This is an interesting piece that offers some good information that I am going to try myself. Thanks to
Xi Shan of flickr for sending this our way. I'll bet many of us are pet owners, so I have put a poll on the right sidebar. Be sure to check it out we would all like to know!
For a Well-Behaved Pet, Take Tips from Zoo Trainers
By LINDA LOMBARDI For The Associated Press
Friday, October 2, 2009
You’ll never have to teach a panda to walk on a leash. But if any kind of animal lives in your house, trainers at the zoo have some useful lessons for you.
Modern training methods rely on a simple principle of learning: If an action has a pleasurable consequence, the animal will repeat it. Or as animal behaviorist Emily Weiss puts it, “If it feels good, do it again.”
So it should be easy to mold a pet’s behavior — reward it when it does what we like, and don’t when it doesn’t. But getting the details right can be a challenge, whether with a panda or a pup, and that’s often because we don’t understand what is actually rewarding to the animal.
The simplest type of reward-based training involves food, and it’s incredibly powerful. It works with animals that don’t care about pleasing us, or that we can’t even safely get near. Weiss has trained a Komodo dragon to enter a crate using food.
But it’s critical to realize that food is not all that’s rewarding, and that the alternatives may be unexpected, such as when Weiss found
that Aldabra tortoises could be rewarded in training by having their necks stroked.
Being aware of other possible rewards can help if your pet is not particularly food motivated, but it’s far more important than that. If you’re not aware of everything that’s rewarding to an animal, you may be accidentally training it to do exactly what you don’t want.