Our focus Currently the focus of many animal care professionals working with behaviour is to train our animals for medical care. This has been called pro active care. The question arrises if we are actually applying pro active care when we train our animals for behaviours such as hoof trims, Read more…
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, Read more…
Zoospensefull uses LearnDash as learning platform and this is where we also build the platform for the online conferences we organise such as the Cooperative Care Conference. As we discovered it isn’t always easy to access such an area if you do not know where to go. We can only Read more…
Often trainers are telling me that when you train with positive reinforcement you give animals a choice. While at first I would say yes definitely but it is actually not the case. Teaching choices is a complicated task especially the yes and no answer. Why is this? Yes or No? Read more…
Cover photo: Brooklands Zoo, New Plymouth After a couple years of focusing on how to train animals to cooperate in their own care I found out that there are some key aspects we have to think about when we start training such behaviours. Have we trained our animals well enough? Read more…
In the past 3-4 years we had the privilege to work together with Namskoggan Familie Park. This park is a 3 hour drive north from Trondheim. A park with mainly European species who are able to handle the rough climates of this country. A very progressive wildlife park that decided Read more…
Recently I have been in some projects who all had one thing in common and which is to change the perspective from the animals in their environment. Within the interaction we have with the animals in our care we are actually doing this all the time. The challenges come when Read more…
This year at the EAZA Welfare Forum I was at a workshop which was about “Pain – why does it matter and what can we do about it” by Dr. Heather Bacon. A very interesting and fantastic workshop to join to be able to understand pain in animals. While pain Read more…
A strongly trained behaviour has a massive history of reinforcement. Small approximations have been made to give the animal a very high success rate. This also means that the reinforcement history behind this new behaviour is very high. Interestingly, over time this will change. This is how that works. Once Read more…
There are various methods to train our animals and some of us claim that there are many different ones but are there really? I’ve worked with a huge variety of different animals and experienced many different training cultures. Free contact and protective contact elephant training, carnivore training, marine mammal training, Read more…
