NEDA Spring Tune Up

Argh. It feels like a hard failure of a ride. I want to whine about what a hard failure of a ride it was. But the numbers say we didn't do too badly at all.

21 miles, 3500' of climbing, 4 hours moving time.


It was a beautiful day, with gorgeous scenery and great company on the trail. I got a little sun on my arms for the first time in what, six months? Whee! My scheme of bringing a case of beer instead of a side dish to potlucks is going over gangbusters and winning me tons of new friends. My feet in their silly barefoot shoes do not hurt. My husband is coming home tomorrow. And I think that's all the blessings I can count for today!

Look at this fine-looking (slightly dirty) Viking war pony!


We set off down the hill. I love these shots - did you know that Lake Tahoe is right behind that mountain? Did you know it's just chilling out a thousand feet above Washoe Valley at the base of that mountain? It really trips me out, thinking about it. Lake Tahoe's surface is a thousand feet higher than the valley, but it's deeper than Washoe Valley. It's a really unbelievably big lake, yall.


ANYWAY.

These trails are steep and rocky at the best of times. Today was not actually the best of times - we got some snow on Wednesday, then it warmed up and the snow is melting as fast as it can, which means the trails are tiny muddy rivers.


At one point, Dixie was powerwalking up a huge hill (passing Arabs left and right!) and we hit a section that was basically a ditch. Instead of walking sensibly in the bottom of the ditch, she was walking on the slippery side of the ditch. Right as I thought to myself "if this silly horse doesn't get off this slope she's going to slip" she slipped and fell down, very delicately and lightly, on my right leg. I got ice cold mud all over my leg, but I just stepped off and led her a little way down the trail to make sure she wasn't hurt. She was fine, but she'd lost a boot, so I got ice cold mud all over my gloves and hands as I washed off the straps and jammed it back on.

And that's pretty much how my day went. No injuries, no catastrophies, just a lot of minor-to-middlin' Slightly Bad Things.

I think this is Reno, waaay away to the north, but it's a really pretty photo regardless.


The first loop, 12 miles, went pretty well actually. I started in with a big group of people I know (shout outs to all my peeps) and things went better than I'd hoped. People would be inspired to power trot past us on gradual climbs, then Dixie and I would catch up and smoke them on the downhills, or (gasp!) we'd catch them at a walk on the steep climbs and pass them. I never thought I'd see the day where my big cow of a TWH would manage to pass an Arab on the uphill. Then we'd slow down and another group would catch the spirit and boogie on past us, and the cycle would repeat.

I think this is A, on Fire, who I rode in the Lake Almanor LD last year.


It was actually everything I love about the spirit of endurance. Nobody cared if you rode off in the middle of a conversation - you gotta ride your own ride. Everybody politely let me pass when I asked, and I got clear of people booking past me. We'd just pick up where we left off when we ended up near each other again.

The ribbons were plentiful but erratic. Hey, it's NEDA, it's a low budget low stress fun experience, not an FEI ride. The markers used mostly pink, but they ran out of pink and switched to multicolored part of the way through the marking experience - so about 2/3 of the first loop and 1/3 of the second loop were pink. The rest of the ride was random ribbons. They were always on the right, and the turns were well marked, and there were plenty of confidence ribbons.

The cottonwoods? willow things? are budding out!


Somehow Dixie lost two boots, front right and left rear, on the long downhill back to camp. I thought about going back, I really did, but I figured I'd come find them later or some kind soul on a short horse would find them for me. A kind soul (on a tall horse) DID find them and returned them to me at a little seasonal spring, but we were only a mile or so from camp and they were mud-caked so I just plodded on half-booted.

We walked in to camp and Dixie pulsed down (64) in a couple of minutes. There's no hold in NEDA rides, but I like to take 20 minutes or so at the trailer, and I got to spend those 20 minutes scrubbing all four boots in a bucket of water and putting them back on. Please, little boots, I thought, just one more loop!

I also shed my jacket and headed back out in my magical sports-bra-tank-top and a fuzzy sleeveless vest. Do you note a pattern of ridiculous optimism?

