Arrange the Antecedents

Before you begin training, set the scene!

Antecedents are anything in the environment that influence behavior. For every horse different antecedents will be helpful, so knowing your horse is important. The better we set the scene the more we help our horses find the goal answer and reach the reinforcement!

We want to decide where we want to train based on what we're working on. If we want calm, relaxed, we might not want to be in a busy arena or agility ring. Maybe a stall or paddock. Do other horses nearby help with confidence or create resource guarding? If we want to work on jumping, make sure they have the space and safe footing to do so. If we want to work in protected contact we can work over a fence, stall door, or reverse round pen, or just use objects as barriers.

We'll want to make sure we have too the tools we need, we can't work on haltering without the halter whether we're doing grooming, tacking, vet prep, or anything else, we need the tools we are teaching the horse about.

We also need to consider the create use of obstacles to make goals easier. Using ground poles to make paths or barriers, barrels, tarps as floors or walls, mats, platforms, different footing all result in different behavioral responses. Setting these up creatively can help make your goal behavior very easy!

We also want to consider our pretrained behaviors we can use, like targeting and body movements, using these to help a horse find the new behavior.