22/07/2026
Alexandra Kurland has died, and with her, a piece of my own history as a trainer is gone.
If you visit Alexandra’s website, theclickercenter.com, the first thing you see is the sentence “Changing forever the way we train horses”. For outsiders that might sound like a marketing slogan. For me, and probably for many other trainers who knew her work more closely, it is a pretty sober description of what she changed in my head. Without her work and her influence, clicker training would probably have stayed in the corner of “let’s just play around a bit today” for me.
In my work there is no training session, no article, no conversation, no explanation, not even a thought about training horses that does not contain something of Alexandra’s work. The way she trained and the way she thought about training has shaped me so deeply that she is as much a part of my work as Karen Pryor is. With Alexandra, almost one and a half years after Karen Pryor, my second idol and an icon and pioneer of clicker training has left this world.
It was in 2002 at the HansePferd fair that I first really came into contact with clicker training. Tarek was still a foal back then and a real challenge for me, because he questioned everything I thought I knew. I was already using food at that time, but it was hard to stand my ground in an environment strongly shaped by horsemanship. Somewhere at that fair someone was demonstrating clicker training with horses. I no longer remember who it was, but I still remember how it felt. For the first time, what I had been doing with food was not just “different”, it was a real option.
Shortly afterwards I had the German edition of Alexandra’s book in my hands. That book was the difference for me between “fooling around and doing tricks” and a training system that could be taken seriously. Suddenly what I was doing had a framework and a face. Her concepts were already solid, well thought out and far ahead of their time. I was grateful that someone had put into words what had been so hard for me to grasp back then.
I will admit that my path was bumpy and at times more, at times less influenced by other approaches. But throughout all of that, Alexandra’s way of working has been there in the background. Her way of structuring training, of working in small steps, of seeing training as a cycle, not just as a metaphor but as a fundamental and central concept, opened up a completely new world for me.
- Loopy training as a model for building clean behavior loops and only moving on when the loop is truly clean.
- Foundation behaviors as a toolbox to prepare horses for everyday life, training and higher demands.
- Rope work that runs through the whole education of the horse, from groundwork to riding.
- The idea of a neutral position from which nothing is changed, and to which you keep returning to secure balance and stability for both horse and human.
- Bodywork and training for the human as part of the system, not an afterthought.
I could list a lot more that she “brought” into my work. She is the reason I went so deep into learning behavior and behavior analysis in the first place. In her own writing, loopy training is described as a teaching process built around movement cycles and as a way of connecting trainers in the field with behavior analysts. She built that bridge between “science” and “practice” for me, the very bridge many people now associate with my own work. That alone shows how strongly her influence lives on in what I do.
Today there is no training session and no planning in which there is not a piece of Alexandra somewhere. In the way I plan training. In the terms I use. In the way I take positive reinforcement with horses seriously as a default, not as an add-on. And also in the way I work with people.
I would have liked to tell her directly how much she contributed to me finding my path so early and so clearly. That is no longer possible. What remains is that I keep working with what she brought into the world.-v