I headed back out with four people. L was riding Ebony, who's like always the top points horse in NEDA - but she's usually pulling a cart. Ebony was sure she needed to pass all the other horses but then maybe she should slow down and gawk at all the sagebrush she usually doesn't see while pulling a cart wearing blinders. L was kicking like a kid on a lesson pony, so I handed her my over-and-under and Ebony squealed like a pig and decided to just trot up the damn hill. We got to the top of the hill together and took a breather, then Dixie went powerwalking down the back side and I didn't see L again til after the ride.

We chased a disappearing tail up endless mountains for a long time, until suddenly we were alone. Our three buddies were far behind us, and the horse we were chasing had gone out of sight, and it was just me and Dixie.

"Wait, what?"


I started to worry about ribbons. Dixie decided we were lost and slowed down. Boots kept coming off. I got cold because we were going slow and I'd left my sweatshirt at the trailer.

It's a Nevada Endurance Thing.


I spent the next hour four thousand years stressing about my horse and the trail. If you look at the Strava map at the top, it looks like a retarded cloverleaf or something, but that's not how it rode. We did a fairly simple loop for the first half of the ride, but the second half kept crossing over the first part of the trail and doing bits of it backwards and bits forward and cutting off into new territory and yall I was sure I was lost. Not like, "oh god where is the trailer" lost, but "I am not doing the trail in the right order" lost. Eventually I decided that I'd ride for 22 damn miles by the damn GPS and then I'd point my horse down the hill toward the trailer and we'd head in and call it a day. But until then we'd just keep the ribbons on the right and follow the dolomite arrows, even though we were totally lost.

More hosebags.


Dixie also knew we were lost. There were no horses for hundreds of miles and her stupid human had led her into the wilderness to die. She slowed down to a crawl. At one boot-fixing pit stop, I snapped off the biggest juniper branch I could grab, but it was only like 12" long. Based on her reaction, it must've felt quite nice as I thwapped her madly about the neck, shoulders, butt, and flanks to try to get her to trot on the nice downhill sections.

Eventually, we moseyed near enough one of those cottonwood/willow things for me to get a Proper Horse Beating Stick, and I snapped off something north of three feet long. Of course, by that time we were only a mile or so from camp, and Dixie had decided that we were actually on the right trail headed in the right direction, and I only had to wiggle my stick to get a trot.

And then we finally caught up to another rider a quarter mile from camp. I'm sure I get no credit at all in Dixie's mind for getting us home safe: we were alone, and things were terrible; we found another horse, and YAY CAMP!

I rode into camp, flung my stick dramatically into the bushes, slithered off my horse, and announced that I hated my horse, the sport, and horses in general. Beth immediately produced a beer that she'd saved for me and I decided that perhaps hate was a strong word.

We finished with 21.1 miles on the GPS, and I'd hit stop at some point because I hung it on a different spot on the saddle, so I'm calling it exactly 22 miles. Ribbons on the right. Watch the hoofprints. Trust the ribbons.

I ate a lot of fried chicken and a handful of Fritos and felt quite a bit better about things. Dixie ate some hay, and some ration balancer, and some hay pellets, and drank a couple gallons of water, and looked pretty good. This is way too long anyway, so tomorrow I'll talk about Everything I Did Wrong.

I read books!

Remember back in January when I was like "I'm gonna blog the books I read"? Yeah. Well. Let's pretend I posted these as I read them, ok?

I read all of the Temeraire books. I'd actually read the first three when we lived in Ohio (side note: Columbus has the best library system I've ever seen) but I'd forgotten them sufficiently to make it worthwhile to reread them. And I thought I remembered them being really quite good in a sea of horrible books. (I read like half the Laurel K. Hamilton books either right before or right after Temeraire.)

Temeraire is the Napoleonic War, with dragons. You're going to read that sentence and hate the idea or love it. I think they're amazingly good from Book 1 - I was captivated from the second chapter. Book 7 is about to come out, YAY! Rated buy.

Then I read Laura Crum's first novel, Cutter. It's reprinted on Kindle for .99, and she just got the second one out last week or so. She was all "oh you should read it but don't expect too much it was my very first book" - but she's wrong. It's quite good! Mysteries aren't my thing (unless it's also SF/F), but I really enjoyed Cutter. The pacing was a little slow - you could tell it was intended to be Book One of A Series, and she was introducing a lot of recurring characters - but the writing was crisp and it flowed really well. And such a charming look back in time, to the misty past of 1994 - the protagonist Gail carries a beeper! A beeper! how cute is that!

