Training animals of any kind can seem like a daunting task to those are
just learning how. In fact sometime it can be pretty daunting for the experts
to. It takes time (sometimes years) and a whole lot of patients. However if you
know the basics, then you can train any animal you want to, even humans. Here
are some of the basic principles needed for successful animal training.
The first and most important thing to animal training is consistency! There
are two types of consistency and both are very important. The first is
consistency in procedure. If you are not
consistent, the animal has no frame work in which to build on, they will be
confused, not understanding what you are asking for and become frustrated.
Especially in timid animals, if they cannot predict your behavior, there is no
way they can trust you and thus learn from you. They second type is
consistently being there for the animal. If you show up for two days, and then
do not show up for a month, then the animal cannot trust know you and trust you.
The second most important thing and it over laps with consistency is
trust, or relationship.
You need to
have a very good relationship with your animal. You need to know their typical
behavior, and details about behavior and mood change. Just as importantly, you need their trust and
they need to be able to read you as well. It is a two way relationship that
grows over time. This is done through lots of positive interactions between you
and your animal. You have to spend the time to build a solid two way
relationship between you and the animal before you even start training. This
may take a lot of time, from days to months, and with some even years. These interactions
should be as positive and rewarding for both you and the animal as possible. This
leads to another very important principle, positive reinforcement.
Positive reinforcement is the act of adding something in order to make a
behavior more likely. A very common one in animal behavior is giving an animal
food as a reinforcer in order to make a behavior more likely. For example,
telling your cat to sit, and then giving her a treat when she does. This is the
best and safest way to train an animal, both for yourself and for the animal.
Even though food is the most common reinforcer, there are other types that
might work better depending on the situation. Some people do not like to
reinforce their dogs with food because they end up relying solely on food and
will not listen to anything else. So they might use praise instead which can be
just as effective. With humans the best reward us generally just some
acknowledgement of what they have done, a thank you.
When you are ready to start training and have chosen a reinforcer, then
next step is to figure out how to create that behavior. There are two ways to create
a behavior. The first is called
capturing, in which you catch the animal in the act of doing the behavior, and
you reward it. If they do it often, this can be much easier and faster. However
there are behaviors that an animal either rarely does or does not do at all,
and thus cannot be captured. In this case we move to shaping.
Shaping is when you use differential reinforcement for successive
approximations. This means that you break the behavior into small steps and
then when the animal does each step it is rewarded consistently. However as
they move closer to the goal, the beginning steps that are repeated smoothly
are no longer reinforced, so the animal has to get to the next step before it
is reinforced again. For example, teaching your dog to shake paw. First you
would reward them shifting their weight to their other leg, when they do that
consistently and when they start to bend their leg(so they can pick it up)
reinforce that and stop reinforcing the weight shift. When they get that down
smoothly, stop reinforcing it until the dog actually picks up their paw, and
reward that consistently.
Being clear in your desires for the animal is also very important. Be consistent
in your auditory and visual ques. Also make sure the animal knows when they are
being rewarded. A food reward is only good if they like the food or they are
hungry, so a good time for a training session is before a meal.
Keep training sessions short and positive, and end on a good note.
Sessions can be as little as a minute and should not go over 30 minutes. An
animal’s attention span is only so large and they get frustrated when they are
learning something new just like we do. When they start to get frustrated or
distracted, take a break, or call it quits for that session. We all need brakes to process the information
we learned and to relax. The most
important things to remember when training an animal is to be consistent, build
a good two way relationship, use positive reinforcement, be patient, and keep
sessions short.
Sources
Shaping of Things to Come, Clements
Cari. Director of Interpretive Programs, Natural Encounters, Inc.
Martin, Steve. President (2005). It’s About Relationships, Natural
Encounters, Inc.
Presented:
IAATE Annual Conference. Atlanta, GA
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