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.
Mom and Sebastian make friends over the fence. Sebastian is getting pretty comfortable with me touching him over most of his body with both my hands and a carrot stick. (Read about Sebastian here or watch a few video clips here.) Here’s three of our next tasks to work on: 1. Touching sensitive body parts […]
I posted yesterday evening about Sebastian’s history, everything we’ve been working on, and how far we’ve come. (Read about Sebastian.) Here are the short video clips I promised. I’m having problems with youtube and will probably be using vimeo for my videos from here on out, unless anyone has suggestions for other video services.
I’ve been playing a lot lately with Sebastian, who is a cute and curious three year old red roan quarter horse. Sebastian has changed tremendously from a shy, unconfident youngster to a eager beaver who is interested in people and engaged during training. When I met Sebastian last spring he was a pretty shy guy who didn’t […]
I played just a bit this afternoon with the Mountain Coati at the Heard Museum. Coatis, which are close relatives of the raccoon, are found in South America and some parts of South Texas. This coati was a gregarious, agreeable sort of fellow, similar to most raccoons that I’ve met. We mainly worked on a […]
Eighteen month old Tootie is super smart, but also a super mugger when it comes to treats. I stopped working with him last Spring because I didn’t really have the skills to keep up with him (or his teeth!). We recently had our first clicker session in months. I kept him behind a barrier so […]
Horse clicker trainer Alexandra Kurland often speaks of splitters and lumpers. These are funny words, but they refer to an often serious training problem! Most behaviors can be broken down into many smaller pieces and approximations. When we break our goal down into tiny chunks and build gradually to a target behavior, we’re being a […]
