By May of the ClickRyder list: Hi, everyone
I just came back from the weekend at a 2-day Kathy Sdao's "Cues and Behavior Chains" seminar, and it was great! It was two 8-hour days going through the tiniest details of adding a behavior, naming it (cues), adduction, chaining, naming chains, and fading cues. My head is so full of new information! This was a weekend geared towards dog people, and we were allowed to bring our own (non-beginner) dogs. My primary interest in training is horses, but I will say it's been very helpful to really delve into training for more than one species. It helps me separate the general rules of training from the species-specific information. And because I have to look at why ___ is working for a horse and not a dog, I'm forced to really think about the psychology of the animal. Sometimes we take for granted a dog (or horse or whatever) will do X if we do Y. Kathy did an excellent job of breaking it down to its simplest form. Once you understand all the little rules, then tackling things such as chains and Premack and keep going signals don't seem to confusing after all. One amazing example of a behavior chain was a video she showed of a parrot. He was cued and would have a matching answer --- a good 30 or so cues in a row before he got his final reinforcement! http://animal.discovery.com/fansites/petstar/videogallery/season3/ep30 9_winner.html or: http://tinyurl.com/b7a7p I'm all excited thinking how I can chain my animals' existing behaviors into a chain. And the converse of this is: now that I understand how chains are formed, I can train the next complicated behavior by breaking it down into tiny little behaviors and then chaining them. Everyone I've talked to seems to think the big behavior will be much cleaner and stronger if you break it into tiny bits and get each bit fluent before trying to combine them. It also answers questions on how to repair damaged complex behaviors. We touched on poisoned cues including the video of the dog taught to come two ways, one with only +R and the other with some +R and a little leash pulls. In the video the difference is amazing in the dog's reaction to the two different cues. I got home and tried to find the studies on it. Does anyone have a link or a scientific paper that demonstrates the dangers of poison cues? In short, if you're serious about understanding training better, not only is the Expo a great but so are clinics the Expo faculty put on throughout the year. Kathy has another clinic coming up this summer on dealing with extremely aggressive dogs. Has anyone done a US clinic focusing on extreme problem horses? I wish there were more +R horse training clinics in general. There is such a vast wealth of information out there. There's so much to learn. The horse world could definitely benefit from this more thoughtful approach. I've got to hand it to this method of training. I hate to call it "clicker training" because it's so much more than just a clicker! It's the first training approach I've found (for dogs or horses) that explains WHY things work. I'm tired of methods that are like "if you yank the lead, the animal will follow". Is that even training if you're just dragging the animal behind you? :-) When I got home, I visited a horse friend. We talked about the mistakes some make with taking shortcuts. We got to talking about the "Colt Starting Challenge". Have you seen this? http://www.roadtothehorse.com/ There is a competition between several big-name trainers once a year. Each trainer is given an unhandled colt and they work the young horse all day. At the end of the day (or whatever short period of time), each has to hop on the horse and show how well broke he is. Someone judges which colt looks to be the best trained and the big-name trainer leaves with bragging rights and cash. The whole idea is silly. It reduces training to: if you can sit on the horse without being bucked off, he's 'broke'. It gives owners the idea if the find the right trainer, their colt can be turned into a nice riding horse in just a few weeks. Isn't this the opposite of good training? I look forward to your thoughts or comments. Sincerely, May Snyder ________________________ Judy http://icehorses.net http://clickryder.com
