Here’s a fun video from dog trainer Donna Hill. In the video, you’ll see some of the steps she used to teach her dog to run a barrel racing pattern. The video shows the individual component behaviors that Donna taught first and then illustrates how she used back chaining to create the final behavior. Watch […]
Training Stories and Tips RSS feed for this section
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.
Chloe’s first rat agility course
Chloe, my agouti and white rat, is still pretty new to clicker training. I started training with her this summer and she has learned several simple tricks, including climbing onto a brick, going through a PVC pipe tunnel, and going over a cardboard jump. This week, I decided to combine the tunnel trick and the […]
Friday fun: Colt 45
The handsome fellow in the photo below is someone I’d like to introduce you to, as he will probably be appearing some more on my blog this fall! This pretty paint is about a year old. His name is Colt 45 and he currently lives at Serenity Spring Sanctuary, a farm animal sanctuary in North […]
Online Equine Clicker Conference
Do you remember last fall, when I posted about the World Equine Clicker Games, an online training competition for horse clicker trainers, which was held in conjunction with the first annual Equine Clicker Conference? Well, last year’s Equine Clicker Conference, hosted by Hannah Dawson Equine, was such a big success that they are doing it […]
Rat agility, coming soon!
I’ve made my rats an A-frame! If you’re not familiar with dog sports, an A-frame is a type of obstacle that is commonly used in dog agility competitions. The dog has to run up one side of the obstacle and then down the other side. The yellow portion is called a “contact.” When going up […]
To change the behavior of the trainer,
try training a chicken!
This summer, my friend Laurie Higgins attended two weeks of operant conditioning workshops with Bob Bailey and Parvene Farhoody. The workshops teach participants about operant conditioning and the science of animal training using chickens. Bob Bailey, along with Marian Bailey, began giving operant conditioning workshops to the general public in the mid-1990s. The workshops were […]