Stale Cheerios » ORCA

Happy Happy Horses and Karen Pryor comes to UNT

Mary Hunter — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 05:24:07 +0000

Spring is in full bloom in Texas. Green grass, green trees and lots and lots of blue bonnets and other lovely wild flowers! The horses are enjoying the weather. They’re kicking up their heels and then burying their heads in the wonderful spring grass. I’ve been busy too, playing with the ponies as well as busy with things at school. I’ve been opting for playing with the horses rather than updating the blog!

We’ve been working on getting all of the rescue horses that are available for adoption up on petfinder. This is a huge task, as it involves taking photos, editing photos, writing descriptions, and so on. Here’s our petfinder page, which has a link to the listings of the 2 dozen or so horses we currently have listed. There are a few more to add, but we’ve made good progress and now have the majority of the horses listed. We have also had quite a few people interested in adopting horses in the past couple of weeks, which is very promising.

Karen Pryor came and spoke at UNT a little over a week ago. She spent the day with ORCA (an animal training lab in UNT’s behavior analysis department) and we all had a blast. During the morning and early afternoon many of the ORCA members had a chance to present some of the projects they are working on and get feedback from Karen Pryor and the rest of ORCA.

There are some really interesting research projects going on right now. Many of the current projects are examining some of the procedures that are commonly used in the clicker training community that have never been examined formally. Everything from microshaping to performance cues and from increasing creativity to putting unwanted behavior under stimulus control.

Karen Pryor also gave a free public lecture in the afternoon. Man, the room was PACKED!! It was neat to see a wide variety of people in attendance, graduate students and faculty members from the behavior analysis department, quite a few undergraduate students and many dog trainers and others from the community. We had people sitting in the aisles and on the floor up front, spilling out the doors!

Dolores Arste and Kellie Snyder both came to dinner with ORCA and we had some lovely conversations about negative reinforcement, extinction, resurgence, desensitization, and CAT (constructional aggression treatment). I’m currently in the process of writing a longer post on some of these issues, some of it is quite eye opening!

Here are some pictures from the past weekend of, as the title says, happy, happy horses. Enjoy them and I hope you are enjoying spring with your animals.

Bob Bailey and Animal Training

Mary Hunter — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 13:33:57 +0000

I’m nearing the end of a series of posts on the 2010 Art and Science of Animal Training Conference. This post is some of my thoughts on the presentation by the second speaker, and one of my favorites, Bob Bailey. Bob Bailey is well known through out the dog training world for his infamous chicken camps–in which he uses chickens to teach trainers the mechanics, timing and finer points of training. Chickens move fast–so you have to click at EXACTLY the right time!

Bob Bailey is more than just a chicken trainer, though. He was Director of Training of the Navy’s Marine Mammal Program in the early 1960s and later partnered with Marian Breland to run Animal Behavior Enterprises (ABE), after the death of Keller Breland. ABE was an anomaly in the 1950s and 1960s, using operant conditioning and positive methods to train a wide range of species for animal shows, TV commercials, the government, and even travelling salesmen.

Much of the first part of Bob Bailey’s talk was about the history of animal training and clicker training. I find this subject fascinating–in part because there are so many misconceptions about the history of training. My favorite (and one that I hear most often) is that clicker training was developed by dolphin trainers. Not true.

The principles of operant conditioning originated out of lab work done by B.F. Skinner in the 1930s with rats and pigeons. He was aided by graduate students, including Marian Breland and Keller Breland. The Brelands realized the potential of applying what they had learned in the lab to commercial animal training.

Most training in the 50s and 60s was pretty aversive. Punishment, negative reinforcement, the do it or else! style of training. Even dolphin training in the 60s was largely based on punishment and aversives. (Hmm. There goes the myth that clicker training was developed for dolphins because dolphins can’t be trained with punishment!)

The Brelands produced and marketed a dog training kit in the mid-50s, the Master Mind Dog Training Kit. The kit was based on positive reinforcement and included instructions and a clicker. It failed miserably. The dog training community just wasn’t ready for positive training.

Many people think of clicker training with dogs and horses as a “new” phenomenon. And on the larger scale, it is. Clicker training didn’t really catch on with the broader community until after the publication of Karen Pryor’s Don’t Shoot the Dog in the 1980s.

