If there's one thing I've learned from life, it's never to say "never". Too often, I've said I'll never use that or I'll never need to do this and along comes a situation where I have to backtrack and do exactly what I said I'd never do!

Some years ago, I did a set of horsemanship courses that insisted we bought their particular brand of special headcollar. I brought it home and hung it in the tack room.

Sometime later, a visiting friend looked along my bridle rack and, spying the cobweb-festooned device, remarked, with a raised eyebrow:

"I see the headcollar's been useful."

"I'll never use that", I retorted.

The very next week, along came Fudge to show me that you should never say never.

Fudge is an Exmoor pony and when he arrived, he simply did not lead. I don't mean he dragged behind or he pulled you along a bit, he simply did not understand that when the rope got a bit tight on the headcollar, he had to follow the feel and go with the human.

In fact, he did the complete opposite.

The minute he felt any pressure to go in a direction that did not suit him, he would twist his neck, turn his head and just GO! It was not a panic or a fear-based behaviour, he had learned that if he didn't want to go somewhere, he didn't have to.

In desperation, the special headcollar was dug out of the tack room. There was still a battle, but Fudge hadn't built up a skill base to outwit this new device, and although it took some weeks, he did learn to follow the leader.

I wonder now if using clicker training would have been less hard work as Fudge lives for his food. Clicker training very simply works by rewarding the desired behaviour with a click sound that is then reinforced using a food treat. Eventually, you can almost completely phase out the food reinforcer and just use the clicker.

Feeding treats to ponies has been another "never" in my life.

As children, we were discouraged from feeding ponies from our hand because, we were told, it encouraged biting. However, feeding treats in the training of horses and ponies seems to be quite fashionable at the moment and because of my involvement with the Horse Agility Club, I thought I'd better learn more about it because quite a few members use it in the training.

Fortunately, we have an expert in the Westcountry in the guise of Ben Hart so I asked him to come over and show me what it was all about. He was down-to-earth and reassuring about my misgivings of feeding treats and the biting that might ensue.

"It's all about timing", he told me, and we spent a wonderful few hours working with the ponies and the only nibble in sight was on a piece of carrot rather than parts of my anatomy.

So this week, when I saw that there was a discussion on the Equine Tourism Community website about using food in our training of horses, I thought I'd have a look.

There seem to be only two schools of thought: Those who believe it's the best and only way, and the others who thought it was the worst form of training.

When you think about it, it's not natural for horses to be rewarded by receiving a food treat. Predators use this but not horses. Horses use pressure and release when training each other. Sometimes that pressure is a look and sometimes it's a full-blown charge, but when the object of their attention does what they want, they stop and take the pressure off, they don't feed treats.

But then when I really think about it, what's natural about most of what we do with horses?