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On My Mind: It's Not What You Do. It's How You Do It.

By Karen Pryor on 05/18/2010

It’s a sunny spring afternoon in New England at the annual meeting of a group of animal behaviorists. I’m sitting on a folding chair alongside a small corral, watching some demonstrations with horses. My friend Tim Sullivan, curator of behavioral husbandry at the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago, is sitting on my left.

We’re watching a demonstration of clicker training. A calm old police horse is led into the corral and turned loose. The trainer stands on our side of the fence. She has a clicker, a bucket of feed, and a huge target stick that looks like a toilet plunger, with a big padded lump on one end.

Podcast: The Phoebe Chronicles V: Learning amid Skateboards

By Gale Pryor on 05/01/2010

In this classic Podcast written and read by Gale Pryor, the subject of training a dog admist the chaos of everyday family life is addressed. Listen to hear how Gale learns how to train an energetic border collie in a household of three energetic boys. You can follow along and read the original article here.

On My Mind: Paying Kids to Learn

By Karen Pryor on 04/26/2010

Last week TIME magazine ran a cover story about paying kids cash money to get better grades.

The objections to cash ‘rewards’ for schooling have been around for a long time and can lead to tremendous political uproar. There are moral objections—children should do what’s expected of them without reward. There are philosophical, theoretical, religious, and of course financial objections.

Well, this fellow at Harvard, economist Roland Fryer Jr., decided the first thing to do was to find out if paying kids to do better in school actually worked or not. Forget all the existing studies and opinions. Forget those specific schools where reinforcers, large and small, are built into the system. According to TIME, Dr. Fryer “did something education researchers almost never do: he ran a randomized experiment.” (Just think about THAT for a minute. They opine stuff and put it into the schools and they don’t TEST it?)

Podcast: Why I Love Freestyle

By Michele Pouliot on 04/01/2010

Enjoy listening to world freestyle champion Michele Pouliot as she talks about how this wonderful sport combines training and teamwork to bring out the wonderful relationship between owner and do

Building Behaviors at the Niabi Zoo: Part Two

By Laura Monaco Torelli on 03/01/2010

Welcome back to Building Behaviors at the Niabi Zoo, Part Two!

Teaching cooperative husbandry behaviors is critical to excellent animal care. The many benefits of trainer patience, a shaping plan, excellent observation skills, clicker mechanics, and the ability to modify training sessions based on the animals’ needs can be seen in this the video just below of a cotton-top tamarin. In the video, the 14.4-ounce female tamarin calmly follows the target onto the scale for voluntary weights. Even as the scale moves slightly, she remains calm and fluent.