# Equine Training/Learning



## trailscout (Nov 23, 2020)

During the summer of 2019, out of curiosity I purchased a book entitled, You Can Teach Your Horse To Do Anything, On Target Training-Clicker Training and beyond: by Shawna Karrasch. After reading and re-reading the book, I was quite taken by what I read which confirmed in my mind the book presented exactly what I had been searching for.

Shawna began her full time working carrier around 1985 resulting from a summer job at Sea World when she was attending a university majoring in the field of animals. She fell in love with training sea mammals and remained there for 10 years at which time her employer bought tickets to an equine jumping show which she had never seen and became hooked on horses.

A year or so later, she was cutting her teeth training Olympic jumpers.

Interestingly, the introduction of reward reinforcement to marine mammals was introduced by two of B. F. Skinner's graduate students in the 60's, who to the disappointment of Skinner, decided to take the knowledge they had learned and apply it commercially.

During the summer of 2019 when the book mentioned above was bought, I was heavily occupied searching for a place to purchase that would be suitable for Keno and I to relocate to on a more permanent basis than our past arrangements had been. And since the purchase that did happen soon afterwards, I have remained heavily occupied in making the place actually suitable, (in my eyes), for Keno, myself, and our two dogs.

Only recently was I finally able to return to my interest in reward based training/teaching. My future tentative plans of using reward based training on an unhandled BLM mustang led me to searching the net, which led me to Mustang Maddy.

To say I was overwhelmed with enthusiasm when Maddy's videos appeared to make my dream doable. And to that point I decided to post a thread by her name in order to hopefully find others who shared a similar interest.

So far there have been 95 posts on the Mustang Maddy thread with other resources being posted. Most of the posts are by me. I've simply been posting what comes to mind as a way of preserving my thoughts where I can return to peruse them to assess to what degree I'm changing course or just to research a link that was mentioned.

I wish to keep posting and preserving my thoughts and eventually (hopefully) my work and experience with an unhandled mustang. But with the various directions the posts have taken, I have decided that Mustang Maddy is not an appropriate title as that is not the central point to the pursuit, although she certainly has been a significant part of it.

So instead of continuing with that thread, the decision has been made to start a Member Journal.

The Mustang Maddy thread will be merged below this post and journal posts will continue where that thread leaves off.


This morning I watched the last of a series of videos on the rehabilitation of Mystic who was deemed an untrainable Mustang.

I think there may be more coming in the series not sure. But I did watch all on her site.

I was more than impressed and learned a great deal of useful information.

I'm wondering if anyone here on the forum has watched the series and if they have any comments about it they'd be willing to share..


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