How can research and science help improve animal training? In this section, you’ll find information about research studies that have explored different animal training techniques and how animals learn. By studying learning and behavior, we can learn more about how animals learn and develop more efficient and effective training techniques.
Many horses resist loading into a horse trailer. A trailer is a strange, noisy box on wheels – it’s no wonder many horses are afraid. Unfortunately, horse trainers have traditionally resorted to negative reinforcement based methods when teaching trailer loading, tactics based out of force and discomfort. Trainers create potentially dangerous situations when they try […]
These are my notes from some of the lectures I attended at the 38th annual convention of the Association for Behavior Analysis International, which I attended in May. I attended a lecture by Cloyd Hyten which focused on the use of punishment by large businesses and corporations, especially when trying to enforce safety rules. Interestingly, […]
These are my notes from some of the lectures I attended at the 38th annual convention of the Association for Behavior Analysis International, which I attended in May 2012. On the first day of the ABAI convention, I was able to attend a very interesting lecture by Harvard psychologist Irene Pepperberg. You might be familiar […]
Have you ever wondered what a horse can see? Does he see the world in color, like you and me, or in black and white? I recently came across an article from the Journal of Vision that examined this very question. Researchers from the Medical College of Wisconsin and from the University of Wisconsin-Madison teamed […]
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 […]
(Note: As some of you know, I’m currently working on a master’s degree in behavior analysis. This is a recent class assignment—to explain applied behavior analysis in a succinct, clear manner so that someone unfamiliar with the field can understand the basics of applied behavior analysis. I’d love for you to leave a comment and […]
