Anaesthesia is a medical treatment that prevents patients from feeling pain during procedures like surgery, certain screening and diagnostic tests, tissue sample removal (e.g., skin biopsies), and dental work (Source: https://www.nigms.nih.gov/education/fact-sheets/Pages/anesthesia.aspx) What often happens with animals that aren’t trained to come to the zoo staff for further examinations they are what we call darted. This means that the veterinarian will have shoot a dart in the animals body with a gun that uses air pressure.
This specific practise doesn’t only give the animal a negative association with the veterinarian but with everything that comes with it. Remember classical conditioning or associative learning? Well thats exactly what is happening. Not to even talk about the pressure in which the dart enters the animal could give some extra medical challenges as well. Enough reason to train this behaviour!
Why this behaviour?
There are various reasons why you want to train your animals for this specific behaviour. Might it be, a proper body check, euthanasia or a move to another area or facility. But why train for anaesthesia if you can train them for everything else? Well this is quite the discussion because imagine you have inexperienced animals and there is a very young experienced team. Think about the time pressure for this animal to be looked at or moved. Is it realistic to train a full body check in protective contact? I mean we are talking about 10+ new behaviours. We want our animals and keepers successful. This is where we have to give and take.
How do we go about this?
It sounds difficult to train for this behaviour, you need a position, desensitisation plan, potential veterinarians collaborating, motivation strategy etc etc. but training this behaviour is actually not that bad. All we have to focus on is the position and the desensitization part of the behaviour. The position is not the problem but duration is often the difficult part to train.
The first question we have to ask ourselves as trainers is how can we create an environment where we are able to reach the goal position a lot faster. As we train most if not all animals in protective contact this is sometimes challenging. Some creative thinking has to come in place.
In case of a Wolf.
We added a barrier close to the fence where we were able to ask the animals to come into. This helped to get the hip closer to the fence where we were able to put the needle into. Because of the placement of the barrier this position was reached pretty easy but the challenge wasn’t necessary the position we first had to train the young experienced trainers to be able to have the animals trained for some foundation.
A control behaviour where the animal stays with you, a follow behaviour where you ask the animal to follow wherever you are, and the target which they touch with their nose. All these behaviour were necessary to get the body position success. Another important behaviour we had to train was the crisscross. Because we had only one place to train the position we had to train the 2 individuals to crisscross. I’ve trained this with many animals but this behaviour believe it or not is pretty challenging for the animal. I mean they have to back up, pass and ignore the other individual and focus back to the trainer.
The animals have to focus on the proper trainer and follow the trainer while passing the other animal. When the other trainer reinforces the animal simultaneously the animal that should crisscross is likely to stay or push the other animal away. So a crisscross is difficult for the animal. After having the foundation set we are now starting the desensitization process.
The Saline as Approximation
Another plan was made and my question to the veterinarian was right away in how far does the liquid we put in their hips have an effect on the behaviour of the individuals? He said not to much which at that point made me think that we didn’t have to train the insert the liquid which was after al not a smart way to think. The interesting part here is that I’ve helped a great friend of mine Grant to train this with Fishing cats. One of the approximations we had talked about was adding the saline. Which I believe made this successful with these cats. What saline does is that it give a little pinch feeling when injected. But doesn’t do any further harm. A great approximation to work towards to the desired goal. An approximation we learned should not have been forgotten.
Even though it is a vaccination, the behaviour we are looking for is exactly the same. Look at the setup. This looks very different to the behaviour we trained with the wolf.
The Animal Decides
Animals decide if something is scary, feels funny, is strange or feels good. The trainer doesn’t decide this. At this point we had trained these individuals to accept a needle and stay in position. We could poke the animals multiple times.
Then the moment was there, we were going to do a full body check to see if the animals were healthy. We asked the animal as a normal training session to come to us. We did our injection and then it happened the animals ran off. The question now was, did they run off because of the feeling in the hip or because we had done things differently. Interestingly the animals came back which meant that the experience they had was less negative than we thought. We tried again, the issue we had was that the liquid started to work so they were not able to come back again. Beside that we weren’t able to reinforce them with solid food. This meant that we had to train them another reinforcer. We used meat juice and blood.
After the whole procedure we had a talk with one another and even though the vet was impressed we wanted it to be more perfect. Afterwards I thought once again why haven’t I listened to myself. We had skipped approximations which we needed in the process. We had to train them for the fact that we might need to use a bigger needle and the liquid.
We are going to do this again but this time we are going to train them to accept a bigger needle and obviously to stay calm and in position when a liquid enters their body. At the other hand I thought you know what why not try it differently. Yes this is how I learn as a trainer. Test situations! What if the motivation strategy creating the reinforcement history overtakes this feeling they have when the liquid enters? Maybe it works. We reinforced heavily after every approximation. Well apparently it wasn’t that strong as I thought it would be which meant that they didn’t accept the liquid medicine we used for the The valuable lesson I learned with training for anaesthesia. That’s how we become better trainers I suppose.
The lesson we learned was that animals can respond to situations which we see as easy. The learner decides. We have to build stronger behaviour with more approximations to give them the best chances to succeed in the future. The best part was that we did exactly that. The main reason we trained this behaviour because we moved her to another Zoo. The facility didn’t allow us to train in protective contact for a transport box and therefore we got her to train for voluntary anaesthetics.
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