I was wondering if anyone had viewed the poisoned cues dvd by Alex Kurland and Jesus R-R yet - and if so what you thought about it? Or any thoughts about poisoned cues generally?
Sorry, I've not seen the DVD (obviously a bit out of touch as I didn't know there was one). But the one occasion I saw AK at a demo I felt she, errrrm, poisoned rather a lot of her cues.
I think it was Karen Pryor who coined the term and there is an article by her on this site if you can bothered to trawl through the archives (maybe a web search would find it??). It essentially makes the point that if your cues were initially trained using -R then there will always be a remnant of pressure, psychologically if not physical, even if you are then rewarding the resultant behaviour. The classic example would be an advanced Parelli horse who is moving off imperceptible cues - tiny finger wiggles or facial expressions - but you know, and the horse certainly knows what could happen if he were to ignore the cue and tempt the trainer to switch to Phase 4.
Whether or not the average well-balanced horse would feel the cue is poisoned for ever is probably debatable. I'm not convinced Jak feels traumatised if I apply some rein pressure in a request to stop. But with a very worried, insecure horse then I would allow for the classical conditioning associated with me and my cues to be much more pronounced. In fact, I would then be wanting to do some free-shaping and helping the horse to learn to problem-solve and make decisions in the absence of cues. And if I did use cues (or -R "requests") they would be very mild and not escalate if the horse did not comply.
your explanation is what I've understood poisoned cues to be - and everything you say makes absolute sense to me. My particular concern is that I think I have poisoned cues for things like my saddle with one of my horses - who I put through a lot of tough, conventional training, before switching to CT. He's had the best part of two years off from riding (variety of reasons - mainly to do with me having a complete change of mind/heart about horse training, and trying to learn new ways of thinking about training, and trianing with the clicker). He's doing really well with clicker taught behaviours, we've got stand, head lowering, stand on a mat, play with a ball, touch cone, nice leading, follow me without a lead rope, backing etc, and we're working towards putting some of these things on visual cues. I've also worked on getting happy to accept things like being brushed and handled in his girth area - he used to be very nippy about having his girth done up, no matter how carefully I did it, and having had numerous saddle checks etc... and has always been sensitive about having that area handled - however he is much better now after ct-ing (have not tried with saddle yet). But the other day I let him into our little indoor training area for a ct session, and there was a saddle hanging on the fence at the far end which I'd been using on somebody else - he looked at it, and then tightened his nostrils and veered away from it, and wouldn't go to the far end of area where the saddle was voluntarily, even though he usually spends the first five mins exploring the whole area and sniffing where the others have been to see if any treats have been dropped, while I am gathering together the things I might want to use. I removed the saddle and he then slowly made his way to the bottom end where it had been. It wasn't out best ever session(!) but I can't say that has anything to do with the saddle.
I think I'll try to get hold of the dvd, and I'll do a bit of a review about it if anyone else is interested. I know what you mean about Alex possibly poisoning cues herself sometimes - some stuff in her books and dvds is a bit questionable - but when I actually saw her work in 'real life' she used very light -R, and free-shaped lots of behaviours - I guess like everyone else, her work and ideas are evolving as well.
If anyone has any more thoughts on this, I'd be really pleased to hear them. To be honest, I'm not close to wanting to get back on this horse yet, and I'm happy to take it slowly and do as much as I need to get him comfortable with the idea of being ridden - and if he shows me he's never going to be that comfortable, then it's no big deal - there's loads of other stuff we can do together - but I think the saddle could be an important issue for us to overcome if we do stand any chance of getting back to riding.