Training

"At the Louisville Zoo, it's not art for art's sake; it's for the sake of the animals -- and, as often as not, their human keepers too.....Keepers bond with the animals -- even through something as abstract as art -- through operant conditioning, 'a training that really is a form of communicating with the animals,' said Diana DeVaughn, the zoo's media/promotions coordinator. 'It builds their trust' by forming an association between a behavior and a positive consequence."

This story on dog aggression from the Gilroy Dispatch is a great little piece on how aggression can be managed with positive reinforcement and clicker training, a topic that's of great interest to us here at KPCT. Emma Parsons, KPCT's Training Director, wrote Click to Calm: Healing the Aggressive Dog and gives Click to Calm seminars around the country. It's nice to see this idea that aggressive dogs don't need to be choked into submission, that there are positive ways to deal with this behavior, spreading in the press.