Question: I am a Psychology student who is currently enrolled in a subject that requires animal training. I saw your video on Youtube.com on training chickens. I was wondering how many days did it take you to teach the chicken those tricks? Did you use positive reinforcement? What are the chances of students like me to train a chicken on color discrimination within 20 days? I appreciate your kind consideration and time for reading this. Thank you. Julie Gajudo Phillipines Answer: Chickens can learn tricks surprisingly fast—often even faster than dogs. That’s because training of simple tasks just involves a

It’s kitty season – meaning, as usual, there are tons of pregnant female cats and young kittens being relinquished to shelters. Most will ultimately be euthanized but some will be fostered and find good homes. While most foster kitten raisers focus on keeping the kittens medically healthy, the most important factor for keeping kittens in their new home is training and socializing them well. We want them to be outgoing, friendly, and social with many different people and in many different environments. We also want them to learn how to play with toys and learn basic exercises such as “sit” and “come when called.” Here

I just finished teaching a two-day workshop at the Humane Animal Welfare Society (HAWS) of Wisconsin. It was 1.5 days of lecture on topics ranging from training animals across species, to the pitfalls of punishment, to the importance of body language and unconscious visual cues that affect a dog’s ability to learn the behaviors you want. This was followed by a 3 hour Circus School for Dogs. The dogs arrive for a fun workshop to learn tricks ranging from touch a target with your nose or foot, to somersault. People worked in groups of 3 and, on average, started the

Whether you have or deal with naughty dogs who need lots of guidance or you just want to learn new fun ways to play and interact with your dog, training tricks may be exactly what you want. Interestingly tricks can be useful in many ways. For instance, even if your dog is about as smart as a stone, if he can beg or wave or shake hands on cue your friends will think he’s practically Einstein. If your clients or friends are lacking one-on-one time with their Fido, training tricks can serve as a quick way for them to play

Free-shaping, meaning capturing a behavior you like by clicking to mark the correct behavior and following with a reward and then systematically rewarding behaviors closer and closer to your goal behavior, is always a good exercise whether you’re a beginner or have been doing it for many years.