Panel members at CCC 2022
At the Cooperative Care Conference This year in November 2022 we had a great panel discussion about “it might hurt but you will be ok”. This panel was conducted by Eva Bertilsson and had some great panelists sharing their thoughts regarding this topic. Hannah Branigan, Chirag Patel, Anna Oblasser-Mirtl, Eva Bertilsson herself and myself all coming from different backgrounds.
The reason I had chosen such a topic was because when training for cooperative care we put ourselves in situations where we have to teach the animals that the procedure is worth doing regardless of the fact that it might be uncomfortable. Think for example about situations where we need to do a blood sample, vaccinations or even sedate an animal through a needle. But other situations such as pulling a tooth, clipping a nail to far etc are not uncommon neither. The question is how do we work with such situations.
Should we go deeper into what it is or shall we focus on behaviour instead?
As mentioned in the panel we have to think about what the animal experiences in comparison to what we interpret as being uncomfortable. This means that we need to look at the behaviour which the animal shows us. Our interpretation is often not the correct one and this is essentially because we add our own feelings and emotions to it. Pain is not pain and discomfort is not discomfort. Sounds strange but each individual that we work with experiences these specific topics differently. For us to agree we need to understand how discomfort and pain actually work and how we can operationalize these.
I don’t want to go to deep in this specific wording but what I do want to share is how my experience goes around these potential challenging situations. As I’ve worked with many different species and individuals I’ve learner over time that things can happen. From accidental target hits to pushing the session for a blood sample to quickly all resulting in an animal that doesn’t want to participate anymore. If this is due to pain or discomfort I don’t know but what I do know is that the environment made the animal stop the specific behaviour I asked for previously. In my experience very simple, the motivation to keep preforming a behaviour is lower then not preforming the behaviour. Easy answer you would say, just raise the motivation on the other side. Well that’s exactly it but there are various ways to do this.
Be motivated to participate
What I find important is an animal that’s shows me whatever happens that they want to participate. This on it’s own should already be reinforced. Without an animal being calm deciding to be with you and look at you, you don’t have anything. When the animal opts out of the behaviour we should always reinforce the animal for the fact that they stay with us. It’s being discussed that we then reinforce the behaviour of opting out sure but at the other hand we now know that the discomfort of the behaviour we out them in was not as bad as we thought. They didn’t seem to enjoy the needle sting but the relationship we have with our animals is strong enough to say that the discomfort wasn’t that bad.
This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take it serious. At the end the animal opted out for a reason. We can do a lot with our reinforcement amounts. As mentioned before I will rienforce the opting out but not as much as I would do when the animal actually accepted the complete procedure. That’s where I can play around which in turn means that the animal always has a chance of reinforcement.
Elephant pedicure
When I was building the elephant program at Kolmarden in Sweden we got to a position where we had to train the elephants for a long duration of the pedicure behaviour. The challenge was, what to do when we cut to deeply and the foot starts to bleed with as a result the animal moving its foot? I want to mention that our program was simple based on, we ask the leg, we then do the procedure, we now mark the behaviour and rienforce accordingly. This meant that we didn’t reinforce in between when the behaviour was being opreformed. We did this to teach the exact task to the animal and kept all the extra grey areas out of it. But in the instance of the bleeding foot we decided to reinforce the animal in position anyway if the animal made the choice to stay in position after the procedure went wrong. This to tell the animal that they were making the right choices regardless of the discomfort.
At the end we don’t know what the animal feels, all we know is that they feel something. We also don’t know the animals pain treshhold (which we don’t have to know anyway) all we can do is look at the animal and measure the behaviour we see. Therefore I like to cue the animal once, do the procedure, when the animal opts out, I wait to see if the animal puts themselves (no cue given by the trainer) back in position. Because then we have communication happening not only from the trainer to the animal but also from the animal to the trainer which should have a proper balance.
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