Endurance friends: Gail boards her horse with an e-rider, who will ring very true to you. She does, in fact, say shit like "Oh not a long ride, just 20 miles today." (I talked to my Dad tonight, and he asked if I had my big race tomorrow, and without even batting an eye I said "Oh no, it's just 20 miles tomorrow.")

The writing was solid, the mystery wasn't immediately obvious, the characters were strong - AND THE HORSES WERE REAL HORSES. I always get excited when there's a horse in a book, but almost always it's either a Magical Fairy-Tail Horse who reads your mind (figuratively or literally) or a prop, something that the character can leap upon and gallop for 20 miles. Before I got a horse, I knew that neither of those was accurate, and now I just grit my teeth about most horse appearances. But Laura, duh, has had horses her whole life, and her horses are just real horses. They do real horse stuff!

Definitely recommended. Book 2 just came out for Kindle (and remember, you can read them on the computer with the Kindle app, even if you don't have a physical Kindle) and it's next on the list. Rated buy (unless you really can't read them online, then you're stuck borrowing them, cause they're out of print.)

I think after that I read Transition by Iain M. Banks.

(I first read Banks' Culture series, last year, and L-O-V-E-D them. Are you on the liberal end of the political spectrum, a fan of space opera without the super-hard how the FTL travel system works details, and interested in the idea of a post-Singularity culture? You will love the Culture books! Read them in any order. If you aren't (or if you don't know what the hell any of that means), you may like them. They share the same universe (and occasionally, the same character appears more than once), but you don't need to read them in any particular order. I thought The Player of Games was rather approachable and a good starting point. Borrow, then buy your faves.)

Anyway, Transition was also good. Not Culture. Banks does Quantum Leap with many leapers. There's a bit of torture porn - one of the Bad Guys is a torturer, and it's a little too gruesome for me, but it's easy enough to skim his chapters. Quite enjoyable. Rated a strong borrow.

I think after that I read The Night Circus. My mom recommended it to me - it's, mmmmm, magical realism? Based loosely upon The Tempest. (Which I really should read one day - The Tempest is a really popular mythological framework, and I've read a bunch of books with Prospero/Miranda characters, but I've just never read the original.) I know a lot of yall aren't SF/F fans - this is a book anyone who likes fiction would like. It's just fun. I wasn't so captivated that I'd buy it - giving it a borrow.

Now I'm working on Entwined and Ruby Red. Aarene promises that Entwined is pretty good, and I normally love fairy-tale retellings, but it's a little too ~princessy~ for me, so I'm alternating with Ruby Red. RR is a time-travel novel - I read the blurb about it on the Unshelved Book Club. I get a lot of "I should look for that" book ideas from Unshelved - good comic, great resource. Anyway, I put in an order for it back in October when I read that, and its time has come!

I shall update with more books no later than May.

Poor little lamb

One of my friends was telling me about her poor kid - they went to some place like Great Clips and he ended up with a bowl cut. He's old enough to be mortified by it, and while it is character building to have a horrible haircut, they're going to get it fixed soon. (I mean, think about it - how many perfectly normal haircuts do you remember from your childhood, versus the time you cut your bangs an inch above your eyebrows, or got bowl'd, or fell asleep in your chewing gum and ended up with a pageboy? This is the stuff that memories are made of!)

So that's kinda how I feel about Dixie today. The other horses may laugh at her, but it'll be a memory she treasures in her golden years! Yes, I attacked her with the clippers again. It looks a lot like a 4H kid's first attempt at sheep-shearing. We just got done with another nasty snowstorm, so I confined myself to her head mostly. It was, in fact, a Learning Experience for Dixie - the last time I clipped her she came utterly unglued when I got within about 3" of her ears. Today was a lot of normal Dixie drama, and I ended up getting one good pass over her mohawk bridle path, plus I did for some of the fuzz around the base of her ears.

Cleaned up her jawline and cheeks, too.


Here's the other side:


No, wait. How about this?


She persisted in trying to eat the phone (if it's not buzzing, it must be food, right??) and the sun was setting straight behind her and it wouldn't have come out anyway so I gave up.

