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…
After many years of training many different species I found that there are only a couple techniques that really makes a change when training hoofstock. As we all know hoofstock species are almost always in groups. This comes with some challenges along the way. Working with groups in general is Read more…
There are a variety of different strategies to train a brand new behaviour. In this article we will talk about Free Shaping. If you want to know more about the other techniques please read this article. There is a variety of ways we can use this technique to solve challenges Read more…
In the past years of coaching animal care professionals about how to train their animals in zoological settings I get asked very often, Where do you even start? Many keepers are stuck because of this question. Overwhelmed might be the right word to use. Even for me it is not Read more…
