Hay Net, Bag, Feeder Review

Hay pillows in front.
Busy Horse feeders in rear

This year I'm trying some new hay pillows. It's not because I'm unhappy with the Busy Horse hay feeders I have. Quite the opposite. I am really impressed with the Busy Grande regular feeders that I have had for many years. In the winter they get almost daily use and they are holding up beautifully. I have three of the Busy Grande hay feeders which are big enough to stuff two or three good sized flakes of hay into and have holes that are about 2 1/4" square. I also have one of the Busy Grande Slow Feeders. They hold the same amount but the holes are only 1 3/4" square. The horses definitely prefer the bigger holes, and choose those bags over the other, such that I have designed a system as to where I put the one with the smaller holes. 

the Slow on the left and the Regular on the right

For the past several years, I've had four places that I can hang the bags. Originally, my husband put four posts in for me but Kizzy snapped one right in half rubbing on it the year she got Sweet Itch so badly. And then we got the street sweeper for itching on and it was convenient to slide that down over another post. Which left me with two posts. The other two heavy duty screw eyes are in the shed attached to the barn. 

The shed is only two sided, and if the wind/snow/yuck comes out of the south, the warmest driest spot is on the western side of the shed. So that is where I put the bag with the smallest holes. My reasoning: whoever has to struggle with that bag, at least is in a cozy spot to do so. Whoever is out in the wind and the snow, can at least eat more in less time.

Stowaway got the slow one in the shed here. You can see how he works at it.

Let me back up a little as to why I use hay bags at all. I do believe that horses should do a lot of eating off the ground. Studies have shown that their nasal passages drain well that way and it helps prevent respiratory problems. However, the studies I am aware of were done ages ago and compared eating off the ground to eating out of hay racks or bags mounted high on the walls of their stalls. 

One of the reasons I chose the Busy Horse bags are because they have no strings to get

The heavy duty snaps I use...double ended ones just broke.

tangled in horse legs. They have two rings in the top which I use heavy duty snaps to attach to heavy duty screw eyes in posts or walls. My horses are all barefoot and so with no strings and no shoes, I am comfortable hanging these bags low enough so that the bottoms are at ground level once the snow comes. The one in the video above is higher, but I'm ok with that since the horses rotate from one to another. They spend some time with their heads at all heights. Horses are also browsers of leaves and brush, so eating at higher heights is not completely unnatural. If I only had one horse and one hay bag that horse ate all her meals out of, I'd be more concerned about the neck issues that some people worry about.

So why not just feed on the ground? I do, in the morning, when the weather allows. As long as it's not too windy, I spread one bale of hay out in the large field before I turn them out each morning. I spread the sections far apart so they have to walk a lot to get from one to another. However, there are some mornings that it is so windy that the hay blows away before it hits the ground, to say nothing of before the horses can clean it up. I don't like using good hay to mulch the next field over while my horses go hungry. So the hay bags keep the hay in place long enough for them to consume it!

It also keeps the horses busy longer. This morning I put a bale out in the field and they had finished it before I left the barn an hour and a half later. I then put another bale in the 4 hay bags and 2 hay pillows. Four hours later they are still picking at those: much better for the equine digestive system.

Finally, it's nice for my schedule to be able to fill the bags at morning chores, and then just hang them, not far from the barn, whenever I get a chance to during the day. It's much easier than putting another bale on the sled and having to hike out to the field while the hungry and bored horses are trying to pull hay off it. They can exhibit self control long enough for me to get a bag hung up. 

Note: Back when Mariah was here, she was big enough and clever enough that she'd stuff her nose down into the bag from the top, eliminating the "slow" from the equation. It was quite tedious, but I had to weave them closed with bale string each time to prevent her from doing that. 

And that brings me back to the hay pillows. They are designed to be thrown right on the ground which is more like grazing. I think I initially got them for the ponies when they are in their own round pen. I have other nets I hang for them but I didn't like doing it all the time. With no posts in their pen, I could just fill the pillows and throw them in. 

When they first arrived, I was disappointed. I thought there was no way that the zippers which held them closed would hold up to the job. In addition, the reality of the filth they could be in on the ground was disheartening. No matter how clean the pen was when I put them in, by the end of the day, there would be manure at the very least for them to be dragged through. If the ground was at all muddy, the bags would be too and if they got flipped over, yuck. A time or two they were so gross at the end of the day that I needed to hose them down and hang them to dry before I could use them again. They were hard to find, being brown, they were camouflaged into the brown muck. Then when freezing weather came, they froze into nasty smelly things so I quit using them. 

Hay Pillow zippers encased in snow

But when winter came, I decided to try again. And I'm amazed how well they are working. The ground is clean and snow covered (we get fresh snow quite regularly) so they stay clean. The zippers continue to work even when full of snow at single digit temps when being tugged on by my gloved fingers. They are frozen into shape when I bring them in at night, but 12 hours hanging in the wash stall with the horses warming the space thaws them enough that while they are still snowy and a little stiff, I can open them and re-stuff them the next morning. 

One of the greatest things about them is how easy they are to throw over a fence, without losing half of it to the wind! Admittedly, they are not used every day, and we are still in December (one more day!) of the first winter. So I cannot say that they will last as long as the others. The ones I got don't hold as much and they were close to the same price. But they do give me options so we'll see how they hold up. The horses do paw at them and flip them around a lot...part of the fun. 

