Riding with the clicker

The click that teaches

by Alexandra Kurland

The Click That Teaches: Riding with the Clicker" is a comprehensive training guide will take you from clicker basics to advanced performance.
If you love your horse and you want to have him around for a long time as your riding partner, you'll want him to learn to use his body well.

Riding with the Clicker gives you a training manual for the life of your horse: from clicker basics and getting started under saddle, to solving training problems and creating a safe fun horse to ride, to developing spectacular performance that promotes good health in your horse - Clicker training brings out the best in your horse!


The book is divided into Six Sections:

Part 1 Clicker Basics: This section introduces you to the scientific principles behind clicker training. It shows you how to develop polite ground manners and emotional self-control in your horse.

Part 2 Before You Ride: This section shows you how to start a young horse under saddle. This is more than a nuts and bolts section. You'll see how training works in the real world - how training problems emerge and clicker training solutions are found. Training a horse is not a matter of following "cook book" recipes. The best trainers are creative and responsive to the needs of each individual horse. You'll learn how to use clicker training to prepare a youngster for riding - how to teach him the emotional self-control and physical balance he'll need to be a great riding horse.

Part 3 Riding with the Clicker: Riding with the clicker is very much like taking apart a jig saw puzzle and then putting it back together again. You're taking apart your horse's training piece by piece. Only instead of reassembling the original picture, you'll be building it back better and stronger than it was before.
Safety, safety, safety - Safety always comes first. This section introduces you to the mechanics of single rein riding. It gives you two powerful exercises - head lowering and flipping the hips - to stop bolting, bucking, spooking and rearing - in other words, to stop all the major behavior problems that take the fun out of riding.

Part 4 Training Exercises for the Rider: Riding Excellence is built on a foundation of body awareness. These simple exercises allow you to become a "Centaur", exploring your horse's balance through the "t'ai chi walk".

Part 5 Single-Rein Riding and the Building Blocks of Excellence: The previous sections showed you how to take apart your horse's training, to make sure each of the critical responses was working well. In this section you'll begin to reassemble the pieces through a series of patterned exercises.

Lessons covered include: the "why would you leave me?" game, jaw flexions, three-flip-three: the foundation of lateral work, move-counter move, hip-shoulder-shoulder to create collected stops, collected gaits, the "300 peck pigeon" lesson under saddle, the "hotwalker" lesson to build perfect circles, the school figures: rollbacks, half turns, half-turns-in-reverse, diagonals and reverse-arc circles - the foundation lessons for upper-leverl performance.

Part 6 Riding for Performance: This final section shows you how to connect all the training steps to create an upper-level performance horse.

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Author's note: When I'm asked which book someone should get, I recommend that people begin with the other two books and moving into the riding book. It will give you a review of clicker basics, but I am very much making the assumption that you have worked through the lessons presented in the previous books and the foundation lesson DVDS. That is the preparation you'll need to get the most value from the riding book.

And speaking of value, I know many of you may be concerned about the price. The Riding book was ten years in the making and it is packed from cover to cover. This is a book you will read many times, and each time you revisit it, you will discover things you did not see before. It truly is a book in which you'll be wondering how I managed to download so much fresh material into your hard copy!

Clicker training breaks every lesson down into small steps. That's its great strength. Riding with the clicker is no exception. This book teases apart what we all thought were the beginning steps of riding and shows you a whole new layer. What emerges first is riding safety. You'll learn how to manage all those issues that take the fun out of being around horses: behaviors such as rearing, spooking, bucking. The same lessons that help you manage the reactive horse, perfected take to advanced performance. And the beauty of this process is you are always learning just one small step at a time. So you may have all the "I'm just a . . . " thoughts: "I'm just a beginner, I could never learn that; "I'm just a trail rider, I could never do that"; etc.. But break the riding process down into enough small steps, and you'll be amazed at what you and your horse will be able to do toget...

Paperback

Published January 1, 2005

About the author

Alexandra Kurland has been teaching and training horses since the mid-1980s as a dressage specialist and an accredited Ttouch practitioner. She began clicker training in the early 1990s, recognizing the power of the method for improving performance and enhancing the relationship between people and their horses. Alexandra teaches the use of clicker training for all equine needs and sports, from providing a gentle, companionable personal riding horse to halter training foals, training advanced performance horses, and reforming difficult and unmanageable horses. She travels widely giving hands-on clicker training seminars in the US and internationally. The author of Clicker Training Your Horse, The Click that Teaches, Riding with the Clicker, and several instructional videos, Alexandra's work is also featured in Panda: A Guide Horse for Ann (Rosanna Hansen, Boyds Mill Press, 2005), a photographic picture book for children about Panda, the miniature seeing eye horse she clicker trained. A graduate of Cornell University, where she specialized in animal behavior, and the author of a series of children's books, Alexandra lives in upstate New York with her horses and her (clicker trained) cats.