However, what continually gets me is that much of the work Bob Bailey and the Brelands were doing in the 1960s far surpasses much of the training I see around me today. Bird shows and dolphin shows, trained chickens, pigs and cows for travelling feed salesmen, birds and dogs for government work, the odd rabbit, raccoon, ferret or pony for a TV commercial or animal show, they trained them all.

They understood how to get behavior and the science behind what they were doing. They also did a lot of training, with a lot of different species, in a lot of different conditions. That’s a lot of a lots! But, there’s something to be learned from this. Lots and lots of practice, as well as a willingness to experiment and try new things is what will make each of us a better trainer. Animal training is much more a learned skill than a natural talent. This also ties back to the concept of broadening, which Dr. Robert Epstein talked about. By trying and learning new things, we can expand our potential and creativity as trainers.

Bob Bailey’s talk also included a great discussion on reinforcers, but I’ll save my thoughts on that for a later post. I’ll leave you with a lovely video from one of Bob Bailey’s students at a chicken camp. The chicken is trained to go in circles around red cones and figure eights around yellow cones. It’s an interesting discrimination problem where the objects themselves serve as cues for the two different behaviors.

Watch this clip on youtube.

If you enjoyed this post, you might enjoy the rest of my notes from the 2010 Art and Science of Animal Training Conference or my notes from the 2009 conference. Better yet, bookmark the ORCA website and come to the 2011 conference next spring! Sign up for e-mail updates to make sure you don’t miss any of the great posts from stalecheerios.com.

Steve Martin: Training Birds with Trust Accounts

Mary Hunter — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 12:13:36 +0000

I love hearing Steve Martin speak. (the bird trainer, not the actor!) He was one of my favorite speakers at the 2009 Art and Science of Animal Training conference and I enjoyed his talk at this year’s conference just as much. These are a few of my thoughts from his talk.

Steve Martin is a bird trainer. Specifically, he works mainly with free flight bird shows. Free flight bird training is a lot like training a dog, horse or dolphin. A good trainer has to understand about positive reinforcement, stimulus control, shaping, cues, etc. Here’s a big difference–at any point your trainee can take to the wind and fly away. (Of course, a dog or horse can run away just as well, but we employ lots of solutions to prevent this, fences, leashes, lead ropes and the like.)

Most bird shows keep their birds hungry. They keep the birds below their natural weight so that the birds are eager performers and willing to quickly come back for any bit of food. Steve Martin’s bird shows fly their birds at or above their natural weight. By manipulating the environment and when food is available, he is able to keep his birds motivated and happy, without having them in a constant state of hunger. And his birds perform amazingly. For instance, at the State Fair of Texas Birds of the World show, part of the show involves releasing a bird from a top car of the Texas Star ferris wheel. The bird swoops down from the car, flies across the park and lands on the show’s stage. (Pretty impressive, especially considering that the Texas Star, at 65 meters, is the largest Ferris wheel in the Western Hemisphere.)

Part of Steve Martin’s talk focused on building trust accounts with our animals. A trust account is like a bank account, when we’re training with positive reinforcement or doing things the animal likes, we’re making deposits into that trust account. When we’re using aversives and punishers or doing things the animal doesn’t like, we’re making withdrawals from that trust account. If we have a large, positive balance in our trust account we’re going to have willing, eager animals that want to be around us.

One interesting point that Steve Martin made was that sometimes we don’t recognize when we’re making withdrawals from the trust accounts we have with our animals. I think this is a really important point to consider, especially when training isn’t going as smoothly as we would like. Just because we think a request is reasonable or just because we think an animal should be okay with something, doesn’t mean the animal feels the same way! Even when we’re clicker training or attempting to train with mostly positive reinforcement, there are still plenty of opportunities for our animals to get frustrated, annoyed or scared.

A good trainer is able to give the animal power over their environment. This builds confidence and trust. We can do this by taking responsibility for what the animal does and giving the animal the right to say no. When things go wrong, it can be really, really easy to blame it on the animal. The animal is being stubborn, hard-headed, a jerk, pushing your buttons, messing with your mind, trying to annoy you, the list of labels goes on and on.

