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.
I’ve been wanting to play with Austin, a young draft-cross gelding who lives at the rescue. He’s had a bit of training in the past, including being halter trained and being trained to lead. However, he’s pretty shy, a little skeptical of people and hasn’t had anybody working with him consistently recently. When I first […]
Many trainers who use operant conditioning and clicker training are fond of saying that we can train an animal to do any behavior the animal is physically capable of performing. Once we figure out what motivates an animal, there’s an almost unlimited variety of behaviors that can be trained and the limiting factor is usually […]
I talked a little bit awhile ago about the camp where I’ll be working this summer. I’ll be volunteering at several weekend sessions before camp starts so that I can start to get to know the horses and learn how the program works. I went out for the first time this morning and everything went […]
My friend Dawn took a great series of photos the other day of Paden smelling his tail. This is something we’ve been working on to teach him how to stretch his neck and begin working on lateral flexion. I took a break from riding, hopped into the pasture, and easily got him to stretch both […]
Regarding finding valuable reinforcers: “One keeper I met learned that an elephant will perform for a single miniature marshmallow.” This is from Temple Grandin’s latest book, Animals Make Us Human. (I also blogged recently about her discussions on introducing scary objects and stereotypical behaviors.) I find many people object to adding a clicker to their training […]
I spend a lot of time on the ground these days. Not because I’m getting bucked off, but because I choose to. As I’ve explored different natural horsemanship methods over the past couple of years, I’ve learned about all sorts of new ways to play with a horse without climbing into the saddle– from obstacle […]
