From Fear to Near: Behaviors that Change Horse Husbandry

Many of today's modern horse owners are faced with a unique situation. While some have boarded their horses at a barn that's complete with turnout, blanketing, training, cleaning, and other care needs provided by someone else, there are increasing numbers of horse owners who have chosen to care for their horses on their own.

Whether your horse is at home or under your care at a different location, if you are committed to the process of caring for a horse, there is a huge training responsibility that sits on your shoulders. Horses need to have a large repertoire of learned husbandry behaviors in several overall categories.

Training these care behaviors can be very manageable for the horse owner who is using clicker training. With the tools and techniques you will learn in this Session and in Part 2, you can break the training into components that will make training those husbandry behaviors joyful daily events.

PART 1 will a focus on shaping, capturing, and targeting as tools for teaching husbandry behaviors. You will see how these tools can become the foundation upon which a trainer can continually build and refine a horse’s skills and repertoire of behaviors. Video will be used to demonstrate many behaviors in the categories of safe ground manners, stationing, haltering, leading, grooming, saddling, and safe feeding rituals.