Building the Bridge
After a horse can stand relaxed in front of me and take food at the rate of 10 bites a minute, I am ready to build a bridge. The bridge is a conditioned reinforcer that will serve as a marker signal to the horse that I like what it is doing.
Building the Bridge
We recommend a verbal bridge for taming wild horses. I generally use “X” (rhymes with sex) and if I am training a foal in with its mother, I use “D” (rhymes with me). I also use a clicker at times. If I am training by negative reinforcement, I use “good” as a marker signal, but in this procedure we are working with +R.
• Objective: The horse will expect food when it hears the bridge sound or sees the bridge signal.
• The Set-Up: You are feeding a relaxed motivated horse through a fence panel in a quiet location. You know what you are using for a bridge sound or bridge signal.
• Prerequisite Training: The horse has learned to take food while remaining relaxed.
• Protocol: Make the sound, hand the animal the food. Repeat many times. Try to use small bites and have a high rate of reinforcement. Increase the temporal variability so that the interval is not predictive, but the animal is cued by the sound. When the animal will turn its head and look for the food at the sound, it knows the sound means “chow is being served”.
• What ifs: What if the animal stops eating? If the animal does not take the food in 5 seconds, take the food away. Give at least a 10 second time out. Try again. If the animal is still reluctant, leave him to grow desire and motivation.
Building a bridge requires that you be able to work with one horse at a time, the horses need to be in individual pens unless you are willing to work with two sounds for a bridge. Sometimes I use their names as the beginning bridge if they are stuck in group pens, but until this afternoon I didn't have names for these new horseshorses. A visitor who had been a horse wrangler in his younger days wanted to help me handfeed the wild ones. He thought for a moment and then supplied names: Queenie, Sally, Mary Bell, Leslie, Shirley, and Billy. These are names you would have used in the rangeland corrals of the 1950's when he was a young man. The mustangs learn to hear their names pretty quickly.
Fortunately four finished horses are leaving the facility today and the newbies can be spread out into their own personal accommodations. This will be really good news for Mary Bell, who is getting chewed on by Sally.
Building the Bridge
We recommend a verbal bridge for taming wild horses. I generally use “X” (rhymes with sex) and if I am training a foal in with its mother, I use “D” (rhymes with me). I also use a clicker at times. If I am training by negative reinforcement, I use “good” as a marker signal, but in this procedure we are working with +R.
• Objective: The horse will expect food when it hears the bridge sound or sees the bridge signal.
• The Set-Up: You are feeding a relaxed motivated horse through a fence panel in a quiet location. You know what you are using for a bridge sound or bridge signal.
• Prerequisite Training: The horse has learned to take food while remaining relaxed.
• Protocol: Make the sound, hand the animal the food. Repeat many times. Try to use small bites and have a high rate of reinforcement. Increase the temporal variability so that the interval is not predictive, but the animal is cued by the sound. When the animal will turn its head and look for the food at the sound, it knows the sound means “chow is being served”.
• What ifs: What if the animal stops eating? If the animal does not take the food in 5 seconds, take the food away. Give at least a 10 second time out. Try again. If the animal is still reluctant, leave him to grow desire and motivation.
Building a bridge requires that you be able to work with one horse at a time, the horses need to be in individual pens unless you are willing to work with two sounds for a bridge. Sometimes I use their names as the beginning bridge if they are stuck in group pens, but until this afternoon I didn't have names for these new horseshorses. A visitor who had been a horse wrangler in his younger days wanted to help me handfeed the wild ones. He thought for a moment and then supplied names: Queenie, Sally, Mary Bell, Leslie, Shirley, and Billy. These are names you would have used in the rangeland corrals of the 1950's when he was a young man. The mustangs learn to hear their names pretty quickly.
Fortunately four finished horses are leaving the facility today and the newbies can be spread out into their own personal accommodations. This will be really good news for Mary Bell, who is getting chewed on by Sally.
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