I have a new friend. He’s a little white mouse who I’ve named Houdini. The name’s appropriate, he is quite the escape artist! Houdini is just a plain little white mouse who was meant to be snake food. He was even given to a snake and (we think) the snake tried to snatch him, as […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
I was playing with the style and layout of the blog yesterday evening. Please let me know if anything doesn’t seem to be displaying correctly!!! I changed themes–the old one had too many things broken and was going to be too much of a pain to fix. I’m also planning to start getting back in […]
There are A LOT of myths about fish being dumb and untrainable. As I found out a couple of years ago with my goldfish Blaze, fish are actually very trainable! (You can see some of his training here or here.) Recently, scientists have discovered that fish use tools. Scientists use to think that only humans […]
