomes associated with a stimulus and with the trainer. Via Pavlovian Conditioning, we the trainer, become associated with these feelings.

Therefore if you train mainly with Positive Reinforcement, you’ll have a horse who mainly likes you and the training. If you train with Negative Reinforcement the opposite will be true.

BUT other learning and associations are also happening, therefore it can seem that your horse likes being caught, likes their bit or likes their stable, if it predicts something that they like will follow or an association has been made between those things and something they like or need. That could be things like leaving their mundane paddock, going for an interesting walk or being fed, it’s like a trade off.

We can also get a seemingly calm and willing horse, because control may be a primary reinforcer, whether that’s control of the addition of an appetitive or understanding what to do to remove an aversive stimulus. It doesn’t mean they’re having fun, it simply means they understand how to avoid the aversive stimulus.

But remember that they had to first feel the discomfort of the aversive stimulus and they also then made the connection with who applied it in the first place, YOU, before they figured out how to remove or avoid it.

A negative emotional valence does have an impact and can impede learning processes. A perceived threat can disconnect horses from learning (and the trainer) and negative emotions can also lead to low motivation. Makes sense right?!

To sum up, an easy way to remember all this is that when we are training and interacting with our horses, we have Skinner (Operant Conditioning) on one shoulder and Pavlov (Classical Conditioning) on the other.

When we do something with our horse, we need to ask ourselves, how do they feel about it and how does that feeling rub off on us?

Finally, these kinds of posts always stir up a lot of cries about the mean R+ trainers and how we are saying negative reinforcement is cruel, abusive and you're evil if you use it. I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying, be informed, be aware and choose carefully.

08/06/2026

Great advice if you deal with trolls like I do constantly!

Do you have right-wing trolls swarming your comments on social media? Attached is a handy guide about to channel your angry without REWARDING THEM with the visibility they seek.

There is a hugely well-financed and well-resourced political campaign being waged online against Australian voters, following the exact methods that brought the disastrous Trump into office in the US.

It RELIES on its opponents getting angry and commenting, because engagement feeds the algorithm and promotes the bad guys to more and more accounts.

Don’t help them. Do this instead. And feel free to share it everywhere.

08/06/2026

This is a rubber doormat from the hardware store.

I have lots out in the paddocks which I use as a station for our clicker training, or I can drop food on it to give the equine a break between training sessions, or use it to put their dinner on, or for various enrichment food items.

It has lots of little bumps on one side or you can flip it over and there are little dimples for extra difficulty.

07/06/2026

I read a comment once where someone thought that in R+ training we were controlling the horse and taking control away from the horse when I talked about "Stimulus Control".

When we think about it, how much real control does anyone ever have? We are controlled by our need for food, shelter, company, pleasure and to avoid things that hurt, scare or make us feel uncomfortable. This means much of our behaviour is controlled by our environment, both internal and external. How much actual real control do we really have? But that's a subject for another day! 😁

This great blog from Eileen Anderson is not a "how to" but explains the concept behind Stimulus Control. Note we are not “controlling the animal”, we are controlling when a cue for a trained behaviour is given; we present the stimulus (cue) to ask the animal to perform a behaviour. A cue is called a Discriminative Stimulus (SD) and the correct presentation of the acronym is the letter “S” in normal type and the letter “D” in superscript, smaller and slightly above it.

- - - - -

"Stimulus control in training is all about response to cues, and goes like this. Given a behavior:

The behavior occurs immediately when the cue is given.

The behavior never occurs in the absence of the cue.

The behavior never occurs in response to some other cue.

No other behavior occurs in response to this cue."

(Eileen Anderson)

Cues for behaviours are important in order to avoid frustration from lack of reinforcement when a horse offers a behaviour. Lack of reinforcement for previously reinforced behaviours can also lead to Extinction, which can be extremely unpleasant emotionally for the horse. It also means Extinction of the behaviour (the behaviour stops being performed after a number of unreinforced repetitions).

A little tip! A great way to build duration on a behaviour, but also teach cues without frustration or Extinction, is to follow one cued behaviour (the new behaviour/cue) with another well known behaviour. In order to build duration, you would stretch out the time between the two cued behaviours.

Also, if you wanted to teach a new cue - cuing a well known behaviour after cueing the new behaviour and reinforcing it, is a great way to avoid uncued behaviours being offered in the space between and to interject a known behaviour adds more positive reinforcement to the picture and helps keep the behavioural momentum flowing.

- - - - -

"If you are regularly going to reinforce uncued behaviors, then you’d best be willing to do so even when it’s inconvenient. Because it’s just not fair to change the rules on your dog without warning. If you do that, you can put behaviors into extinction. This is unpleasant for the dog and doesn’t serve our overall training goals well."

(Eileen Anderson)

- - - -

Put another way:

"In behavioral psychology, stimulus control is a phenomenon that occurs when an organism behaves in one way in the presence of a given stimulus and another way in its absence. Any stimulus that modifies behavior in this manner is referred to as a discriminative stimulus. Stimulus control of behavior occurs when the performance of a particular behavior is controlled by the presence or absence of a discriminative stimulus. For example, the presence of a stop sign (a discriminative stimulus) at a traffic intersection increases the probability that "braking" behavior will occur."

(Wikipedia)

You can read more about Stimulus Control ie. putting behaviours on cue, in Eileen's blog in the comments.

07/06/2026

Horse training can be as clear and systematic or as muddy and confusing as you want to make it.

There's a lot of very muddy horse training out there.

There's a lot of talk out there that doesn't match actions.

I am positively reinforcing behaviour and I am counter conditioning emotions.

You can see it, you don't have to imagine it.

Learning also doesn't need to involve stress for the horse.

It doesn't need to involve imaginative thinking about what the horse thinks either.

It also means we don't have to tell ourselves fairy tales about our methods and tools like magical "wands", or colourful "carrot sticks", or ephemeral "energy", or ubiquitous "pressure".

07/06/2026

Are you a lumper or a splitter?

Are you familiar with these terms?

Do you teach a behaviour and automatically assume your horse knows how to do it in all situations?

When shaping a new behaviour, if you teach your horse to take one step to touch a target, do you assume he will then walk from the other end of the paddock or arena to touch the target?

Being able to split is a valuable skill that takes creativity AND patience!

We all lump occasionally and think "what was I thinking!!"

But behaviours split up and taught methodically and incrementally become solid and well liked behaviours.

You can read more in the link in the comments and check out the video in there as well.