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.
Many equine species are able to breed with each other. Although the offspring are usually not fertile, some of them can be quite interesting too see! Most people know that a mule is the cross between a horse and a donkey. (The above mule is a little fellow named Scooby. We used him for riding […]
Many miniature horses are sassy, spunky little things. I think they know they’re adorable, and know that since they’re small and cute they can get away with things that people would never put up with from big horses. The camp where I’ll be working this summer has 2 miniature horses, Blossom and Midnight. The minis […]
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 […]
