Teach Your Horse to Target
You can accomplish so much by making sure your horse really knows how to target. This can be the foundation of many other things including trailer loading, walking on a lead, and tricks like playing fetch.
Teaching Your Horse to Target
Teach your horse to target an object. I used a small, orange marker cone. You need something sturdy enough that your horse won’t destroy it.
Hold the object near the horse’s nose. Horse’s are naturally curious animals and eventually they will sniff at it or touch it with their nose.
Click.Treat!
When your horse is reliably touching the cone, hold it to the right and retrain it.
Hold it up higher and retrain.
Hold it lower and retrain.
It may all seem to be the same to you, but it’s not the same to your horse. And you need to keep training it in different places until your horse is entirely solid.
Adding a Command to Targeting
It’s backwards from how most of us learned to train dogs, but it’s important to teach the behavior thoroughly before you name it.
When your horse is reliably touching the object with his nose you can add a command. I use “touch.”
Once your horse is touching the cone, you can have him touch all kinds of things. Touching scary things can help bombproof your horse.
Using a flat target, like a plastic can cover or even frisbee type disk, can be useful down the road. You can place it wherever you like, including vertical surfaces, with some tape or staples. If you want the horse to go to the back of a stall when you enter, for example, or as a target in a horse trailer to train self-loading, a “wall target” like this makes things simple.. You can also use a ball or buoy on a short dowel or pole. This can be useful in guiding the horse or other animal in movement, and is easier to handle than a cone. Happy training!