Are you going to win or are you going to lose? Observation is a powerful method useful before and in all training sessions. It can make you win the session or lose the session. I remember working with Killer whales one of the senior trainers in Spain telling me Peter Read more…
What About If the Reinforcement is Good for the Animal? Imagine this, you have animals who we know like certain types of food but you can’t give this to them or animals who seem to be ”happy” when they get a particular fruit. Hmm… I do think we all agree Read more…
Species and individuals who prefer to flee… Where do you start? You know this one animal, or these species who are extremely afraid of humans? In the marine mammal world, we do have these individuals who are more sensitive than others. In the zoo world we have many species who Read more…
An upgrade in history… Operant and classical conditioning is not new as we know. The foot steps have been made a long time ago by for example Sir I.Pavlov and Sir B.F. Skinner. Skinner discovered how you can connect behaviours to causes and how you can actually train an animal Read more…
Curiosity in Terrestrial Animals Over the last few months, I’ve been writing a lot about motivation connected to marine mammals. Now, I’ve been introduced to a new position at Kolmårdens Djurpark where I’m able to rediscover this motivation and training strategies with the other zoo animals. Although the training methods Read more…
The moment you say, “Yes!” Within the positive reinforcement training strategies, there are plenty of different styles that trainers use to best utilize these training methods. The beautiful thing is that everything fits in this box, but one is definitely faster than the other. Over the years, I’ve talked to Read more…
Inventive Methods of Reinforcement We will never know exactly what an animal is thinking, but there is beauty in all that we can discover. If we open our minds, we can really see what is possible. We are all inventors in our own ways. When we think about the boundaries Read more…
Discussing Motivation We all have moments where we want to learn something new, but where does our desire to learn come from? It’s certainly true that we retain more knowledge when learning about a subject that interests us in a positive way. It’s much harder to remain attentive and absorb Read more…
We make many choices throughout our lives. Some are simple, while others are more complex. Everyday we make thousands of choices, what to eat, where to go, who we want to spend time with and some choices not only effect our days or weeks they can even affect our entire Read more…
