Category: Animal Training

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Animal Training Ethics

7 ways to get behaviour

Revised May 2024.

There are two important question to ask before teaching an animal a new skill.

In another blog post, I discussed the first question, one that is extremely basic but often overlooked: “what is the cost/benefit of the behaviour?” Is it useful, useless, abuse or an ethical dilemma?

Once a behaviour has been found to be useful, it’s time to consider how to best go about teaching it.

And this brings us to the second question.

Which is the best technique to teach the animal how to perform a new skill?

You know the old saying “All roads lead to Rome”..?

With regards to animal training, the same is true. There are many ways to teach animals what you want them to do.

Many ways to “get” behaviour, as it were.

There are many techniques to “get” behaviour.
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Categories
Animal Training Ethics Weathering scepticism

The cost/benefit of animal training

Updated December 2023

dressage
This would qualify as abuse as defined below.

When planning to teach an animal to carry out any new response, there are two questions to ask before even getting started.

  • What is the cost/benefit of teaching the behaviour? Should it even be taught in the first place?
  • If so, how should it be taught?

Let’s look at the first of those two questions, as it will help decide whether a behaviour should be trained at all, and identify potential situations where we simply shouldn’t bother.

Oh, and I address the question of how to chose the best training method in this blog post.

Training new behaviour could in some cases cause suffering to the animal.

Continue reading “The cost/benefit of animal training”
Categories
Animal Training Ethics How we learn

Why dog training programs on TV should be entertaining, educational – and ethical

Suppose you were a TV producer charged with launching a new dog training show on your network. Or in this day and age, your medium might not be television but any kind of video streaming service.

How would you go about doing that?

Which criteria would be important in outlining the show?

Some may say: you need to find a charismatic trainer, to serve as host.

TV dog show hosts need to be charismatic.

True.

That’s not all, though. I wouldn’t even start there.

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Categories
Animal Training How we learn

How to become a better animal trainer.

It took me years to realize this, but there are some approaches that really propelled my learning about animal behaviour management in general, and animal training specifically.

trainer and dog

Here are the four tactics or concepts that I’ve found most useful:

Continue reading “How to become a better animal trainer.”