How long is your tongue? Can you touch your nose? What about your eye? Or your ear? Okapi (which are forest-dwelling hoofed mammals closely related to the giraffe) have enormously long tongues. They use their tongues to reach leaves high up in the trees and then to grasp and pull down leaves or other bits […]
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.
Introducing Clicker Training through Targeting
Because of the old paint I wrote about last week and the two mares I wrote about yesterday, you might be thinking by now that all the horses at the rescue are terrified of people. Happily, this is far from the case. Many of the horses are quite friendly and would follow you around all […]
Gracie and I become Friends (sort of)
I went out today for a third time today to the horse rescue I started volunteering at last week. Over the weekend we took the big paint gelding I wrote about last week to a local trainer who’s agreed to work with him. The trainer seemed like a great guy and has some past experience […]
How is Strangles Transmitted?
I just finished reading an interesting article from The Horse about the disease strangles. I had always been told (and had read in at least several places) that the strangles bacteria, Streptococcus equi, stays in the ground for years and years and years. This is why many people are quite afraid of Strangles, not only […]
How to Praise a Fish
Many animal trainers that use positive reinforcement and operant conditioning rely on a clicker or a certain word (such as “Good!”) to mark correct behavior. The marker sound or word functions as a secondary reinforcer. When you give the signal, the animal knows it’s performed a good behavior and will get a reward (such as […]
Time For Horses
I spent the better part of the afternoon sitting on the ground picking bunches of grass and feeding them to a big blue-eyed brown and white paint horse. He’s still not at all sure he wants to be my friend, but he started being convinced by the end of the session. I had a friend […]