The Power of 'Touch'

Teaching 'touch' helps overcome all sorts of obstacles

When Thunder and I were out for our walk yesterday, we travelled further along our usual route and found some puddles. Now for some reason (perhaps he's watch the 'Vicar of Dibley' or something), puddles hold some unknown terror and are not to be trusted.
Well this won't do, in this climate we are never going to get away with avoiding puddles all our life! Especially if they effectively block our forward progress. 
Hence we thank our lucky stars that we completed our foundation clicker training!
The foundation stages involve teaching the horse to be polite around food, backing up (respect of space), calm down (head lowering), and targetting. The targetting is the 'touch' cue, and becomes a conditioned response. In the absence of a cone I can use my hand as a fist, and the horse moves forward to touch it.
So we've stopped dead about 1m away from this insurmountable obstacle. Does this ring any bells with other things, like trailers, flapping tarpaulin, alien traffic cones, bulging wheelie bins? All I had to do was extend my arm a small distance from the front of his nose and say 'touch'. When he touched - good boy, click and treat. All of a sudden the foot is in the puddle, head goes down to investigate, click and treat, and off we went through the murky water. I have to admit the puddle was rushed rather, but we played around it for a while, then went home, and I still have all the toes on my feet in tact!