Progress

Mr. Darcy is making progress!!

Slowing down on raising the criteron for jumping has made wonderful progress, he is now reliably jumping onto my arm at the height we were at before without his chinchilla tantrums.

For the behavior for hopping I have found that the height I hold my hand is very important to whether he hops or simply follows my hand. There has been some confusion as to whether he is supposed to do hop or jump. I do not reward him when doing jump when I want him to hop. But I can understand his confusion because for both I am holding my arm out and the only difference is one has an open hand over his head (hop) and the other has a closed hand across his body. By keeping my arm closer to my body I hope to eliminate this problem.

His turns are back to where they were before.

Mr. Darcy has recently developed a new behavior I wish to discourage which is he jumps onto my lap to beg for food. The only behavior that I can do while he is on my lap is touch, furthermore he bites at my hand to get to the food so this new behavior is rather annoying. I have never rewarded him for this, and I am not going to. Before I would give him a light nudge to get him off my lap, but then he just hops right back on. Or I would get him off by asking him to touch my hand. So, instead, I am going to click and reward for being right in front of me where I want him to be, and ignore when he is on my lap. When he gets off my lap, I am going to click and reward for getting off, and click and reward again for staying off before he can get onto my lap again, and then go into another behaivor.

Asking for other behaviors seems to be a really strong motivator for him, so by asking him to touch my hand when he was on my lap, I might have been accidently reinforcing the behavior.

Nay