The classic example is the horse who can’t be caught. The rider usually ends up annoyed and frustrated at the horse, who is being “bad.” The rider usually doesn’t stop to think that maybe there have been one too many withdrawals and the horse wants nothing to do with the rider. Of course, it’s easier to blame the animal. It’s pretty humbling to admit that an animal actually wants absolutely nothing to do with you.

However, when our animals misbehave, they’re trying to tell us something! It would be good of us to listen to what they have to say.

Good training is about communication, confidence and motivation. The animal must clearly understand what we’re asking, believe he is able to perform the request and be properly motivated to complete the task. When we build up that trust account, we create a willing partnership with our animals. Do you have a bright-eyed, enthusiastic animal who gets excited about training? Or do you need to reevaluate the balance in your trust account and what’s motivating your animal?

Ken Ramirez: Animal Trainers Need People Skills Too!

Mary Hunter — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 04:27:53 +0000

Ken Ramirez, the head trainer from the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, spoke about the skills necessary to be a good animal training consultant at the Art and Science of Animal Training Conference. His talk, titled Wanted: Animal Trainer Consultant, those good with animals need not apply, emphasized how a good consultant or instructor MUST have good people skills. Many people want to become an animal professional because they enjoy working with animals. However, many animal training jobs are really about working with people and teaching people to train animals. Because of this, an ability and desire to work with people is essential.

Here’s a few of the tips Ken Ramirez gave that I thought were really important. Most of these suggestions are beneficial for any situation where there’s multiple people dealing with an animal, even if you’re not a high paid animal consultant.

1. Clearly Identify the Problem
Does everyone involved see the same problem? Are different goals or principles getting in the way of a solution? People will disagree. A good trainer will help people negotiate and agree on a common goal. Everyone involved must agree on a plan and be committed to be consistent, otherwise the animal will get conflicting information.

2. Identify and Explain Sacrifices
Many people call in a consultant looking for that magic bullet, a quick and easy solution. Most animal “problems” have dozens of possible solutions. However, many solutions require a change or sacrifice, such as money spent, more time, additional personnel, or an change in thinking. A good consultant shows people that there are lots of possible solutions, if the client understands the effort required to implement them.

3. Communicate clearly and speak your client’s language
Understand the client, where they are coming from and what examples and terminology will make the most sense to them. Make sure they are open to listening. Importantly, don’t demean or belittle any past training they have done.

4. Encourage a shift in thinking
Find solutions and help expose half-truths, myths and excuses. Shift the questions from “What’s wrong with the problem animal?” to “What behaviors do I want to see and how can I train it?” A good trainer gives clear guidance for thinking about alternatives and has a system for finding the least intrusive method to approach the problem.

5. Positively Reinforce your clients
Build relationships with your clients, gain their trust and then don’t betray it. Find out what motivates the people you work with and make sure they’re getting something out of it. What’s in it for them? What’s going to motivate them to follow through with training or instructions? Learning more about your clients will help you to implement better training solutions.

Ken Ramirez is a great speaker, his lecture was full of all sorts of interesting stories from consulting with zoos and other animal programs. These stories ranged from training sharks to a past client asking him to provide marriage counseling (he declined).

As Ken said during the lecture, “Training the animals is the easy part!” If people could easily understand and solve a problem, they wouldn’t need to call in a trainer or consultant. A great animal trainer knows how to train animals AND understands how to work with people.

Kay Laurence: Assessing Your Animal Training Skills

Mary Hunter — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 21:36:17 +0000

Are you good at training animals? Are you great at shaping, but not so good at putting behavior under stimulus control? You know you’re a better trainer than your next door neighbor, but you’re nowhere near the level of the expert trainer who runs your agility class….

Good, better, worse, best, intermediate, beginner, expert. The ways we evaluate our skill as a trainer and compare ourselves to others is usually completely subjective. What are we actually measuring? Kay Laurence spoke about the important hows and whys of assessing our own skills as animal trainers. Below are a few of the points she highlighted that I thought were particularly important.

1. Learning to Assess
Being able to self assess yourself is essential for moving forward. Part of Kay Laurence’s talk focused on her Competency Assessment Programme (CAP). However, assessment is not about ticking off boxes and passing a test. Instead, it’s much more important to learn how to evaluate your own strengths, weaknesses and progress. For any skill you want to assess you must understand the point of the criteria and what it is measuring. This is far more important than someone else telling you if you’ve passed or failed.

