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 […]
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.
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 […]
Training is More Fun with Friends!
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 […]
Fish Can Use Tools Too!
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 […]
How long does it take to train a horse? pt. 2
You might also like to read part 1, when I first discussed this topic. This is a question that I often hear people ask. How long does it take to train a horse? Or, how long should it take a horse to learn a certain skill? Or, how much should a colt know after 30 […]