Trainer Talk

One of the biggest challenges zoos face, is keeping animals fit in their environment. We know a lot about nutrition and body scoring but what do we know about the fitness level of our animals?  I remember at one of the zoos I worked at we started to introduce a Read more…

Over the years I have learned a lot about behaviour and why it occurs. There is always a reason a behaviour occurs, and there is often motivation connected to behaviour. The fact that there are most likely emotions, and even thoughts and feelings, coming alongside most behaviour is obvious. The Read more…

If you haven’t read “Don’t Shoot the Dog” from Karen Pryor you should! In her book on page 38 & 39 she explains the 10 laws of shaping. A great tool for the trainer to make progress with their learners. In this article I would like to add my thoughts Read more…

We can train cooperative care in many different ways, and we all know how much this training helps the animals in our care. Their welfare increases and we are able to take even better care of our animals individually. What if we take a deeper look into how we can Read more…

As animal caretakers we have to try and be proactive in different situations and scenarios. To be able to check our animals voluntary we need some basic trained behaviours. The animals often require a good relationship with the trainer and understand several foundation behaviours. But when we train for urine Read more…

Aggression is a natural and common behaviour in animals. There are many reasons why animals demonstrate aggressive behaviour to conspecifics or even towards us. When should we take action as caretakers and what is the reason the aggressor shows aggressive behaviour towards the other members of the group, other species or Read more…

Cover Photo: Kirstin Anderson Hanson – Shape training with Cormorants Website: www.sdu.dk Training animals to understand shapes can be a very useful behaviour. We can make our training sessions more fun and interesting for our animals as well as the training becomes more enriching when we work with shapes and Read more…

As animal caregivers we want the best for our animals, but sometimes there are situations where we have to put an animal in an environment or situation that they may perceive as negative or stressful. In these situations animal care trumps animal training. Retroactive Management Zookeeping is all about observation. Read more…

Conscious or Unconscious Reinforcement, Anticipation or Stereotyping Animal training is all about responding to behaviour but what if the behaviour that occurs is repetitive? With repetitive behaviour it is useful to try and identify if the behaviour is a result of conscious or unconscious reinforcement, anticipation or stereotyping. Stereotypical behaviours are Read more…