Dogs, horses, and rats. Birds, goldfish, cats. Dolphins, raccoons, and elephants. What animals can’t we train? In this section you’ll find lots of great training stories and tips. You will also get to meet many of the wonderful animals that I get to train. I hope that you’ll enjoy reading about my adventures (and misadventures) and that these articles and tales can provide you with insight that will help you with your own animals.
The Art and Science of Animal Training Conference, held yearly at the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas, is one of my all-time favorite conferences. This conference is organized and run by ORCA (the Organization for Reinforcement Contingencies with Animals) a group of graduate students in UNT’s behavior analysis department that researches animal behavior […]
Amy is getting to be quite an old rat. However, she still enjoys training time and likes learning new tricks. This is Amy’s latest trick, the bucket trick. A small “bucket” (part of a toothpaste box) hangs on a shoelace. Amy must pull up on the shoelace to get to the bucket and the treats […]
The Online Equine Clicker Training Conference ended recently. I’ll be sharing some of my reflections about the conference presentations on my blog over the next few weeks. The conference featured three weeks of fascinating lectures about clicker training horses and other equine. You can still sign up if you’d like, the presentations will be available […]
Next Monday marks the start of the Online Equine Clicker Conference! Have you signed up yet? This is going to be a very fun event that will feature all of the presentations and demostrations from this year’s Equine Clicker Conference, plus additional material that is being produced exclusively for the online portion of the conference, […]
I’m working on a project right now about reinforcers. (More on this soon in an upcoming post!) So, as a result, I’ve been thinking a lot about reinforcement, reinforcers, and the different types of things trainers use during training to reward behavior. Many horse clicker trainers primarily use food during training to reinforce correct behavior. […]
There's a great article in the most recent Smithsonian Magazine about Bob Bailey and Animal Behavior Enterprises (ABE). Many animal trainers are familiar with Bob Bailey because of the operant conditioning workshops that he teaches with chickens. However, Bob Bailey first became interested in animal behavior and training in the 1950s and spent decades training […]
