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.
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.
Updated August 2023
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:
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 But inevitably, some of those laws became outdated.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.
How do you become a better animal trainer?
Here’s four quick tips (discussed in more detail here):
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!
Is this familiar?
Your cat comes when called in the kitchen, but not in the garden.
Or your horse loads beautifully into the old trailer, but refuses to set hoof in the brand new one.
Or your dog sits on cue anywhere but in the vet’s office.
This problem could be about either (or both) of two issues:
In order to successfully get behaviour in all contexts, you need to address both Communication and Motivation.