Categories
Animal Training

The 6 foundation behaviours

I’ve recently revised my introductory animal training course, and one thing we do in the course is discuss which behaviours to start teaching an animal.

The 6 foundation behaviours.

Not only are these the behaviours that the animal learns first, so they are the ones that he’ll tend to revert back to and offer when he doesn’t know what else to do, but they also teach him about this game we’re playing together.

The foundation behaviours teach the animal what training is all about.

That it’s fun.

The foundation behaviours teach the animal what training is all about.

That the trainer is a good person to be around – interesting things happen next to that person, which builds their relationship.

Categories
Animal Training How we learn

Most-listened-to animal-related podcasts (August 2020)

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…

Podcasts – yes, no, or huh?

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

Categories
Animal Training

How to teach a cue

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?!”

“Is this what you wanted, mommy?”

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.

Categories
Animal Emotions Animal Training Applied Ethology

Animal Welfare and her fairy godmothers

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 of Animal Welfare

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:

Categories
Animal Training

The Modern Principles of Shaping

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.

Incidentally, the principles can all be understood in terms of traffic signs.
Categories
Animal Training

Good Trainer Habits

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!