I haven't been on here in a long time.
Time to start up my blogging again
Mr. Darcy,
My goals for this week are to advance one behavior, improve another, and teach yet another one.
Jump
I am currently teaching my chinchilla to jump over my arm. Right now he is jumping on top of my arm, but I'm really not too bothered by this, and I am going to let it continue. My arm is about a foot and a half above the ground and he will occasionally jump onto my arm. Not reliably. When I go this high, he throws somewhat of a chinchilla tempertantrum bouncing off the walls and jumping onto my knee which I have interpreted as "Just give me the food". I have never rewarded this behavior. I know that he can jump this high because he has done it many times before and I have observed him jumping this high (and a LOT higher) before. However, I think that I am moving too fast for him, and I need to lower my arm just a bit until he is at 90% offering the behavior before I raise my arm.
I have found that my greatest error in training is trying to move the animal too fast. While I am well aware that small steps yield faster learning, I get too excited.
Spin
Mr. Darcy's spins used to be the most adorable thing on the plannet, fast and enthusiastically given. Now they are lagging, slow and sometimes he even stops halfway in the spin. Two options immediately come to mind to fix the behavior.
1. To reward for better spins
2. Go back to kindergarden and teach it again.
I think that going back to kindergarden is the best option because Mr. Darcy is not very resiliant when it comes to not getting a reward on a frequent basis. This needs to be worked on.
Hop
The other night I asked Mr. Darcy to follow my hand, and he did this really cute hopping motion to it, I would like to put this behavior on cue. I plan to do this by rewarding him with one pellet for following my hand (as I do not wish this behavior to break down) and rewarding him with multiple pellets for any hops, in the hope that the hopping behavior will increase. When he is conisitantly hopping I will put this on cue with 'hop' and and a thumps up hand signal.
