Published: Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Zookeepers offer tips for training your pets
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.
Food
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. Using food, Weiss has trained a Komodo dragon to enter a crate.
Attention
Make sure you’re not accidentally training the animal to do exactly what you don’t want. If your dog jumps up on you when you come home, it’s because your reaction is rewarding. Try turning your back and not making eye contact or speaking until he stops jumping, and the behavior should eventually disappear.
Prevention
To change what zookeepers call stereotypical behaviors, such as barking, “Change the environment that elicits the behavior,” said Lisa Stevens, curator of pandas and primates at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. If the dog’s barking begins when a person or dog walks by, restrict access to the room that faces the street, or don’t leave him in the yard alone.
Instinct
Take a natural action and put a command to it. Laurie Thompson, a biologist at the National Zoo, says that this method is used to train the pandas to open their mouths for dental exams. Keepers simply “capture” the natural behavior by rewarding the panda when it opens its mouth on its own, and associate a word to the action. To train your pup to eliminate on command, choose a command, preferably a phrase you won’t accidentally use in the living room, and repeat it every time the dog relieves himself.
Lifestyle
Make sure that your pet’s lifestyle allows him to exercise his natural abilities. A dog needs exercise and chances to use his brain. Both pandas and dogs enjoy the many types of puzzle feeders that are now available. Give your dog enough chances to be a dog, and he’ll get into less trouble.
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.
Food
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. Using food, Weiss has trained a Komodo dragon to enter a crate.
Attention
Make sure you’re not accidentally training the animal to do exactly what you don’t want. If your dog jumps up on you when you come home, it’s because your reaction is rewarding. Try turning your back and not making eye contact or speaking until he stops jumping, and the behavior should eventually disappear.
Prevention
To change what zookeepers call stereotypical behaviors, such as barking, “Change the environment that elicits the behavior,” said Lisa Stevens, curator of pandas and primates at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. If the dog’s barking begins when a person or dog walks by, restrict access to the room that faces the street, or don’t leave him in the yard alone.
Instinct
Take a natural action and put a command to it. Laurie Thompson, a biologist at the National Zoo, says that this method is used to train the pandas to open their mouths for dental exams. Keepers simply “capture” the natural behavior by rewarding the panda when it opens its mouth on its own, and associate a word to the action. To train your pup to eliminate on command, choose a command, preferably a phrase you won’t accidentally use in the living room, and repeat it every time the dog relieves himself.
Lifestyle
Make sure that your pet’s lifestyle allows him to exercise his natural abilities. A dog needs exercise and chances to use his brain. Both pandas and dogs enjoy the many types of puzzle feeders that are now available. Give your dog enough chances to be a dog, and he’ll get into less trouble.
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