I touched up her feet too, but they're holding up quite well. I've gotten in the groove again and I go to town on them about every two weeks, so there's never a huge amount to take off.

Front right, pre-trim:


Heel view - I don't think I've ever seen her heels this open. YAY ME!


Front left:




I didn't take after solar views, because they didn't look much different! I took the heels down as much as I could, knocked off a bit of wall that was too long, and put a hell of a roll on all four feet. One side of her front right frog was thrushy so I cleaned it out and smeared a lot of goo in.

I go through cycles in my trimming - I'll get her feet looking (I think) really nice and get all smug and complacent about my routine. Then someone will post pictures or a discussion on a blog (my latest inspiration: Pangea's crappy pasture trim on Andrea's new blog) and I'll start really thinking hard about trim theory and looking at exactly what I'm doing.

So, the two things I'm thinking about now:
1) I don't THINK Dixie needs the support of those bars, and I'm watching them hard, but I didn't take them out today. I get confused about bars - it seems like every school of thought approaches them differently, and even the major trimmers change their approach over time. I just read a Ramey article and I am moved to not trim Dixie's bars, not today at least.

2) Breakover. That's actually one of the main things I think about when I think about trimming - it's so complex and so crucial. Even (especially?) when you have a horse that's going sound barefoot, there's still so much room for adjustment in the breakover. Dixie's walls are so thick! Look at the walls back by the heel buttresses - they're about a quarter of an inch thick. A quarter of an inch versus an eighth of an inch versus a sixteenth of an inch at the toe will have a huge influence on her hoof flight path. Breakover's been something I've neglected, and I wailed on her mustang roll today.

Behold!






I even got in the super-awkward position and rolled her back feet, too. (I am especially bad about keeping the walls level with the sole and letting them just chip off on rocks. Bad Funder!)



A third thing I've been thinking about, off and on, is rings. I thought that Dixie didn't really have rings/event lines, but I wanted to get some pictures and really look. I'd say she does not have event lines. Grass hay, yall. Grass hay.

Pretty nice trotters. Not perfect - gonna keep working on the thrush, maybe I can get those heels down further - but pretty nice.

Lies, damn lies, and weather forecasts: 25 at Red Rocks

Yesterday, C and I touched base and agreed to meet at Red Rocks (Rides of March ridecamp) at 10 am today. When I woke up it was a very inauspicious 11 degrees out, but by the time I hitched the trailer it was a balmy 27.

Yesterday, the weather forecast had promised "Partly sunny, with a high near 45. East wind between 5 and 10 mph." I convinced myself that "partly sunny" == "mostly sunny," and that 45 is just a bit cooler than 50. This morning, they'd hedged it down to a high of 42. I am not real sure it ever got above freezing, I saw the sun maybe twice, and the wind was bitter! 27* at 10 am at Red Rocks. 30* at 5 pm. Brrrr!

C and I were so unhappy about being there that we didn't even say hi, we just set to work on our horses and didn't say a word til we were headed out to the trail. But once we got moving and talking, the day just flew by. We didn't push the horses too hard; the trail was plenty long and hard on its own.


25 miles in 6:30 total time, 5:49 moving. 4000 feet of elevation gain - we climbed a big mountain! It's Nevada in February, so there was nothing much for the horses to snack on, which I think was their biggest problem in the last half of the ride. There was plenty of water, and as usual, Dixie drank great once she finally started to drink.

Here are some pictures! According to the very small sign, this is a wildlife habitat area. Under the big horizontal thing I could see two concrete pipes, mostly buried but sticking out of the ground. The pipes had openings at the top/end, and the openings were filled with rocks.


What the hell kind of wildlife a) needs that habitat and b) cannot find it in the tens of square miles of uninhabited rocky hills?

Gratuitous Dixie shot.


We rode across the valley and up to the top of that there mountain.


Immense cottonwood. It was easily 6' across at the base. I got distracted and forgot to take more pictures.


Res ispa loquitur.


Merri! Do you see what we saw? There's a HUGE NEST, made of sticks, in that boulder. Looks fairly old, but I think the golden eagles raised at least one batch of babies there.


