Clicker training a shy goat to become a pack goat - ungoing process

[Sanhestar]

Here's, as promised, Freddie's story.

Freddie’s story start’s a few years before his birth. Mind you, I can’t scientifically prove my theories so anyone else who keeps goats might have a different opinion.


With Freddie I can follow a trait of somewhat inherited shyness through his family.

We bought his grandmother Mona in 2005. She was then a very shy 1,5 year old doe who had formerly lived with another doe which was constantly mobbing her. I believe that part of her shyness resulted in the mobbing she experienced. I’ve seem something similar in one of our first lambs we had back in 2002 – Muffin. Muffins mother also was a formerly shy goat who turned to become a people friendly, attentive doe in a smaller group and with enough patience and kindness. Muffin however, although handled from his first day, turned into a stand-offish buckling which was hard to catch. I also observed that everytime I tried to handle him, his father would intervene and butt him off. My theory then and now was that some goats connect the mobbing from other herd members to the person that is present during the mobbing and therefore avoid him/her, too.

Muffin proved this theory right because his father died in a freak accident when he was two years old and in the course of the year that followed, Muffin became tame and eager to interact with people.

Back to Mona. She became tame when she kidded the first time and we had to take her and the lamb into the house for a few weeks because of the hard winter in that year. Her daughter, though, kept being stand-offish until we sold her to a family with kids were she bonded to one daughter.

Freddie’s mother was from Mona’s second lambing. I wasn’t able to handle her directly after birth as we had contractors working on the house and they weren’t willing to wait for me to check that she was ok. Her brother who was born first and received his initial handling, is tame and well socialized.

She wouldn’t follow her mother’s example and loose the shyness in the following years but passed her behaviour and her shyness to Freddie.

As, years ago, when I started with goats and then began the packing, we added goats from various sources to our herd, I have some experience in how to „tame“ a goat and often had good results with the approach „time, patience and kindness“.

Freddie (and his mother) and one of Freddies half-brothers did resist this approach. Although handled with kindness from birth, Freddie turned into a stand-offish goat when he was just a few weeks old and stayed that way for the rest of his life until I started to click him in December 2014, when he was 6 years old.

For the years previous to that date, you would find Freddie somewhere in the back of the herd, keeping other goats between him and me (or my husband) and catching him to trim his feet or administer medical care was always accompanied with some scheme to get him into a corner and then hold onto him. He became very adept at reading the signs that I was planning to get him, off course. In the winter months everything was a bit easier, because with the restricted room the flight distance would go down and for a few days every winter I was able to give treats and ask him to accept being touched but this always broke down as soon as even the slightest demand was put to him. So I resigned myself to let him live his life out in the brush clearing group and just „be a goat“ but we had a very sad thing happen in Autumn of 2014 that got me thinking again and trying to find a way to get him to be able to interact on a calmer level with me:

While moving the herd to the next pasture, which at that time involved loading the herd into a trailer, Feddie’s mother and his shy half brothers separated from the herd. We didn’t manage to re-capture them that day nor in the weeks that followed. They turned feral and where in the end shot and killed while attempting to cross a highway by police to prevent an accident.

When I started clicker-training our ponies in December 2014 I wanted to give a last try to getting Freddie tame and him to clicker the really old-fashioned way without any protected contact or targeting.

Started with just a bit of grain in my hand, letting that trickle out of the hand and clicking until he made the connection that there’s food in the hand and the click means that food will be released. As he knew the hand feeding from previous years this wasn’t completely new to him but I didn’t know at that time if under clicker training his behaviour would hold when I would make demands, like „allow being touched“.

The decision to work without protected contact was made because he already had this hughe flight distance and I wanted him to become comfortable near to me.
I spent the winter months of 2014/2015 with working on nearness, allowing touch and following free. After 15 sessions he was able to interact not only during the clicker sessions but at times when I would work in the paddock without clicker, would come to me for some scratching, did no longer move away when I was walking towards him while doing chores.

With turning them out on pasture in spring he regressed, didn’t want to interact and had no interest in clicker plays.

I had to return the herd to the stable for two weeks and while I didn’t click him, he was again interested in social interaction and stayed that way during the summer.

I clicked irregularly over the summer, showed him the saddle once in August and then again made a long pause until just after New Year of 2016.

Within three sessions we refreshed social interaction, hand-target, following free and allowing the saddle to touch him resp. being placed on his back.
Then we had THE break-through moment of the whole year spent training him. Freddie accepted being saddled.

We now work on leaving the stable (because we are being pestered by the other goats), introducing the panniers and, as soon as the weather allows, going out with some of the experienced packers, although I will secure him with a lead rope then.

The next challenge is now hoof trimming without fighting or fussing. As I don’t want to wrestle with him for his foot I started to introduce a body taget = he is supposed to touch my hand with his carpal joint by lifting his leg and this will then be transformed into „place your leg into my hand“


The leg lifting was very easy, took just two sessions. Folding the leg and putting it into my hand is a bit more challenging. But the targeting has the side effect that he becomes more comfortable with me being near his front legs – hind legs will be another story, still.

I also play with him with saddling, right now with „standing still while being saddled“ and I’ve incorporated some leading techniques that are used with horses with good results. To explain these would go too deep, if your interested, I would suggest that you look at the clicker work that Alexandra Kurland is doing with horses.

I realise that I have placed several clicker-related terms into this story. If you want to know what specific terms mean, just ask.