2. Measurable Criteria
Any form of assessment needs objective, measurable criteria. We are inclined to measure training subjectively, saying a task looked “good,” “very nice,” or “better than last time.” But this is not an accurate way to actually tracking progress and skill. Defined goals and detailed training logs are a more efficient way to track progress. As well, we need to assess all parts of training–getting behavior, shaping, finishing behavior, generalization, stimulus control and maintenance over time, rather than just looking at the final behavior.

3. Skill Based Criteria
Most of the time our assessment criteria is based on tasks and final products; we look at the end result. However, understanding the teaching process of how to get from A to B is just as, if not more beneficial. Excellence in a competitive field is not a measure of training competency, it could just indicate that you had someone great who was giving you good instruction. As I look over Kay Laurence’s CAP program, I see that many of the things it tests are skills, rather than specific tasks (such as sit or stay). For instance, part of the Level 1 program requires being able to “operate the clicker in either hand with a non-visual movement” and to “give reasons for choice of reward.”

4. The Teacher Takes Responsibility
The good trainer will take responsibility for what her students (animal or human) have or have not learned. Sharon Foley says this nicely: “If the horse knew what I wanted and believed he was able to do it, he’d BE doing it.” If the dog (or horse or human) knew what you wanted, understood how to do it and was motivated to carry out the request, he or she would be doing it!

5. Assessment is Never Comparative
Comparing yourself to your neighbor, trainer or best friend isn’t going to get you much of anywhere. Instead, focus on comparing yourself to objective criteria or tracking your progress over time. Aim to be the best you can be, rather than better than someone else.

6. Periodically Reassess the Basics
When’s the last time you retested your basic mechanics or tried some of the basic behaviors you first taught the animal? As training gets more complex and our skills get more refined, it’s important to check and make sure your foundation is still in place. Double check what’s cueing the dog, your clicker or your right elbow! (Some) horse people could really benefit from this back to basics idea. It’s startling the number of upper level show horses who have trouble with basic skills such as trailer loading or leading.

Towards the end of the talk, Kay Laurence shared a great quote for any trainer:

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
Marcel Proust

Ultimately, advanced skills are only a refinement and deeper exploration of basic skills. But, if we develop our ability to self-assess, we will be better equipped to discover the nuisances of training and the differences between good and great training.

Alexandra Kurland and Loopy Training

Mary Hunter — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 19:58:21 +0000

At the Art and Science of Animal Training conference this year Alexandra Kurland spoke about loopy training, which is a concept she has been developing over the past year. Loopy training was the focus of a clinic I did with Alexandra Kurland last fall. The more I hear about it, the more it makes sense and the more I’m able to see how to apply it to make me a better trainer. This post is a combination of my notes from the conference and from the fall 2009 Alvin clinic.

The great thing about loopy training is that you’re probably already using it! However, the loopy training model gives us a clear framework to look at training. Loopy training helps us see what makes great training great and helps us figure out what’s going on when problems occur. If we can formalize and name concepts (such as the loopy training concept), it makes the training process more deliberate, simpler to teach and easier to discuss and assess.

Basics of Good Training (just so we’re all on the same page!)

Animal training (as Bob Bailey often says) is a mechanical skill. We shouldn’t let poor mechanics get in the way of good training. Alexandra Kurland shared three things that contribute to great training:

Clear, well, defined criteria
Great timing
High rates of reinforcement

In addition, good training requires that we are splitters, not lumpers. Being a splitter means that when teaching, we break down behaviors into small enough pieces so that the animal can be successful.

Alexandra Kurland talked some about poisoned cues, which can occur when we combine positive reinforcement with negative reinforcement. (I’m going to save poisoned cues for another post in an effort to keep this one a reasonable length!) Basically, though, when we use aversives or when we use negative reinforcement poorly, the emotional effects linger long after the use of corrections has stopped. Clicker training can bypass the poisoned cue effect by retraining old behaviors in new ways.

We want happy, exuberant, eager to please animals and this is what we usually see when training with positive reinforcement. It’s important to retrain familiar behaviors even if the horse already “knows that” because these simple behaviors become anchor behaviors as we build more complex behaviors and loops. If we build a strong foundation, cues for simple behaviors can be used to reinforce and build more complex behaviors.

