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 […]
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.
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 […]
Dog Training Update
Here’s a video of Ginger and I playing from about a week ago. It shows a handful of the things we’ve been working on recently. We’ve been working quite a bit on targeting type behaviors, including touching my palm and touching the end of a targeting stick. (More information about target training.) She really understand […]
What makes a good reinforcer?
Here’s how I’m putting theory from the classroom into my training sessions! Several weeks ago in my intro behavior analysis class we talked about good reinforcers using an acronym called DISC. This is what DISC stands for: D–deprivation I–immediacy S–size C–contengency The best reinforcers are something the animal hasn’t had in awhile (principle of deprivation), […]
Paden Smells his Tail
Here’s a video of Paden and I playing a bit. Paden’s a paint gelding who I’ve been working with some at the horse rescue where I volunteer. He’s a nice little horse and has had some training. However, he still has lots of things to learn. He tends to carry his head quite high and […]