How We Got Started With Augmentative Interspecies Communication (Buttons)
One of the questions I get asked the most is how to get started with buttons. This seemed fitting for a blog post, so now we're turning into bloggers too.
I first got the idea from @merlinthepig on Instagram! His button use was just jaw dropping, and hilarious, and I have to say my favorite is when he asks for Al Capone. That was the whole spark. I got Charlie the buttons for Christmas 2025. And then they sat for six months.
Outside of Merlin, I had little appreciation for the button world at large, and it was not until a barn friend mentioned @whataboutbunny to me, right around the time I was starting Charlie on the buttons, that I realized there was a whole established community out there. I had wandered in a bit sideways, which is kind of how a lot of cool things seem to happen in my life.
Here is the first thing about doing this with a horse. Nothing is really built for it. A small animal board lives on the floor and the animal wanders over to access it whenever. A horse can't really do that, and I wasn't sure how to present the buttons to him in a way that would work. So they sat, until I finally worked out a board setup I could hold up for him. The hardware problem is real, and it is the first thing that might slow you down.
Here is how the first session went. I gave him the whole board at once, used his target to bring him over to it, and when he activated a button, any of them, he got a couple of hay pellets. At that stage I did not care what he pressed. I just wanted him to understand that pressing did something. Once that clicked, the food rewards went away and the reward was whatever the button actually meant. He pressed the one for a scratch, he got a scratch. That switch, from food for any press to the real thing for the right press, is the whole foundation of how he uses them now and was fully acceptable to him.
I also want to be clear about something, because I think it is the most important part of this whole post. The buttons are not the start of our story, they are just the newest chapter of it. They were a next step in a conversation Charlie and I had already been having for years.
I have been in the horse world for most of my 42 years. I started riding around seven, got my first horse at twelve, my second at seventeen, and rode in my college's equestrian program for four years even though I was not an equine major. A friend of more than twenty years now kept me riding for another fifteen, right up until I got Charlie as a three year old. He came to me with no baggage, no history to undo, a clean slate. And from the start, I paid attention and I showed up, every day, even though he was boarded and not in my backyard.
On his rest days, I did things I was paying to have done but did them anyways. I'd pick his stall, I'd turn him out. When I got him started on a forage balancer, I showed up to feed him at first to make sure he was eating it with no issues. I spent time on the ground, in his stall, out in the pasture, just watching him. How he moved, how he stood, how he interacted with his pasture mates, what he did with his body when something was off. I also did target and clicker work with him, which further set the groundwork for everything that came later.
I also made a choice early on that I think mattered more than any of the rest of it. Horse ownership as a teen and horse ownership as an adult were two wholly different experiences. When Charlie came into my life, it was with a lot more weight of responsibility than the crazy horse girl teenager who was mostly just having fun without much in the way of worry.
From the get go, I wanted him to have a say. Fjords are smart, opinionated, and can be stubborn. They are a very honest breed, and earning their mutual respect goes much further than any amount of insisting. You do not win with a Fjord by being the boss. You win by being worth listening to (arguably true for all breeds, but I digress). The few times Charlie really had strong opinions about things, I could not just accept an explanation of he is being spicy, or he is trying to get out of working, or he is just in a mood. If he told me something, with his body, with his behavior, I paid attention. I encouraged him to keep telling me instead of ignoring it. And I am very glad I did not shut him down, because he had a lot working against him medically, chronic Lyme, EPM, and permanent degenerative changes in his cervical spine.
By the time buttons entered the picture, Charlie had six years of knowing that I paid attention. That is the foundation. The buttons just gave him one more way to say the things he had already been saying.
Which brings me to the advice, if you can even call it that. If you are here because you want to teach your horse buttons, the first thing to sit with is your relationship with your horse. Do you show up mostly to ride, or to get something done, and then leave? Or do you also spend time just being with your horse, giving them your attention when you are not asking anything of them? There is no judgment in the question. Riding and training and goals are all good. But if the honest answer is that almost every visit is a demand of some kind, that is the place I would start. With slow, unhurried time, where you are not asking for anything at all.
If you do decide to give it a try, here is the setup I landed on after some trial and error. This is just what has been working for us, and you will likely tweak it for your own horse and space.
Our boards are a piece of clear polycarbonate, I have a few now in different sizes. It is rigid, tough, and stands up to barn life. I attach the buttons to it with industrial-strength outdoor Velcro, the heavy-duty kind, which also lets me move buttons around and swap boards out. The buttons themselves are the standard generic recordable ones made for dogs and cats. And I use simple round labels to mark what each one is, so I can keep track as the vocabulary grows. I just draw the symbols on with a black Sharpie and get creative, nothing fancy.
A safety note! horse can absolutely chew and swallow button components or batteries, and that is not just broken equipment. It is a real colic and battery risk, and colic can be life threatening. So this is never a leave-it-out, unsupervised setup for a horse. Everything comes down and goes away when we are done, every single time. No exceptions.
Full disclosure, I got Charlie young, with no history to work around. I have decades of horsemanship behind me, and between lessons and everything else over the years, I have worked with hundreds of horses. First and foremost, you have to know your own horse's normal, and that only comes from time with the horse in front of you. But working with that many taught me how to meet each horse where it was. What works for Charlie might do nothing for the next horse, and what that horse needs might be useless for Charlie. There is no single playbook. My starting conditions were good. If your horse came to you later, with baggage, with a harder past, or if you are earlier in your own horse journey, this is a different and slower road, and I do not want to pretend otherwise.
A couple of books also shaped how I think about all of this, and I'd point you to them:
Horse Brain, Human Brain by Janet Jones digs into how a horse's brain really works, how they see, learn, and process the world, and it changed how I read a lot of what Charlie does.
Horse Speak by Sharon Wilsie is all about learning to notice and respond to the body language a horse is already using with you. Neither is about buttons at all, which is exactly why they matter. They are about paying attention, and that is the whole thing.
With all that said, I hope this helps you get started with your own button journey. It is one of the most interesting and rewarding things I have done in the horse world.
