Want to improve your training sessions with your horses, dogs, or other animals? Start by practicing without your animal! What is a dress rehearsal? In my Shaping Skills Workshop courses, I encourage my students to do dress rehearsals without their animals before their training sessions. Here’s how to do a dress rehearsal: Step 1: Get […]
When you are training an animal, you are working with another living creature. What happens during training is an interaction between this particular animal and your training plan. In some cases, the animal does something that you didn’t anticipate. I’ve been thinking this week about what happens when things don’t go as planned. What happens […]
Note: I wrote this post about two weeks ago, but haven’t been able to find the time to publish it. I think you’ll still enjoy it, though. Also, I’m happy to report that we’ve found what I think is going to be the perfect forever home for DaVinci! When DaVinci the old English sheep dog […]
Note: This post is a bit of a “blast from the past.” These notes were originally posted last summer on a different website, which unfortunately no longer exists. So, I am making them available here. I hope you enjoy them, this was a great seminar and I’ve tried to capture some of the highlights in […]
How do you structure your training sessions? How long is each session? Do you take breaks during the session, or just train continuously? We had an interesting discussion about this recently on one of the online horse clicker training groups. This was one of the replies I wrote to the group and I thought it […]
This is part seven of my notes from ORCA’s 2013 Art and Science of Animal Training Conference. For the rest of the notes, please visit the Conference and Clinic Notes section of my site. Steve White’s lecture at this year’s ORCA conference was titled “Plateau schmateau! Why progress matters.” During his talk, Steve discussed training […]
