The Hidden Challenges of Using Food to Train Horses & An Anecdote About Croissants

A horse baking croissants. It is a disaster. I swear there's a point to this metaphor.

You're having an ambitious Saturday morning. The sun is shining. You're channeling your inner Julia Child when you decide... croissants! From scratch.

You scroll through photos, read some reviews, and think: I’ve got this.

Do you have baking experience? No.

Do you have all the ingredients? Probably not.

Is this ambition likely to end in a (predictable) disaster? Absolutely.

But the dream of a hot, flaky croissant and a perfect coffee on the balcony is too good to resist. You can't tell this boss mare what she can and can't do.

Clicker training horses well is much like the flakey, gorgeous, croissant - it makes you feel good, it's pretty to look at, it's an instagrammable (that's a word, right? Don't kill me I'm a Millenial) moment and it's delicious. But also?

It's like deciding to make croissants from scratch on a Saturday morning with zero baking experience, half a recipe pulled from a questionable AI, and missing ingredients.

It’s messy. It's confusing. It's predictably overwhelming. Quite honestly it's a health and safety hazard..

You Can't Bake a Croissant Without Butter

Likewise, you can't expect a horse to train calmly using food if their basic needs aren't met. If your horse is hungry, under-stimulated, socially isolated, stressed or in pain, adding food to the mix can turn a relaxed training session into a frantic Kitchen Nightmare.

Without the right ingredients you'll see:

• Pawing

• Mugging

• Agitation

• Behaviours that are best described as "hangry"

• Overstimulation (like over-arousal, dropping, whickering/nickering)

• Target obsession

The butter may be a problem but it isn't the problem.

Food doesn't cause the chaos -- it just reveals what's already bubbling underneath the surface.

No recipe? No Problem. Let's wing it.

Baking requires chemistry, precise measurements and temperature control... But how hard can combining butter, flour and salt really be?

I present to you some "cookies" I made a few weeks ago where a recipe was not followed... (Sorry Sophia)

I promise I'm a better horse trainer than baker. Moral of the story - don't bake ingredients with no recipe or plan.

Ok... So maybe winging it doesn't work.

Without a solid recipe (aka: Training Plan), things get weird fast. Horses need clarity and if you start tossing out clicks and cookies (preferable not the 'cookies' from the above image) without explaining what earns them, your horse is going to guess, and guess, and guess again, and guess again but harder this time.

You'll end up with:

• Button-mashing behaviours

• Confusion

• Frustration

• Sessions that feel highly chaotic

• Inconsistent results

Training without a plan is like baking without a recipe: it might work, but probably won't. Also the clean up is going to suck.

Hot Dog Buns are not Croissants -

Your horse is not a dolphin, or a dog, or a liger.

A lot of popular clicker-training advice available comes from the dog and marine mammal world and for good reason! The science is solid, the systems are elegant, and it works. So why is it so $*#&$^! hard with horses?

Example: Your dog gets a little frustrated during an exercise. You toss a treat to reset, then do a few rapid click-and-treat-in-position reps to build momentum. It works. Everyone’s happy.

But try this with a horse?

It tends to blow up in your face.

More food, delivered quickly, without a clear pause or spatial reset, often leads to over-arousal. Horses go from mildly frustrated to full meltdown in zero to naught seconds.

That might look like:

• Ear pinning

• Pawing

• Nipping or snapping

• Obsessive or stereotypical behaviours

• Dropping

• Vocalizing

• Dangerous movements like rearing, kicking, or head-flinging
  

Here’s the thing: If you want a croissant, don’t go dressing up a hot dog bun and pretending it’s the same thing. Sure, it’s technically of the same bread family, but one requires lamination, precision, rest time, and layers, and the other was born to hold ketchup and questionable life choices.

New Techniques Are Hard & You'll Probably Suck At It (at first, anyways).

If you, like me, have been cooking from a pressure-based cookbook, dabbling in clicker training is a bit like picking up Thomas Keller's cookbook and attempting to make one of his Michelin Star recipes without ever having cooked anything more complicated than KD in your dorm room hotplate (and probably messing that up).

You pick up clicker training and suddenly:

• The environment matters way more than you thought

• You can't "make" anything happen

• Precision in timing isn't just important it's necessary

• You need to think way outside the box and creatively come up with set-ups that illicit the behaviours you want rather than trying to make those behaviours happen

It's no longer about telling your horse what to do it's about setting up the environment to invite your horse to do a behaviour and then reinforcing that behaviour with a well timed mark and following that up with a reinforcer.

It's weird, it works, it takes a heck of a lot of time and you're going to need to get a lot more nerdy and a little less sporty.

Why Bother? Commercial Hot Dog Buns are Great

(are they, though?)

Because commercial hot dog buns are fine...But I’d rather have a French bakery croissant.

When done well, training with food is precise, effective, and deeply rewarding. When done badly, you get weird cookies, non-croissants, and a big mess.

So why do I still bother? Because when I've done clicker training well, I get:

• Horses who offer new behaviours with confidence

• Real precision and stimulus control

• A library of behaviours that slot into complex chains without reteaching

• A creative framework to build anything from a solid foundation

• A push outside my comfort zone that actually feels fun and empowering
  

So yes, it’s messy at first. You’ll burn a few batches. But when you finally get that warm, flakey delicious croissant moment?

Totally worth it.