By now you’re wondering…what the heck is loopy training?

We generally think of behavior using the following model:

Cue –> Behavior –> Click –> Deliver Reinforcer

However, this is too simple of a model. This is how training really looks:

Cue –> Behavior –> Click –> Deliver Reinforcer –> Cue –> Behavior –> Click –> Deliver Reinforcer –> Cue –> Behavior –> Click –> Deliver Reinforcer –> Cue –> Behavior –> Click –> Deliver Reinforcer

Behaviors and training happens as a LOOP, rather than as a single instance in time. Also, although we might be thinking only of the cue we’re giving and the behavior we want to reinforce, there’s actually a lot more behavior going on! The goal in training is to create clean loops.

A clean loop will have the following features:

No unwanted behaviors in the loop
Animal performs all elements smoothly
Behaviors in the loop are performed with no hesitation

The framework of loopy training emphasizes that all elements in a loop need to be clean, both before and after the click. If you have a clean loop, you can (and should!) move on. If you have a behavior loop that stays messy and does not seem to be getting cleaner, reassess your training. Are you asking for too much? Have you skipped a step? How can you better motivate your horse or improve communication?

The Click as a Cue

The click serves several different functions and ends up getting called all sorts of different names, a marker signal, a yes answer signal, a conditioned reinforcer, a bridging signal, a highlighter.

Most importantly, the clicker, if used properly, functions as a cue, or a green light for earning reinforcement. This idea came out of a research project at the University of North Texas. In that study, the trainer had a nice clean loop with a dog touching a target across the room. She delivered treats by tossing them into a bowl at her feet. However, in order to increase precision, she changed from tossing the treats to dropping them down a piece of PVC pipe.

Her clean loop fell apart completely. After the click and food delivery, the dog stopped, looked at her, paused and then repeated the behavior. The dog made several more attempts and looked quite frustrated before giving up all together! In this situation, the click was serving as a cue to look at the handler and watch for the toss and landing of the food. The dog stopped and looked, but because of the new PVC pipe, no toss happened. The poor confused dog had no idea what was going on.

Feeding skills and food delivery are essential for good training! The animal must know when and how food is delivered and must be able to collect the food promptly, efficiently and safely. We can have different ways of delivering food (tossing on the ground, tossing to the animal, giving to the animal, etc.) but we must train each and make sure the food delivery part of the loop is always clean. When horses mug for treats, it often indicates that either they have not been taught proper manners and self control around food or that our food delivery is inefficient or clumsy.

Inefficient, awkward or clumsy food delivery will break down the smooth flow of the loop. I watched a DVD last semester where the trainer was delivering food by tossing it on the floor. The dog did not know how to watch the throw and find the food. So, there was lots of extra sniffing and searching behavior and the pace of the training was often interrupted. The trainer eventually got the behavior, but the process was neither efficient, nor elegant.

What are your foundation lessons?

Good training starts with small chunks. If we can get small, clean chunks of behavior then it is easy to start combining to get more complex patterns.

Once we have clean loops for at least two to three behaviors its easy to start mixing and matching. Having a clean loop does not mean the behavior is perfect, it just means the cycle is fluid without any unwanted behavior. Once we build an inventory of simple loops we can start on more complicated loops. Importantly, we can also use the cues and behaviors in our simple loops to reinforce other behaviors we are working on.

Alexandra has six basic foundation lessons she teaches her horses. This is a way to introduce the horse to training and start building some simple loops. The foundation lessons she selects are important because they teach behaviors related to self control and safety, as well as being behaviors that can be expanded later to teach all sorts of other behaviors.

Having organized foundation lessons means that you have a plan for training. You understand what skills are essential to teach the animal early on and you recognize how these skills can be combined or developed to teach more advanced behaviors. Foundations skills are like loops. Very likely, you already use them, but you’ve never formalized them.

So I have a clean loop, no what?

Here’s a nice simple loop that you might see in horse training (or dog training):

cue –> horse backs up several steps –> click –> deliver reinforcer –> cue –> horse backs up several steps –> click –> deliver reinforcer –> cue –> and so on!

How can we use this to our advantage in training?

