If you’ve ever watched someone clicker train their horse, it can look wonderfully simple. You click when the horse does the thing you want… then you hand over a bit of food. Easy, right? 🤷‍♀️🐴

Well… not quite.
This is where so many well-meaning horse owners hit a stumbling block.

Clicker training is a beautifully clear, ethical way to communicate with your horse — but only when the foundations are set up correctly. The biggest challenge I see, time and time again, doesn’t come from the clicking bit at all. It comes from something far more primal:

Relaxation around food 😌🍏

Why Food Can Be Stressful for Horses (Even If It Seems Odd to Us)

Horses evolved to eat little and often, with food available pretty much continuously as they travelled, browsed and grazed. Their entire digestive system — and their emotional system — is built around the assumption that food isn’t scarce. 🌾

Now enter the modern training scenario, where the human suddenly becomes the gatekeeper of the food. From the horse’s perspective, this can be confusing, stressful and deeply frustrating. Why is my access to food suddenly being controlled? Why is it unpredictable? 😟

If we don’t introduce food thoughtfully, it’s incredibly easy for tension to creep in. Once tension enters the picture, learning becomes harder… and those unwanted behaviours start to appear.

The Hidden Difficulty Beginners Don’t See

This is why clicker training isn’t as simple as “click → treat.” Before we ever reach the point of reinforcing a specific behaviour, we need to introduce food rewards in a way that:

• supports relaxation

• avoids frustration

• feels safe and predictable

• builds trust 💛

• creates a calm learning environment 😌

Without this setup, horses can quickly become over-aroused. That’s when people call me saying:

• “He’s mugging me!”

• “She’s getting pushy around food.”

• “He’s too excited to think.”

• “She grabs at the treat before I’ve even delivered it.”

These aren’t ‘naughty’ behaviours — they’re stress behaviours. 😬

And here’s the tough bit:
It’s much harder to fix these problems once they’ve taken hold than it is to prevent them in the first place.

Why Starting Without Guidance Causes So Many Issues

One of the biggest patterns I see in my work is this:

Someone begins their clicker training journey with the best intentions. They’ve watched videos, read posts, maybe seen a friend do it. It looks simple enough — so they give it a go. 🎥📚

A few weeks in, they’re dealing with frustration, pushiness or excessive excitement… and that’s when they reach out for help.

By this point, the horse has already learnt a whole set of associations around food — often involving tension — and we now need to undo those patterns before we can build the new ones. It’s absolutely possible, but it takes longer and is more challenging for both horse and human.

This is exactly why I prefer to be involved from day 0, not day 1. 💡

Day 0: Setting You and Your Horse Up for Success

Before we ask the horse for any trained behaviour, I spend time on pre-training essentials such as:

• choosing the right reward for that individual horse 🥕

• understanding their emotional responses around food

• introducing reinforcement calmly and predictably

• helping the handler develop clear, consistent delivery 🤲

• creating a training space that feels safe and supportive

This groundwork means that when we do start clicking and reinforcing behaviours, the horse already feels relaxed and confident around the presence of food - and the handler feels prepared, too. 🌟

This approach prevents the common problems people associate with clicker training — overarousal, mugging and frustration — because we’ve already set the horse up to succeed. 🙌

Clicker Training Works Best When It’s Thoughtful, Not Fast

The magic of positive reinforcement isn’t in the click.
It’s in how we prepare the learning environment. ✨

It’s in how we introduce food.
It’s in how we honour the horse’s emotional needs.
And it’s in how we support the human to feel confident, calm and consistent. 💛

Clicker training can be simple — beautifully simple — but it isn’t simplistic.

When you start with guidance, especially from day 0, you and your horse get to skip the common pitfalls and enjoy the clarity, connection and confidence that positive reinforcement can bring. 🌈🐴

If you're ready to explore clicker training and you don't already have an Instructor lined up, drop me a message because I can support you either in-person or via video. Let's get this right from day 0.