Micro Breaks in Clicker Training

My aim for the animals I am training is that they love to train and they enjoy it so much, they don’t want it to stop.
Then I build balance into the training where I give them lots of breaks, offer alternative food and train them to understand when they can go forage for food and when food and training is not available from me. They are masters at reading context and body language and they can learn this and then read me when I’m walking past to organise a training set up or move the camera, as you’ll see in my video link below.
At each micro break, which means after a couple of minutes training, I give the animal a break and I scatter food on mats and in buckets. I have lots of buckets and bowls in my training area. Over time, this builds a positive reinforcement history with buckets and wandering around to check buckets. If I do this at every micro break, the behaviour of wandering around and checking buckets becomes very context specific. Eventually, scattering food is the cue for my horse to go take a micro break and wander around and nibble, while I do other things.
I also offer easily accessible hay as alternative food as well.
A horse who has been trained and positively reinforced for taking a break and foraging, searching for food or eating their hay net, is different to a horse who walks away because the training session is less positively reinforcing than foraging for food, eating grass or nibbling around the edges of the arena or eating their hay net or doing anything else.
If a horse chooses to walk away mid session, it means it’s not fun anymore and they don’t want to participate and want to seek positive reinforcement elsewhere. But not all horses walk away, some stay, no matter how aversive they find it. That's why we always have to analyse their behaviour, how they take the food, how they eat, how they respond to cues and how they behave in general.
If they walk away mid session, it could also mean that they are seeking negative reinforcement, they want to remove/ leave an uncomfortable or unpleasant situation.
Training micro breaks in your clicker training can be a game changer, but it does have to be trained. You can teach them to ignore you for a little while and go do their own thing, using a contextual cue.
This leads towards not having a "velcro horse", but one that can chill with their hay net, wander around, enjoy some food that's been scattered and then come when called.
It also means later in your R+ training, when you want to train behaviours that incorporate distance away from you, the horse already has an inkling of this concept. My horses are great at this because of this early training.
Note the lovely Discretionary Effort, where she trots over to me, rather than strolls to me when I'm ready!
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