Well, I have three new friends living with me in my apartment now! Last weekend, I adopted Chloe, Amy, and Isabella from the SPCA of Texas. They join my two resident rats, Georgie and Lucy, bringing the rat count up to 5! Many people think of dogs and cats in shelters, but don’t realize that [...]
Georgie Works on Learning to Fetch
One of my goals for 2012 is to do some clicker training everyday (or at least almost everyday) with my critters. Finding time for training was hard last semester because I had three evening classes. Since the rats and mice are semi-nocturnal, the evening is one of the best times to work on training. I’m [...]
Georgie Learns to Jump
Here’s a video of Georgie’s latest trick—jumping over a small jump! Our elegant jump is constructed out of several toilet tissue rolls. Watch on YouTube: Georgie Learns to Jump Georgie learned this trick incredibly fast. She had about 15 clicks (treats) before I took this video. I have several ideas about how to expand on [...]
Georgie Learns to Spin
Georgie’s latest trick is spinning in a circle. We’ve been working on this over several days and she’s really starting to get the hang of it! Check out the video clip below. Now, the interesting thing about training is that sometimes what the animal learns is slightly different from what we are teaching. I was [...]
Lab Rats Learning about Pink Floyd
Ever seen a rat who could play a keyboard to the melody of a Pink Floyd song? Check out the YouTube clip below and you’ll meet several rats who can do just that! One of my professors, Jesús Rosales-Ruiz, shared this clip with me yesterday. I think it’s a fun and very creative example of [...]
Georgie Learns a New Trick
One thing I’ve been doing more of this semester is rat training. I started some clicker training with my rat Georgie last fall. However, I didn’t get too far past teaching food delivery and conditioning the clicker. So far this fall we’ve worked on a handful of tricks, including targeting, standing on a platform (including [...]
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 [...]
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I'm a graduate student studying the science of behavior and training. On this blog I share stories of my animal training adventures, as well as tips, techniques and tricks to help you improve your training. Although most of this blog centers around training rescue horses, the ideas discussed apply equally to all species. The other animals I work with, including dogs and rats, also appear occasionally on the blog.
Mary Hunter
cheeriotrainer@gmail.com
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