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.
Several years ago, Ken Ramirez gave a talk at the Art and Science of Animal Training Conference which was called “Training when you’re not training.” You can read my notes from Ken’s talk in this post. One of Ken’s main points was that training is always going on. We have many informal interactions with our […]
Occasionally when I am at the barn, I realize that I have forgotten something that is still in the tack room. Apollo, of course, can’t come in the tack room with me. Until recently, I have had two options for what I can do in this situation. Option 1: I can give him some feed […]
Apollo and I have been working on Alexandra Kurland’s “the grown-ups are talking” exercise. This is a polite manners exercise that teaches the horse to stand calmly next to you for an extended duration of time with his head straight ahead. One important consideration when we first started this exercise was our training environment. When […]
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 […]
I have some exciting news to share…. This summer and fall, a friend and I did some volunteer work at a local horse rescue. At the end of November, I adopted one of the horses from the rescue. Apollo is a middle-aged Arabian gelding. He’s been at the rescue since this past spring. Other than […]
I have been catching up on the Equiosity podcast, which is a collaboration between Alexandra Kurland and Dominique Day. In Episode 49, Alexandra tells a story from when her horse Robin was very young. At the time, Alexandra had been working with Robin on many different things using clicker training. However, she had often been […]
