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When I was little, I became mesmerized by Dr Dolittle.

Dr Dolittle could talk to animals. He’d ask them questions, they’d vocalize, he’d nod wisely and translate their chirps, whistles, woofs and meows to plain English, to the astonishment of those present.

It was my all-time favourite movie, when I was nine.

Side-note: the 2,5-hour film from 1967 was broadcast on TV at a time in the evening when I was supposed to go to bed about three-quarters of the way through. So after one hour and 45 minutes, dad said: “time to go to bed, Karolina”.

And I pleaded. Threatened. Screamed.

To no avail; there were to be no exceptions to that bedtime hour. I remember being lead to my room, still protesting loudly. And then I spent several hours having a loud and ugly meltdown alone in my room, way past the time that the film ended, and at some point somewhat triumphantly shrieking at the door: “If only you’d let me watch the whole film I’d be asleep by now!!!”

Continue reading “Talking to animals”

Last week, I asked the people on my email list, and my Facebook community, whether they listened to any animal-related podcasts, and if so, which ones.

I don’t know what I expected, maybe a handful of answers. Little did I know…

517 people answered, and I just summarized the wealth of data that they provided.

Continue reading “Most-listened-to animal-related podcasts (August 2020)”

Is this familiar?

You’ve been training tricks with your dog, and want to impress some visiting friends with his new skills.

You ask him for a high five.

He gives a high five, then he lies down, plays dead, rolls over… all the while throwing expectant looks at you, as if saying “is it this?!”

In other words, you ask for one specific behaviour, and he enthusiastically responds by giving you his entire learned repertoire of tricks.

What’s going on?

Well, in technical terms, he’s not under Stimulus Control.

In less technical terms, he hasn’t yet quite learned about cues. Continue reading “How to teach a cue”

Once upon a time there was a princess.

She was quite furry and partly covered in scales, and also had a beak, and so she was named Animal.

Her last name was Welfare.

Animal Welfare had four fairy godmothers, who all gave her precious gifts.

The fairy godmothers came from different scientific realms, and they were called Applied Ethology, Veterinary Medicine, Affective Neuroscience and Applied Behaviour Analysis – and each of them offered priceless, irreplaceable gifts to Animal Welfare.

And here’s the twist of this fairy tale: Continue reading “Animal Welfare and her fairy godmothers”

Back in 1984, Karen Pryor wrote the 10 Laws of Shaping into her book Don’t shoot the dog.

That book, and those laws, have been extremely influential in shaping the contemporary animal training community. But inevitably, some of those laws became outdated.

So, 30 years later, she and her team updated them – they’re now called the Modern Principles of Shaping.

Continue reading “The Modern Principles of Shaping”

How do you become a better animal trainer?

Here’s four quick tips (discussed in more detail here):

• learn from many teachers
• learn from many individual animals
• learn from several animal species
• keep an open mind

Another useful approach is to acquire overall good trainer habits. And in the video below (chapter 12 from the final module of my online course Advanced Animal Training) I discuss what I think are 30 such useful trainer habits.

Not that the concepts are that terribly advanced, frankly – most of them are very useful to beginner trainers too! Continue reading “Good Trainer Habits”