We climbed the north side of the mountain, and the trail was pretty snowy. Just patches at first, but the drifts were over a foot deep near the peak.


In this cloudy blurry camera-phone photograph, you can (not) see many major landmarks! Peavine ("my" mountain) is in the center-back, Mt. Rose is the tallest peak in the back line, and Slide Mountain is the one with visible ski slopes toward the left. The trailers are behind the dark juniper hills on the right in the middle. My house is behind some hills, off camera to the left.


Anyway, horse stuff: we went slow, but the horses didn't have any problems. I am quite sure that if there'd been a vet check in the middle of the ride, they'd have chowed down and perked right up. As it was, they were pretty hungry and a little tired when we made it back to the trailers - they both dove right into their hay, but neither one had that "tired eye."

Baby needs new shoes! Dixie's starting to wear out the toes of her front Renegades. The holes are pretty teeny right now, so I think they've got at least another 100 miles in them, but I might get replacements at convention.

If she handles the NEDA Washoe ride at least this well, I think I will bump up to the 50 at ROM. I mean, we just did an LD, with no vet check/food break, without the high-energy hoopla of all those other horses, and we pretty much made time.

Yea, get negative on that horse!

The previous post has some fantastic comments that have influenced what I'm going to say here - if you're finding this topic interesting, make sure you read the comments on the last post!

Shannon said something that really piqued my interest:

I don't really like the article on positive reinforcement that you linked. It relies far too heavily on B.F. Skinners original 1950 work. We have made great progress in the study of behavior since then, particularly in identifying the neurologic pathways involved in operant conditioning. There is little evidence that negative and positive reinforcement are any different from a neurologic perspective. Many behaviorists are actually pushing to drop the words "negative" and "positive" completely and simply go with "reinforcement". Both negative and positive reinforcement are reward based. The only difference in the two is the application of the stimulus: Negative = stimulus removed to gain desired behavior, positive = stimulus applied to gain desired behavior. Realistically, arguing negative vs. positive reinforcement is arguing semantics.

Both negative and positive reinforcement are part of operant conditioning. Operant conditioning is a method by which a behavior is "shaped" (trained) to a stimulus which is irrelevant to the behavior. So, a rat running on a wheel when he hears a bell and a horse knowing to stop when he hears the word "whoa" are both examples of operant conditioning and have been trained by reinforcement, either positive or negative.
...
Clicker training is the use of a "click" as a stimulus. Whether or not it is positive or negative reinforcement is a matter of semantics. In the end, the "click" is no different from the "aids" that conventional trainers use. We are all using a stimulus and a reward to shape a desired behavior.

So - I acknowledge that it may be outmoded for me to differentiate between positive and negative reinforcement. I definitely see the point, that biochemically there might not be a difference between a click followed by a reward versus a release of pressure, but I don't think that totally invalidates what I wanted to talk about today.

Negative reinforcement definitely has an image problem, that's for sure. It just sounds mean, and many horse owners don't want to be mean. I mean, hell, I don't want to be mean! As firm as necessary, and fair, yes, but I don't want to be the mean hateful human. So let's call it -R (as opposed to +R, usually but not exclusively clicker training).

Still, I think -R is the most natural way to train horses. (Oh man I'm gonna get some hate mail for saying that!) Hear me out, though - we touch our horses more than we touch any other being aside from human family members. How often do you touch a stranger? Almost never. How often do you touch your dog or cat - and you can't count "the cat climbs on my lap every night" in this instance? You pet them, yes, and pick them up as necessary, but I bet you hardly ever lay hands on your house pets like you do your horse. Horses are one of the few creatures that we manipulate with our hands every single time we interact with them. The most intuitive, even "natural" way we have to communicate with horses is through direct contact.

Direct contact is -R. It can also be +R: scratching an itchy spot or massaging a tight muscle feels immediately good to a horse. And it can even be a form of clicker training - if your horse has learned to associate a pat on the neck with positive feelings, that's +R in my book (but just like the clicker noise, it's a learned association). But most of the time, when we touch our horses, it falls in two camps: "don't move, let me do this to you" or "move away from my pressure." Almost everybody indicates "move from pressure" with, well, pressure, repeated as necessary.