In our loopy model, cues serve a double function. A cue can:

1. Tell the animal what next behavior will earn reinforcement.
2. Reinforce whatever behavior occurred previously.

So, later on we might have:

cue 1 –> horse backs up several steps –> cue 2–> horse lowers her head–> click –> deliver reinforcer –> cue 1 –> horse backs up several steps –> cue 2 –> horse lovers her head –> click –> deliver reinforcer –> cue 1 –> and so on!

If both behaviors started out as clean loops, we can easily combine them into a larger loop. More importantly, we can use the cue for head lowering to reinforce really good backing up. So, we ask for the horse to back up. When we get several really good steps of backing up, we ask for head lowering. Since the head lowering cue signals a chance to earn reinforcement, the cue itself will reinforce good backing up.

As the animal learns more behaviors, we can combine them in all sorts of ways and patterns until we end up with quite complex loops. We might have head lowering then backing then head lowering then a click and treat, then a hindquarter yield and then backing and then click treat then 5 target touches and repeat. Clean training is built on loops, even if it might be difficult to see them at the more advanced and complex stages. When coming up with a training plan at more complex stages of training, think about where you need the primary reinforcement and what the horse is telling you he needs to work on.

Loopy Training, Poisoned Cues and Negative Reinforcement

Loopy training is the antidote for poisoned cues because poisoned cues are a product of lumping. When we teach behavior too quickly or in too big of chunks, we often end up with frustrated, annoyed animals who are not enthusiastic about training. These poisoned cues don’t work well in loops! We can avoid frustration and unwanted behavior by building tight, clean loops that gradually spiral outward.

Most of the time when we use negative reinforcement we’re guilty of lumping. It’s not the negative reinforcement that poisons the cues, but the lumping that creates stress, frustration and confusion for our horses. We can create equally frustrated animals if we’re using positive reinforcement, but lumping behaviors together rather than splitting and shaping gradually. Now, this doesn’t mean train in the tiniest steps possible. It only means we must progress at a level where the animal can continue to be a successful learner.

Later on, we can also use loops to give our horses a choice or to let them cue us. What is very important to animals is how much control they have over the environment. We can make our animals more confident and comfortable by giving them more control. For instance, you could teach your horse to touch a target before you put on the saddle. The horse then learns he can use the target touch to tell you when he’s ready to for you to saddle him. If the horse later on chooses not to touch the target, then it’s up to you to figure out why he doesn’t want to be saddled that day.

Loopy training helps us be more deliberate as trainers. Behavior happens as a cycle, or loop, rather than as a discrete unit. If we can see these loops and learn how to use cues more effectively, our training and animals will benefit. At the core, loops work because they teach us to split behavior in small chunks and get good quality behavior before trying to move on.

Dr. Robert Epstein: Engineering Complex and Novel Behavior in Animals

Mary Hunter — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 04:12:44 +0000

Robert Epstein was the keynote speaker for the Art and Science of Animal Training conference this year. (Be sure to read the rest of my notes from the conference as well.) Epstein, who was the last student of B.F. Skinner, researches the creativity process and how novel behavior develops.

All behavior, in some sense, is novel, you never brush your teeth the exactly the same way twice. However, each person or animal develops a repertoire of known behaviors and these behaviors can be combined or altered to create new behaviors. Interestingly, this combination process if quite orderly and predictable and we can alter it’s flow experimentally to create new behavior.

Check out the video below of a pigeon Robert Epstein and his lab trained to solve the classic box and banana problem. The pigeon knew how to move a box and stand on a box and knew that pecking the banana would get it a reward. You can see it’s frustration at the beginning until it realizes (in about a minute!) how to solve the problem using what it has learned in the past.

Animal behavior is orderly and predicable (even if it is often too complex for us to notice that order!) Much of Robert Epstein’s research involved studying the orderly relationships between behavior and past history. Behavior can be established easily by first teaching any underlying component behaviors. Animal training could benefit from this, as we often lump several behaviors together. For instance, some teach an inexperienced horse to stand still by a mounting block for a rider to mount. Instead, first teach the horse to stand still, then teach stand by the mounting block, then worry about getting on! Our shaping and training often is slowed down because the animal is lacking the prerequisite skills.

