ANIMAL TRAINING DIARY - SHEDDS AQUARIUM – Part 2
Goosebumps, The rest of my Shedd experience was AMAZING!!!!
In my last blog I talked about some of the fantastic training that was taking place at the aquarium. During the rest of the course I got to see and learn more about these.
Imagine teaching one dolphin to jump 6 foot out of the water, now think about teaching three dolphins to do this all together (at the same time) and if that wasn’t enough now consider how you would teach these dolphins to do the above in addition to teaching them all to faced one direction (the audience) and to always remain a certain distance from any physical barrier so that they would not injure themselves.
Mind-boggling???
What was even more inspiring and wonderful was to watch and understand the training methods & philosophies that the aquarium takes to animal training and care. I get goosebumps just thinking about it!
Some concepts & thoughts that I think applies well to us trainers and pet owners working with dogs are:
Training:
When you think of training, what does it mean to you? How would your opinions and thoughts differ if you thought of dog training as teaching instead?
We can think of ourselves as teachers, working with students that we are teaching to “live in an environment that we have created for them”. For example: living in human society and households (because lets not forget that they don’t normally live in houses and around humans in the way we expect them to in our society! ) They don’t have genes that program them to do this naturally, we have to teach them!!! This could also be the same for any dog sport we may compete in. We set rules and the environment in which we want the dog to work, we must therefore teach the dog the rules to in order to compete and do well in a sport. HOWEVER I feel here we have to be careful and not forget the next point:
Training Philosophy:
Regardless of how we interact with animals, (whether you are training a service dog, are a pet owner, training for a dog sport such as agility etc), we as humans make the choices but the dogs are often conscripted (have no choice in the matter)! In my opinion, regardless of our involvement our primary role and concern should be the individual animal’s physical and mental health and welfare.
Ken discussed how even though an establishment may be there to educate, entertain, to promote conservation and research among many other thing; in his opinion the trainers (or people working with the animals) primary goal is to meet the animals needs and provide the best care possible at the individual animals level. Everything else is secondary to this!!!
Isn’t this why we do the job we do after all?
The way the animals were trained at Shedd reflected this; the philosophy was applied when they interacted with the animals. The animals always had choices, there was no force, no one was shouting or hitting the animals, and no one starved the animal in the name of training! If the animal decided that for whatever reason s/he did not want to participate in a training session that day their daily diet wasn’t denied to them, and why should it be?
After all how much training do we actually do with the animal that it NEEDS to know? If our dogs won’t hold a dumbbell in their mouth, what gives us the right to add some form of pain or aversive to make them hold it? Lets not forget that it’s not the dog that is desperate to do a dumbbell retrieve or win that competition! I am not suggesting that we shouldn’t do sports with our dogs, on the contrary! I am not suggesting that we don’t do a sport with our dogs because its something we want to do; we can realise that the animal often does not get to choose and we should remember this when selecting training methods to teach them what we want from them so that we can win those competitions or shows.
Wow! Lots to think about and I haven’t even told you most of the really really exciting aspects to my trip, but I better stop now other wise it will become a book instead of a blog.
The course was fantastic! I would highly recommend Ken’s course to any trainers wanting to further their knowledge and experience in the animal training field!!! Worth every single penny!
Finally thanks to the friends I made during the trip for the fun, the great conversations and most importantly for discovering that awesome ice cream shop :-)))