Here's where I think -R training diverges from clicker training. All the c/t stuff I've read says "don't nag." Ask (verbally or physically) and wait, and eventually, when the behavior happens, reward. -R behavior teaches your horse new behaviors (or reinforces old ones) by, in essence, nagging. If I want my horse to back up from the ground, I give her the verbal cue ("shhhhh"), the body language, and the physical cue (jiggling her halter backwards) - and I keep that up, escalating the physical cue, til I get the response I want. I start with a cue that's as subtle as I can manage, because I want to train her to respond to the lightest touch, but I ramp it up geometrically if she's balky or not paying attention. For some behaviors (i.e. moving the hindquarters at a tap), I don't ramp up the intensity of my request, but I keep asking over and over til I get what I want.

Clicker people: Is there a way to ramp up the request? Because if there is, I'll buy the "C/T is equivalent to -R training" argument.

So, back to my main point: the easiest way for me to ask my horse to do something is physically. I reach out and literally touch her and indicate "please move away from this pressure." She'll try different things to get a release from that pressure, and when she tries the right thing, I release to reward her. Sometimes, she doesn't get it and gets frustrated, so I go to my #1 Plan B: clicker training.

(I might write yet another long post about why I like clicker training, which will no doubt piss off both the hardcore c/t'ers and the traditional horsepeople. We'll see how tired I am tomorrow night!)

+R behavior modification - clicker training - is the only way to work with animals that you cannot regularly touch, like captive elephants or dolphins or even chickens (god bless all four brain cells). It's fabulous for working with animals that you do not want to touch all the time, like dogs doing liberty work (agility, off-leash training, etc.) It even works for horses - but why start there? We touch horses more than we touch any other creatures, so why not start with the intuitive -R pressure and release method? Sometimes it's ok to be negative.

All right, smart readers: rip it apart!

We're all clicker trainers?

A committed clicker trainer friend posted this (not her content, just a link she liked) on Facebook this morning.
An Open Letter to Buck Brannaman

I really encourage yall to go read it if you have time. It's long, but it's really good - I especially like the point she makes about using clicker-type training to teach riders how to ride. In her open letter to Buck, she suggests that he break down the rider's movements and mark when they're doing it right.

For example (I'm making this one up): tell the rider that to steer the horse to the left, she should turn her head left, pick up contact on the left rein, support the horse with the right rein, and use her legs to ask the horse to walk. Then have the rider just concentrate on the head movement, and say "there" whenever she remembers to turn her head. Then add in the inside rein, then the outside rein, etc. "There" is the marker sound to reinforce the behavior, and by breaking it down into component body movements it should be easier for the rider to piece it together.

Sounds familiar, yes? It's similar to how we teach horses. We ask for some component and keep asking til we get it, then we ask for more. Trot in a circle. Ok, good, now trot in a circle with a little actual bend. Good! Now slow that trot down (or extend it, or collect it - whatever you're looking for in your discipline).

Now, the two points I think Gretchen, the blog author, got totally wrong:

One.

The practice [of clicker training] is relatively simple in broad outline, but in detail as complex as the teacher’s knowledge and creativity can make it. Mark and reward what you want, block/ignore/wait out what you don’t. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat again. If you’ve ever shaped another creature’s behavior using those simple steps, you’re a clicker trainer, whether or not you’ve ever touched a clicker. Whether or not you’ve ever given an animal a food treat. Guess what, Buck. You’re a clicker trainer, insulting as that might be for you to hear.

When you artfully channel your green filly’s longing for peace, when you dole it out to her in tiny sips with every well-timed release, would you call that exploitive? I wouldn’t.

Clicker training, by every definition I've ever read, uses positive reinforcement. (Click that link - I go back to it several times.) Positive reinforcement means that the trainer gives something to the subject in order to increase the frequency of a behavior. You give the dog a bit of kibble when she sits. You give your husband a kiss when he loads the dishwasher. You give the horse a treat when she walks calmly past the scary trash can. That's a great tool, and it's extremely effective in all kinds of situations if you use it right, but it's not what most horse owners do most of the time when we interact with our animals.

