Training the Balancer’: The Gold at the end
of the Rainbow
May 5, 2010
Horse training, or learning about horse
training, is a long road. It never ends.
However, there is great joy when you find
the gold at the end of the rainbow. There
have been many ups and downs while training
Jackson. There have been quick and
unexpected results and there have been times
when I didn’t think we were ever going to
accomplish a certain task. Teaching Jackson
the balancer’ (pronounced bal-on-say) is one
of those things that took a long time, but I
think I have found my pot of gold.
Ever since I saw Nevzorov’s horse doing the
balancer, I have wanted to train Jackson to
do it as well. There was very little I could
find out about it. In the beginning, I
didn’t even know how it was spelled.
Eventually, I found out how it was spelled
and learned just a little bit about it, but
there was not clear plan, that I found, on
how to start training a horse on the ground
at liberty. So I had to pave my own way.
I started last fall, I think. I knew that,
for me, to capture the behavior I wanted, I
would need to use the clicker. I started the
training in the round pen. First I would
have Jackson trot or canter around the round
pen, then I would suddenly ask him to
reverse directions, making sure he turned to
the inside. If he did, I would let him slow
down afterwards and then I would give him a
treat. I made sure to do this evenly on both
sides. Then I began to ask him for more. I
wanted him to turn more quickly, more like a
pivot on the hind legs. If he did it nicely,
I would click that moment and reward.
This seemed to be the hardest thing for him
to learn to do consistently. Some days he
would do some nice changes of directions and
other days it was just sloppy. I decided to
shelve it, for the most part, during the
winter. As soon as the snow melted however,
I was ready to give it a try. As it turned
out, he seemed to have remembered our
previous lessons and did pretty well. I then
began to add more difficulty. I would ask
for a change of direction and then, right
away, another change. When he would put
those two together, I would click and
reward. It did take a lot of patience and
quite a lot of pressure (being careful not
to use too much pressure, of course). It
might have been easier for a horse that had
more energy than Jackson, however.
Then we spent lots of time working on
getting two or three changes of direction
consistently. The trick was getting him to
change directions, without doing any forward
steps. After working on this for a few days,
there didn’t seem to be much progress. So I
dropped it for a few weeks. Then, right
before the horse show in April, I gave it a
try. There was huge improvement. When I
asked for those changes of direction, he
gave me some really nice movements.
Certainly, it was not hopping from one foot
to the other, but it was consistent jumps
from one side to the other, pivoting on the
hind legs. I was thrilled!
Then it seemed to get easier and more fun. I
needed to refine his jumping and landing on
both legs to jumping from one leg to the
other. I began by just asking for the
jumping side to side. I would click and
reward for consistency and rhythm. After
about a week of working on it, he started
offering to jump from side to side on his
own. Once he learned that he could get
rewarded for offering it, he started to try
different things with his feet. If I saw him
jump and land one foot, I would click and
reward that effort.
It simply became a matter of shaping his
behavior to be closer and closer to what I
wanted. If he tried really hard, but didn’t
get it, I would still reward and encourage
him. If he managed a step or two of the
right thing, I would praise him a lot and
shove handfuls of grain in his face.
Finally, he figured out how to jump to his
left, land on one foot, then jump to the
right, and land on both feet. Progress, but
not finished. I needed to figure out how to
get him to land on one foot going in both
directions.
I would ask for the balancer, and just watch
for the behavior that was close to landing
on one foot. It didn’t take long at all. I
tried to be consistent with what I would
reward, and, as a result, Jackson got more
and more consistent in giving me two or
three or even four very good steps of that
balancer.
That was yesterday. Now all I have to do is
gradually build on that until he can
consistently give me many steps of the
balancer. It took a long time to get here;
there were times when I wasn’t sure we would
ever get it, but we did. With patience,
persistence, and encouragement from my
friends and family, I did find the pot of
gold at the end of the rainbow.
