A rabbit's proper target-stick has got to be easily visible to the rabbit. I still haven't done the research on rabbit vision that I had hoped to today. Well, I guess that's my next chore. But I did buy styrofoam balls and little sticks from Michaeil's, the craft store, while I was in town in Frederick this morning. It's quite simple to construct a target stick out of these materials: just make the dowel the length you want and then press the ball onto it. I suppose if I got really fancy I could even glue it into place. I saw another couple of trainers working with sticks that looked like they had pingpong balls on them. If those were pingpong balls, I don't know how they got the glue to stick. But maybe they were just styrofoam balls like mine. I don't know. Anyway, those were white, and the rabbits didn't seem to have any problem seeing them. I think I might want to try painting mine different colors, just to see which color they respond to best.(And maybe it will turn out that each has her favorite color!)
The intial reception has been good. Jemimah in particular seemed to understand that I wanted to do the same thing with this larger target stick that I wanted to do with the smaller pointer stick. She did the abstract generalization in no time. . .
I used to think that my rabbits were really food motivated, but I see that they also like loving attention and that their appetities for treats really isn't that great, especially in the warmer weather of summer. I am trying to wean them off of the Viitakraft yoghurt berry and carrot-flavored drops, because they are very sweet and rich, . A rabbit really should have no more than 1-3 of them per day. I need to have treats where my rabbits can have more than that per day, or we will not make much progress with training. I hope that they will soon like to eat the papaya and banana chips I bought. the chips I have placed in their food so they get used to them, and they do seem to be willing to take them after performing a "trick" (though "tricks" at this point are very limited -- just touching nose to stick, running on harness and going over the jump).