I might get this wrong - and if so, I hope the clicker nerds who read this will correct me - but I think most human/horse interaction is negative reinforcement ("the taking away of an aversive stimulus to increase certain behavior or response.") An aversive stimulus doesn't have to be harsh to be effective - it just means pressure and release. We all know to release the pressure as soon as the horse does what we want, right? I think that's pretty fundamental to every effective non-clicker form of horsemanship. If you're tapping your horse's butt with a lunge whip to encourage her to load in a trailer, you stop tapping as soon as she starts moving toward the trailer. By taking away that aversive whip stimulus, you've showed her that yes, that's what I want.

Now, look back up at that quote. "When you artfully channel your green filly’s longing for peace, when you dole it out to her in tiny sips with every well-timed release..." Release is not a reward. Rewards are positive reinforcement; releases are negative reinforcement. I'm a big fan of negative reinforcement - but it's not clicker training.

Two. (Emphasis in original.)

The moment in your brief anti-clicker tirade when your ignorance was most glaringly exposed was when you scoffed that a clicker trainer “couldn’t click fast enough” if you put her in a dangerous situation. It would make as little sense to say of one of your students that she couldn’t yank on the bit often or hard enough to survive such a test. The problem wouldn’t lie with the bit, it would lie with the unprepared rider and horse. A clicker trainer uses the clicker to nurture a feel and to establish, refine, and then occasionally maintain specific cued behaviors. If a trainer hadn’t worked hard and long (possibly with the help of a clicker) to get the feel of her horse and to get the behaviors she would need in such a situation solidly on cue, if she hadn’t already established that she could bet her life on her horse responding as he needed to in order to keep them both safe, she would be a suicidal idiot to get the two of them willingly into such a fix. As would any student using your methods.

Um, I actually can't ask for a behavior that's incompatible with the horse trompling me (such as "head down" or "feet still") and click to reward it faster than the horse can run over me (or buck me off, or spin and bolt). Especially if I've only used clicker training - meaning, I've only used positive reinforcement of the behaviors I want to see. I haven't yet met a horse that was exclusively trained using positive reinforcement - and to be honest, I don't ever want to be on the same side of a fence as that horse.

You know what I can do? Scream and wave my fists, for trompling on the ground. Yank the horse's nose to my knee with my instruments of oppression reins. It might not save me - horses are dangerous! - but it's more likely to save me than asking for a behavior that's incompatible with splattering me.

Let's go back to operant conditioning terms for a second. My panic reactions to my horse trying, inadvertently, to kill me are all positive punishment methods: the adding of an aversive stimulus to decrease a certain behavior or response. If my horse walks right into my bubble like she's forgotten I exist, I will absolutely add an aversive stimulus (yelling, thrashing about with the lead rope, flailing with my arms) to decrease that behavior.

In contrast, if I'm trying to train her to stand in a slightly different spot, I might use pressure/release negative reinforcement: jiggle the lead rope til she backs up with her head at my shoulder. Or I might use clicker training positive reinforcement: when she's standing exactly where I want, make a marker sound that she associates with something pleasant, to indicate that that's where I want her to stand. Both of those methods take repetition, and they'll both get you a horse that's interested in leading and standing in exactly the way you've trained - but I just don't know if that horse wouldn't leap into you to get away from a plastic bag blowing across the yard. That's what positive punishment is for.

Additionally: you only become prepared for your horse by doing shit with your horse. I do not know how to get behaviors on cue 100% of the time without exposure to different scenarios, and no one else does either. That's why endurance riders are prepared to eat dirt at the first start line. It's why your barrel horse runs differently away from home. It's why dressage people start out at lower levels than what they train at home. It's why eventers practice jumping so many types of jump - it takes exposure to get the cues right, whether you're using positive or negative reinforcement. Yes, I'm sure a committed and gifted clicker trainer could get the cues right to perform well in any of those scenarios - but positive punishment is there to save you from a world of hurt if it all goes sideways.

What do you think, clicker and traditional people?

I am the worst endurance rider ever

I didn't ride again. And it was in the low 60s! My uterus declared today to be a non-riding day, and lobbied hard for it to be a couch-day, but I did manage to strip the den floor at least. Getting the carpet up was pretty easy, and then I just alternated sitting on the couch feeling sorry for myself with crawling on the floor prying up staples.

Tomorrow. I ride. Swear to god, no matter what, I ride that horse.