Are there any "standards" in horse clickertraining?

Voice and hand signals can be anything you want them to be and is up to you. The only recommendations I have seen clicker trainers encourage is getting started behind protective contact (fencing or barrier) to phase out any treat mugging. With protective contact a useful behavior to teach is targeting a stick or a crop handle with their nose. Use this to teach backing up when entering a stall, directional cues like forward left and right, and head lowering. Head lowering helps with teaching haltering and calming the horse. Placement of the treat delivery is recommended to be placed in front of the horse keeping the spine straight. Predictable placement like this can also prevent crowding. Teach the horse to station standing on a mat which can have hundreds of uses including making cross ties easier, keeping horse still during brushing and tacking or anything else you can think of. If you haven’t already make sure you find a good article explaining the physical skill involved in your part that includes hand position, observation and timing. I recommend a regular dog training article from KPA for this. I think these are the basic recommendations for getting started that I’ve seen from other clicker trainers that work with horses. I work mainly with dogs and haven’t had the chance to fully clicker train a horse as an adult but I have done some clicker work with someone else’s horse and it was extremely fun! I think the main thing for getting started is just staying safe and using the clicker to teach boundaries and simple behaviors before trying harder things.

This is a good question and discussion to have! There aren’t any set standard exactly, as compared to the traditional training world. I try to make my cues for whatever behaviors I train to be similar to what they’d be in the traditional world so that they are easy to generalize. For example, my cue for “walk on” in a leading position is turning my body and facing forward. My cue for “back up” is turning my body towards my horse, with my hand at his chest, and saying “back”.

If you’re just starting out, I’d recommend starting in protected contact for your safety and to give your horse some more guidance and information. You can make your cues whatever you’d like! I find that body cues are the easiest, at least for my horse to understand. I also use verbal cues - I use a specific word at a pitch/tone that I normally wouldn’t use in my everyday talk. Context and environmental cues are also a big one - such as the mounting block or having some tack out.

I train with Adele from The Willing Equine and have for many years. She has a lot of good information on her social media accounts and her website. If you are able to take her Foundations course, it is great! I know there are other trainers out there with courses as well, I’m just the most familiar with Adele’s work!

It’s really wise of you to take this into consideration! The horse is a very visual learner so will definitely watch the human and adopt their own cues. These can also be environmental! It is something to be mindful of during training. Alexander Kurland has a podcast, Equiosity, and she has episodes about this very topic. I highly recommend listening to these episodes. Personally, I think it's important to transition quickly to teaching whatever visual, tactile &/or verbal cues a horse will encounter in a non R+ world. This is best to keep them safe from an escalation of pressure or punishment from other handlers.

No standard really, but I do try to have my cues mimic traditional ones, so that if my boy ever needs to be handled by others, he'll know what they're asking, and they won't feel the need to escalate. For example, his "Back" cue while leading is the lead rope being moved towards him and the movement of his halter. The same motion that'd be traditionally used, but without actually pulling on his head.