ZOOmility

Keeper Tales of Training With Positive Reinforcement

From the book...

"... Training is as much about having fun as it is about helping animals succeed in the world in which we've placed them, whether it be a zoo, a kennel, a wildlife preserve, a stable, or our own home. Behavior training should be all about what the animals need in order to thrive. Selfish, lazy, uptight, or impatient trainers often fail both themselves and their animals. They simply lack zoomility.

"So this book was written to provide readers useful training tips as well as a glimpse at the funny side of working around animals with positive reinforcement. Hopefully, finding a little humor in some of my mistakes will help you to avoid anger and frustration in your own training situations, to resist applying punishment to "correct" behaviors, and most of all, to embrace the joy of training through positive reinforcement. Learning to put aside your own training ego and adopting a little zoomility will help you build a healthier, more dependable, and more successful relationship with your animal students, whatever species they may be."

Each chapter of the book begins with a zoomility tale much like this one...

Stick to your reinforcement guns
It's one thing to talk about training with zoomility when things are going well from the safety and security of our own home, back yard, or zoo. It's another thing to actually do it when you and your animal are someplace completely new! How does training with only positive reinforcement stack up to traditional methods when you have absolutely zero control over the situation? The following zoomility story might give you some idea.

One spring, the zoo and I were invited to bring several educational outreach animals to a huge school event at a local city park. It was a lush, green park lined with streetlights but few trees. One of the animal ambassadors I'd brought out was Comanche, a beautiful Harris's hawk, which is a bird of prey native to the American Southwest. In addition to visiting school children, Comanche was also in training to become one of our onsite free-flight demonstration birds. While we were training him to fly over the zoo, we never intended for him to try this while we were off zoo grounds!

Comanche had other ideas. As usual, I reached into his carrier to secure his jesses to my glove, then asked him to perch on my arm. But just as a line of 50 school buses pulled into the parking lot right next to us, Comanche flew away.

Since there were no trees nearby, he chose to perch on top of one of the street lamps that bordered the parking lot and the grass field. There he sat, watching as the giant yellow buses pulled into spots beneath him. I knew that within seconds, a huge wave of excited children was about to spread out and envelop the entire park. If Comanche lost sight of me in the crowd of kids running around, there'd be little chance he'd fly back to me. My only option was to request him to fly down to my glove right away, as he was learning to do quite well back at the zoo.

I made the request. Comanche ignored me.

I paused and thought, "Well, maybe he couldn't see my request." Never mind that birds of prey like Comanche can spot small prey animals from high in the sky! I was reacting out of desperation and not relying on the training we shared. So I moved closer to his location and asked again. Nothing. I tried again, and finally realized that the more I moved closer to him, the more he looked away from me, as if he were trying to avoid me. I was training in reverse! I was inadvertently reinforcing lower and lower behavior criteria with every step I took towards him by changing what I was doing as a function of his undesirable behavior.

Finally, my training sense returned and I did what I should have done in the first place -- trust the principles of positive reinforcement training. Instead of rewarding him for continuing to ignore me by shortening the distance between us, I reversed direction and began to walk away from him. It took every ounce of faith in zoomility I had.

Now it was he who had to pay attention to where I was going! Suddenly his eyes locked on me as I moved away from him. Why? For one thing, animals trained with positive reinforcement tend to gravitate to the source of their reinforcement, which for Comanche, was me. So Comanche was watching me carefully, waiting to see what I expected next.

Every free-flight bird I've known has little unique behaviors it displays just before taking flight, much like a swimmer on a starting block. It wasn't long before Comanche started to show me that he was ready to fly down. I turned back toward him and asked one last time for him to fly to me. The kids who saw his return were quite impressed as he swooped from the top of the light and landed gracefully on my outstretched arm.

(In case you're wondering, yes, I reinforced him for coming back.)