training
Training the Wild Friends at Best Friends
Vicki Ronchette talks training tortoises to target and station, thinking outside the box to find
high value reinforcers, and the importance of working with different species to improve
mechanical skills
W
Photo © Vicki Ronchette
Via clicker training, the workshop tortoises were quick to learn to target and trainers were quickly able to add duration to the behavior
hen I received the phone call last year asking me if I would teach three workshops for PPG’s inaugural Training and Behavior Workshop at Best Friends Animal Society in Kanab, Utah, I immediately said yes. How could I not? Visiting Best Friends is on the bucket list for many people and I had been interested in seeing this amazing place for a long time. I also felt a little bit of pressure as the quality of instructors I would be teaching alongside was more than impressive. Nevertheless, I still had to say yes. My assigned area was Wild Friends at Best Friends Animal Sanctuary. Wild Friends is the area that cares for animals that don’t obviously fit into one of the other areas, such as Dogtown or Parrot Garden. As in all the areas, animals come and go. They are accepted into the program and many are adopted out, if they are adoptable. What makes Wild Friends different is that you never know what species will be there. I was told they had raptors, chickens and reptiles at the time, but that it could change any time. Teaching at a big workshop or conference can be
Photo © Vicki Ronchette
Learning to effectively deliver reinforcers like greens and grape pieces while working with a completely new species can be tricky, but is an excellent skill for trainers to have
stressful enough, but to not know what animals I would be working with was a whole other ball game. In order to keep it simple and workable, then, I created a workshop that would work with just about any species. When I arrived in Kanab, Chirag Patel, who was also hosting workshops in the Wild Friends area, and I were taken on a tour of Best Friends including the Wild Friends area, so we could see which animals might be options for us to work with. There were a lot of wonderful animals and it was hard not to want to work with all of them. There was a gorgeous red-tailed hawk, one of my favorite species and a bird I love working with. However, using a non-releasable wild bird of prey in a workshop to work with 10 people is not a great idea. We would have spent the entire time just working on the bird being comfortable with us standing around. There was also a beautiful Peking duck that had an issue with chasing people in his enclosure. I really wanted to work with him and immediately had ideas of incompatible behaviors we could train to help with this behavior. But again, with one duck and 10 people
BARKS from the Guild
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