This week in ORCA we watched a really neat video of a dog learning to match objects. We often don’t think of matching as a complex skill because we are very familiar with matching and have had a lot of practice with it. However, it’s pretty complicated! Matching can also be a hard skill to […]
Archive | November, 2010
Shaping Ginger to Lower Her Head
Clicker training isolated muscle movements can be great for improving your shaping skills. One behavior that ginger and I have been working on using clicker training is teaching her to lower her head. With shaping, we don’t try and teach the whole behavior at once. Instead, we split the behavior into small approximations toward the […]
Setting up Optimal Training Sessions
There’s a video of mine that’s being passed around several training groups of what not to do during training. It’s one of my older videos, from when I had been clicker training for almost a year. I love taking videos, as I think they are great for improving my training skills. (In fact, videoing yourself […]
Slow and Steady Progress
What a great day on Saturday with the horses! My friend Kirsten was out at the rescue for the weekend and we worked most of the afternoon with a few of the horses. I am continually being reminded that animal training shouldn’t be a race. Slow and steady progress beats fast and rushed! The horses […]
Clicker Training Step 1: Teach Food Delivery
I’m (finally) starting to have some success with clicker training the rats. (Check out Georgie’s debut on youtube in this post, Rat Clicker Training Success.) Who would have thought training a rat would be this hard? In this post I’ll explain some of the initial troubles I had and describe how I finally trained the […]
Working on Building Trust with Dottie
Dottie is a two year old filly we have at the rescue. She had no previous handling before coming to the rescue and was very skeptical about people for a long time. We started working with her this summer and got her friendlier toward people, as well as teaching her some of the basics like […]