Similarly to pigeons, most humans do not develop their full potential to express creativity. Creativity is a learned skill and can be strengthened through practice and specific activities. Robert Epstein has developed four core competencies that form the basic skill set for creativity. If we can learn to use these, we are well on our way to increasing our creativity! His four competencies are:

1. Capturing
Capturing means learning to listen to and record our ideas. If you have a good idea, write it down! Better yet, set aside time every day for daydreaming or brain storming. If you capture ideas as they occur, you have a larger pool to select from and better quality to pick from. Capture now, evaluate later.

2. Challenging
Expose yourself to failure and don’t be afraid to fail. If we put ourselves in tough situations that require thinking or problem solving, old behaviors and ideas often surface and link together, creating new behavior. This is essentially what happened to the problem solving pigeon above.

3. Broadening
Learn things well out of your current area of expertise. The more diverse your experiences, ideas and skills, the more potential for creativity and interesting combination. If you broaden what you know, you’ll see connections or possibilities that you might never have thought of before.

4. Surrounding
This principle relates to how you manage your physical or social environment. Unusual stimuli, combinations of stimuli or different environments will often produce novel ideas or inspirations. New situations and environments challenge us to respond differently.

So, if you’ve always thought of yourself as not creative, don’t fear! There are lots of ways to increase your creativity. Also, by training and working with our animals, we can make them better problem solvers and increase their creative ability. Can you think of ways that the above principles might apply to animals or animal training? You might be interested in checking out Robert Epstein’s website. He has written several books on increasing creativity and has information and articles on his site.

Crate training macaws and an exciting weekend ahead

Mary Hunter — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 12:57:06 +0000

by Martin Pettitt, on Flickr

I volunteer with ORCA at the Heard Museum about once a week. (ORCA is a lab in UNT’s behavior analysis department that focuses on animal training.) One project for this semester is crate training the museum’s two blue and gold macaws. During the fall and spring, Texas can have crazy temperature fluctuations. Some days it might be lovely weather for the birds to be outside and a day later it might dip back to frigid temperatures.

Training the birds to voluntarily walk into a crate is a humane way to transport them. This will be a quite valuable skill for the birds, as it will make it easy for the staff to transfer them from their outside habitat to their inside cage. We worked a bit with the female this morning. Although we’ve just recently started this, she is already making good progress at approaching the opening to the crate.

Good animal training is all about communication–making it easier for animals and people to get along. We want ways to be able to interact with our animals safely and humanely. Training helps animals learn how to be successful in an environment run by humans.

Animal training is a learned skill. This is contrary to the popular view, which views many animal trainers as having a gift or natural talent. Of course, many trainers are truly talented. However, good training skills are developed and refined through practice (and lots of it!), hard-work, and education. Much can be learned from watching and interacting with other trainers.

This weekend, I’ll be hanging out with and learning from some awesome trainers. OCRA is hosting it’s second annual Art and Science of Animal Training conference. The speakers include Bob Bailey, Alexandra Kurland, Ken Ramirez, Robert Epstein, Kay Laurence, Steve Martin, Steve White, Jen White, Cassie Malina, and Jesús Rosales-Ruiz. (Check out my notes from the 2009 conference!) I am super excited, it should be a weekend packed with tons of great discussions and learning. If you’re interested, you can read more about the conference on the ORCA website. It’s going to be an action-packed weekend, but I’ll be sure to share some of my notes and what I learn in the upcoming weeks.

Lessons from Teaching Your Dog To Skateboard DVD

Mary Hunter — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:56:02 +0000

In the ORCA meeting several weeks ago, we watched Bill Ryan’s DVD Teaching Your Dog To Skateboard. You can see a preview video clip of this DVD on the Dogwise site here.

It’s a short, but well done DVD that explains one method for teaching your dog to ride on a skateboard. The approach is well though out. Bill Ryan sets up the environment from the beginning so that the dogs have a very high chance of being successful. This is a defining characteristic of good training–the trainer has a well defined plan from the start and understands how to manipulate the environment to help the animal succeed.

The part of his training strategy that I liked the most was his emphasis on the dog standing with three legs on the board, which is the basic foundation for the behavior. Once the dog can stand confidently with three legs on the stationary board, teaching the rest of the behavior is downright easy.

So, foundations are important. Yet, how many times do we mess up our training or make it more difficult for the animal by asking for too much too soon, before we’ve built the basic foundation?

