Rosie and I have had some grooming sessions and some hang-out time, but I’ve just recently started doing some ground work with her. This is a video of our second time working on figure-eights. (This is also her third session with the clicker.) She’s doing great, and catching on quickly. In later sessions, I’ll start […]
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.
Mustang Poker
I’ve been watching Carolyn Resnick’s Waterhole Rituals DVD. I don’t agree with a lot of her horse psychology and dominance theory approach. However, she does make some good points. In the beginning of the DVD she talks briefly about the power of curiosity as a motivator. Instead of chasing our horses around and around a […]
B.F. Skinner and Shaping Behaviors
We’ve been talk about shaping in class, which is one of the neatest things about clicker training. (Actually, there are a lot of neat things about clicker training!) Shaping is teaching a new behavior through successive approximations. Basically, you start with a very low criteria and gradually increase your criteria until you reach your target […]
Gracie Update
About a month ago, I wrote about Gracie, one of the mares at the horse rescue where I volunteer. Gracie’s a smart mare, but extremely skeptical of people. (And she has reason to be–she’s got scars on her body that were most likely human inflicted.) I’ve spent time with Gracie once or twice a week […]
Aggressive Training Methods and Aggressive Dogs
How do we train our dogs? Do we need to be the alpha dog, the most dominant member of the pack, and insist that our dogs obey us, even if we must use force or punishment? This is the view still advocated by many trainers, but is it a scientifically sound way to train our […]
Equine Artists
I love positive training methods and clicker training because it opens up a whole range of new behaviors we can teach our animals that could never be possible with traditional methods. I’ve recently found a new blog that I love. Cheryl, the woman who owns the website, has taught all four of her horses to […]