The Important Detail

Cooperative care has many different details to be considered. You might remember that in the past we have been talking about a variety of different behaviour’s which you need for successful cooperative care behaviours. But there is more.

Interestingly we discovered an important detail to add into your cooperative care training. Which might solve your duration technique. It seems to be that most trainers find it difficult to train duration in their behaviour. To be able to work through the duration trainers start to apply a variety of techniques which sometimes isn’t teaching duration to the animal but the outcome is having duration in your behaviour. Sounds confusing right? Let me explain. 

Sea World Australia

In many zoological facilities trainers use a technique which we would call continuous feeding. The animal is non stop being fed for the blood sample, hoofcare, vaccination or any other medical behaviour to reach the duration goal. At Zoospensefull we prefer not to teach this technique just because we think this technique isn’t the best one. It might be the fastest one but that’s where it ends. 

Polar Bear Training

We started to work with the Polar Bears at Sea World where one of the goals was to get the 3 bears voluntary blood trained. This used to be done through continuous feeding, although unsuccessful often. I had seen this before In Highland Wildlife Park in Schotland where they had a similar practice. I was always wondering why trainers chose for this technique. The answer has always been that you want high reinforcement history and make sure the animal doesn’t know what happens through distracting the animal. 

Measurable Approximations

We are a big fan of teaching the animal a skill. This means that we have to teach the animal through approximations to understand when a reinforcer is coming. It is the simple ABC process. This doesn’t necessarily start with the timing of your reinforcer but more with the timing of the terminal bridge. The terminal bridge lets the animal know the criteria is reached and you (the animal) can stop what you are doing. This is detrimental for the animal to understand because this way we can teach the animal duration through approximations. This is measurable through behaviour. 

You might say but we can measure the duration as well with non stop feeding. Although this is true the difference is the distraction that comes with it. We have no idea if the animal even understands the fact that something is going to happen to their body.

Duration for the Blood Draw

Sea World Australia

One of the challenges we had with the polar bears was training for duration. Desensitisation was actually easier than we thought but it was all about the use of terminal bridge.

We asked the paw in the paw sleeve, then we asked the bear to stay, then we touched the bear and bridged. The bear would not take the bridge and stay with it’s paw in the sleeve. We did reinforce after the bridge but form the behaviour standpoint, we bridged after 10 seconds but because the bear didn’t take its paw out the next approximation was applied which made the bear stay for another 15 seconds. This meant 25 seconds in total duration just because the bear didn’t take its paw out. This is where the problem was. If we want to reinforce a clear approximation of duration we need to make sure they take the paw out to officially start over again. 

Default Behaviour

Make sure your animal understands this process.

Whenever a bridge is presented the bear is going back to default behaviour which in this case is 2 paws on the ground in a sit position. Whenever the bridge was given this was the position the bear stayed in. This allowed us to increase duration rapidly and add desensitisation challenges. This had boasted the program is such a way that the voluntary blood sample was reached quickly.

The main goal for such behaviours is not that the animal is able to do but is the animal able to do it repeatedly? for example every month? Often this is the issue in many training programs. The animal is conditioned for a one timer and then we have to retrain completely. We are now in a position where we can take blood every month if we want to. Just by changing the timing of our consequences.

Want to know how we trained this behaviour? Download the training plan and remember every approximation leads us back to the default behaviour.

Categories: Trainer Talk

PeterGiljam

Peter is a passionate Animal Consultant that beside teaching you about Operant Conditioning makes sure you will go home motivated and inspired. Make sure you read his Bio!

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