The horse who won’t trailer load–could she use some work on basic leading? The agility dog who’s going the wrong way–how closely is she paying attention to the handler? The horse who’s not taking the correct lead over a jump–might he need to go back to cantering figure-eights with drop to trot changes over a ground pole?

The problem is, when our animals have difficulties with complex tasks (jumping, agility, trailer loading, etc.) we tend to focus on the problem at the complex task level. Instead, these problems often indicated holes in the basics. This could be a variety of things, something we skipped over, something we went too fast on, something we though the animal understood when she didn’t.

Most complex behaviors might look like one fluid behavior, but they really consist of lots of already learned skills that have been pieced together. If we focus on the basics and get them good and solid, then it is much easier to get all the other pieces to fall into place.

What happened in the video? Bill Ryan spent almost all of the training teaching the dogs to be confident and comfortable with three legs on a stationary skateboard. Once they had this solid, they all progressed rapidly through the rest of the steps, until they were all skateboarding with ease.

So, the next time you’re training a complex skill, consider how you can break it down into fundamental component skills. Or, if a behavior falls apart, stop and think if there might have been holes or weak spots in previously trained behaviors. And, if you’re thinking about teaching your dog to skateboard, you might want to considering purchasing a copy of Bill Ryan’s Teaching Your Dog to Skateboard DVD!

Mountain Coatis and Training Mechanics

Mary Hunter — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 22:49:46 +0000

I played just a bit this afternoon with the Mountain Coati at the Heard Museum. Coatis, which are close relatives of the raccoon, are found in South America and some parts of South Texas. This coati was a gregarious, agreeable sort of fellow, similar to most raccoons that I’ve met. We mainly worked on a bit of targeting with him, having him touch a ball on the end of a stick in exchange for a piece of apple or grape. He understood the targeting well, so it became a fun exercise of moving him up and down and around his cage as he eagerly followed the target stick. (Read more about target training.)

My main issues with working with the coati were mechanical in nature. I was working one-handed as I currently have my left hand in a cast. This meant as soon as he targeted the stick, I had to set it down so I could deliver food with the same hand. However, he was pretty forgiving of my lack of speed. A larger problem was actual food delivery. Coatis have really long noses. (They remind me almost of an anteater’s snout.) As well, the upper jaw extends quite further than the bottom. Since I was feeding him through the cage, I had to hold my tidbit of food just right so that he could grasp it with his teeth. I was a bit clumsy with this at the beginning and he kept dropping the food.

I was feeding cut up pieces of grapes and apples as reinforcers. After a few of each, it was clear that he much preferred the grapes as he would grab those much faster. After a few more pieces of apple the picky little fellow started refusing them entirely! This made me wonder a bit if the earlier dropped pieces of apple could have been somewhat on purpose…

The coati was super interested in me and willing to continue playing the targeting game even though my mechanics were less than stellar. However, with many animals, especially those that are shy, hesitant, newer to training or less eager to offer behavior, this big of a breakdown in mechanics could have been too much for the animal. A less eager animal might have become bored, distracted or disinterested by my slow food delivery or lack of food delivery (when pieces were dropped or when the coati refused the apples).

At it’s essence, training is a mechanical skill. When you train it’s always important to consider mechanics. If you are keeping a high rate of reinforcement and your animal still seems bored, disinterested or is leaving the session, consider if your mechanics could be at fault. Think about these questions:

Is the animal getting the reward every time?
Could the timing of your food delivery be improved?
Can the timing of your click or marker signal be improved?
Are you using a good enough reinforcer?
What are you doing that is preventing or interrupting the flow of the training session?
(Click here for suggestions to improve your mechanical skills.)

Bad mechanics often become apparent when the animal leaves or becomes frustrated. However, even if you think your training is going well, it still could benefit from improved mechanics. I find certain styles of clickers are easier to click than others. With some designs, I find the stiffness of the button means I click too slowly. (And then I potentially reinforce the wrong behavior!) I can improve my timing just by changing the type of clicker I use. With the coati, even though he was targeting well, I had plenty of room for improvement So, even when you think training is going well, it’s beneficial to pause every once in awhile and assess whether improving your mechanical skills could make a good training session into a great training session.