I learnt the basics of clicker training and how to break a behaviour that you want into lots of tiny steps so that you can "shape" the animal one tiny step at a time and build it up gradually to eventually result in the entire behaviour. For example, when getting a chicken to peck at a disk, you first click and reward every time the chicken looks at the disk, moves in the direction of the disk, or lowers its head towards the disk. Gradually you narrow your criteria so that you only click and reward when she is getting closer to the goal of pecking the disk. Eventually she will peck it and then you can narrow the criteria to only rewarding when she pecks it. I was absolutely amazed how well this works and how quickly the chickens picked it up. Once she is consistently pecking the disk and has a good reinforcement history (i.e. she's done it enough times so that she really understands the cause and effect of pecking and getting a treat) you can then make the behaviour more complicated by making it a moving target, or adding disks of different colours and getting her to do colour discrimination and only peck disks of one colour. I couldn't believe how well the chookums did at the more complicated behaviours.
At the end, for a bit of fun, we did "slaying the dragon" by getting the chookums to pick up and throw little dinosaur toys off the table. I don't know if it was because the chickens were used to being trained by then or that the trainers had improved their skills over the two days, but the chookums picked up this trick almost instantly.
I am so enthused about clicker training now. I have my clicker, treats, and training plan all set up for Darcy so stay tuned for some adorable videos of Darcy doing tricks in the future.
No comments:
Post a Comment