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Mary Hunter and her horse Apollo


On this site I share stories of my animal training adventures, information about the science of animal training and behavior, and tips and advice to help you improve your training.

Join me as we explore the best training strategies for creating fast learning, effective communication, and enthusiastic, willing animals.

If you’re new to Stale Cheerios, I recommend that you start by visiting this page to learn more about Stale Cheerios and that you visit my Top Posts page.

~Mary Hunter

Recent posts from the StaleCheerios blog

Music Learning Lab screen shot

Shaping Musical Behavior

By on June 20, 2013 in Teaching People

This post is going to be about teaching people, rather than training animals. (However, it will involve some pretty cute animated animals!) Many of the principles of good animal training apply equally as well to teaching humans. In fact, behavior analysts were designing positive reinforcement based teaching programs for people long before clicker training caught […]

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Do horses like doing work?

Do horses like doing work?

By on June 18, 2013 in Horse Training

Well… no. A recent research study, which was featured on theHorse.com, found that when the horses in the study were given a choice, they would rather not work. The article concludes that horses would rather hang out in the pasture with their buddies, than be ridden by a person. (You can read the article here.) […]

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Canis Film Festival — coming soon!

By on June 15, 2013 in Dog Training

The 2013 Canis Film Festival is coming up soon! If you’ve not heard of the Canis Film Festival, it’s a very cool film festival that is sponsored by Karen Pryor Clicker Training and is held every two years. From Karen Pryor’s website: The Canis Film Festival is designed to showcase innovative, highly–communicative, short videos on […]

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Mind your manners

Mind your manners

By on June 9, 2013 in Dog Training

Recently, at the end of May, the American Veterinary Medical Association sponsored the 2013 Dog Bite Prevention Week. The sad thing about dog bites is that most bites could have been prevented. However, this is a good thing as well, because it means that by educating people about dog behavior and about how to safely interact […]

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Conference this weekend (plus some pretty cool rats!)

By on May 22, 2013 in Conferences and Clinics, Rat (and Mouse) Training

I’m heading to Minneapolis this weekend for the 39th Annual Convention of the Association for Behavior Analysis, International. This will be my 3rd time to attend and I am really excited. It’s a four day conference, full of lots of fascinating lectures and presentations about both human and animal behavior. I’ll be pretty busy while […]

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