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.
Everybody’s got some valuable knowledge – a “yellow umbrella”. Finding it can be challenging.
Find the yellow umbrella.
We can learn something from every single person.
That’s a conviction that I have.
My challenge to you is to try to find that something in every single pet owner or animal professional that you meet.
What animal-related piece of knowledge can you gain from that person?
Find the yellow umbrella. The nugget of wisdom that will change how you interact with animals.
Ignore the other, black umbrellas: the ideas, techniques and explanations that don’t fit your paradigm. And here’s the challenge: though you might find these black umbrellas appalling – the task in this exercise is to ignore them rather than allow them to flip your lid.
Rather, pick and choose that which resonates with you. What you find might be an animal-related technique, a piece of knowledge, or merely an idea that you can mold to fit your own framework.
I try to approach animal trainers from all camps with an open heart and mind, knowing that they all have some insight that will help me improve my understanding of the world in general, and animals in particular.
So, which nugget of knowledge do I find with the Dog Whisperer, Cesar Millan?
In the last couple of weeks, I’ve had influences from two directions that have caused me to consider the age at which dogs are separated from their litter and mom.
Yes, I know, it’s nigh impossible to guess which emotional state an animal is in from a still picture. We need motion, and context, to be able to do that.
I guess what I’m really asking is: do you look at animals and see predominantly their behaviour, or do you take a stab at considering their emotional/mood state?
In this blog post, I hope to convince you to develop the second perspective, if you haven’t already.
In other words, I would encourage you to start using emotion labels – one of the three types of useful labels when it comes to animals and their behaviour.
The world of animal trainers is divided, and I find that some trainers avoid the subject of animal emotions altogether.
“There’s no need to factor in and understand emotions, just deal with the observable behaviour”, is the gist of what some trainers and animal professionals say.
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.
