In this section, you’ll find articles about important concepts and terms related to the science of animal training and animal behavior. If you’re new to positive animal training, I recommend starting with the articles in my Top Posts section.
Emotions can be a tricky subject. What is an emotion? Do animals have emotions the same way people do? Do emotions cause behavior? Is it important to pay attention to our animals’ emotions during training? We’ve had some discussion about emotions recently in the Listen and Learn online course (link). Emotions also made an appearance […]
I got an email reminder yesterday about this weekend’s Equiosity webinar. This reminded me that I still hadn’t posted my thoughts from the March webinar! For the March webinar, Alexandra Kurland and Dominique Day invited Dr. Jesús Rosales-Ruiz to join them for a discussion about schedules of reinforcement. This can often be a rather dry topic, […]
Recently, my friend Cindy sent me a great video from agility dog trainer Susan Garrett. The video shows Susan shaping two of her dogs to jump on a cooler. Both dogs are eight-year-old border collies owned by Susan. Both dogs are pretty smart pups with an extensive history of training. However, the second dog learns […]
“The continuousness of behavior means that the organism can be thought of as always doing something.” In September, I shared this quote on my blog and discussed how it relates to “problem” behaviors. You can find that post here. However, this quote also relates to shaping. If you spend some time on YouTube, you can […]
My friend Dr. Joe Layng was in town this past weekend. While he was here, he gave a two-hour lecture for the Department of Behavior Analysis at UNT which was titled “Implications and applications of nonlinear contingency analysis.” Joe’s talk was packed full of great information. For this post, however, I want to focus on […]
If you’ve spent any time training animals (or humans, for that matter), you know that things don’t always go as planned! Particular steps may end up taking much longer or shorter than your initially anticipated. And at certain steps, the animal may behave in a way that you didn’t expect at all. You should always […]
