Saturday, January 15, 2011

Cisco got it! I knew he would, he's a smart boy. It seems he doesn't really like to touch the target, or he doesn't really understand why we're playing this game, but he knows now that touching the target gets him a reward.

I'm trying to edit a video of our first tries... We've had nothing but technical difficulties with the camera today. This video may be too big but I'm going to give it a shot. (Don't mind my scowl, somehow my face stuck like that. My poor horses probably don't know what to think. I need to make it a goal to soften my expression a LOT.)


Note that I make an attempt to not click and treat when he's crowding or mugging. The point here isn't that I'm rewarding him for anything yet, I'm just showing him that the click is connected to the food. But I don't want to click when he's doing something I don't like. When he's sniffing my right hand he's checking out the clicker. That's okay, I like curiosity, but it was kind of like mugging too. He wanted to know if it was food.

I'll try to get some video of the next step tomorrow, but it might be raining all day so we'll see...

2 comments:

arlene said...

That's really good. Well done.
I have been wanting to take a video of Echo, but I have to learn how to get it on the blog. :)

Mary @ StaleCheerios said...

That's great! It looks like he is really getting the hang of it--that he gets treats for backing up, turning his head, or otherwise staying out of your space.

Regarding targeting---try playing around with a variety of different objects / types of targets. I had a very sensitive arab mare a year or so ago who was very particular about what she would target. Some things, she just would say, nope, I'm not going to target that!