This fall my husband put four new posts out in the field for me for those mornings when it's really windy AND I won't be home at noon. I've ordered more of the Busy Horse Grandes so I will be able to hang eight out in the morning which should keep everyone busy for the day!

12 Days of Christmas

In my recent blog for the dog training part of my business,  

swollen eye

(https://dogchapter.wordpress.com/2016/12/10/indoor-training/) I linked to a 12 Days of Christmas training series by Donna Hill. I also mentioned that working on husbandry skills is a great winter project. Since then I have been keeping a list of skills to see if I could come up with twelve for my own 12 days of Christmas project. 
Here is my list:

1. deworming
2. foot handling for simple picking as well as for trimming
3. intramuscular injections
4. intravenous injections or draws
5. eye care
6. ear handling
7. leg palpation
8. leg manipulation
9. TPR (taking temperature, pulse and respiration)
10. bandaging or applying boots
11. tooth care
12. sheath and udder care

wearing boots (NOT put on correctly)

I'll focus on each one of these per day, as both a review of how our skills are, and looking for ways to improve them. Each one can be incorporated into a daily grooming session or chore time.

As always, it's important to work on these before you need them. An injured horse does not need added stress of treatment and handling she has never received before. A professional (chiropractor, vet, hoof trimmer) does not need the added stress of working on a horse who is not familiar with what is being done!

Bitless? My Thoughts on the Wide Range of What Is Acceptable to Different Trainers

All one has to do is pick up a hefty tack shop catalog to see the enormous variety of equipment available for working with horses. Or visit the website. Some of the equipment looks like medieval torture devices to me. But some of the equipment I use, like a plain snaffle bit, apparently looks like a torture device to others. 

"Pressure" is a loaded word in horse training circles. There are those who say it's the most natural way to train horses (a la "Natural Horsemanship"). There are others, like myself, who have found that using Positive Reinforcement instead of escalating pressure to train is a highly effective method which is also more humane. But the continuum continues. There are those who think that what I consider a "contact" cue is really pressure. They want to hang me by my toenails, even though I teach contact cues with positive reinforcement, rather than escalating pressure (and the irony of the highly aversive words and deeds these individuals bestow on fellow humans does not escape me).

Pressure is not just physical. As soon as an animal perceives your presence, there is pressure. And pressure can be a pull as well as a push; just ask anyone who has livestock..."pressure" will pull animals to a barn, to grass, up a hill, to a larger group, etc. 

So where do each of us draw our lines as to what is acceptable and what is not? 

If we start with truly wild horses, those who have never seen people (wow, is that even possible today?), then they experience pressure from humans miles away. Horses are horizon scanners; just ask mine. A person appearing in the distance is noticed. The horse is already considering its flight options. So, for those who don't want ANY AVERSIVES used in training, I would propose you leave them wild. Because your presence is initially aversive. 

Maybe you say I'm talking nonsense when I start with wild horses. So start with a newborn foal from a very domesticated line of horses. I posit that your first appearance will be aversive to that foal. Is that reason not to enter the stall? How are you going to train that foal if you don't get that foal accustomed to your presence? You may do it carefully, gently, with scratches (oh, but don't they twitch at that first touch of a human hand) on the chest and withers. But you have applied your hand to that foal, or mustang, or any other equine. That's contact. 

Where does contact cross the line to pressure? Is it a pounds per square inch measurement? Does it depend on the body part? Is a massage aversive? The answer is, as we so often say, "it depends". The type of deep tissue massage my husband likes makes me miserable. Everyone has different sensitivities. So we need to assess the individual at hand. 

Is pressure defined as aversive if the horse moves away from it? How do these folks who claim not to use pressure ever ask a horse to step away from them? I train a horse, using positive reinforcement, to step away by reinforcing the slightest movement away from my hand. Yes, if I can detect the movement away, I click and reinforce. Animals move. Even when they look like they are still, they move slightly, shifting weight. I can capture that little move when it happens away from me, and I can click and reinforce and my educated learners will repeat that. They will do it again, and I can shape more or less movement. So yes, my horses move away when I put up a hand in a certain way, but it is not because I have used escalating pressure (escalating pressure would be if I put my hand on the horse and intentionally added more and more pounds to my pressure until I got a reaction. Or if I got louder with my voice until I got a reaction. Or I kept kicking or pulling until I got a reaction).

So, in my life, I now have a horse who will move away from me on the cue of my using my hand in a certain way. I trained it using positive reinforcement, not escalating pressure. But because the horse moves away from it, do others consider it aversive? I don't think that assessment can be made unless you know how it was trained. 

How would we put any equipment on a horse if we never used contact/pressure? I would say the ethology of the horse does not include wearing a halter, or a blanket, or a cordeo (neck rope). Therefore, if we put any of these things on a horse, we are applying something inherently aversive. When I do this, I initially click and reinforce for any interest (looking at, sniffing, touching) the object. Once they make voluntary physical contact with the object, I can progress to touching them with it, gradually, and with reinforcement for every approximation along the way. The formerly aversive object is no longer something they move away from. In time, I can help them become comfortable with that object. Why would I do that? Because I feel that there are times when halters and blankets help keep horses safe and comfortable.

And what about riding a horse? Well if we look at the painting below and read a little about equine predators, it isn't too big a stretch to know that the "natural" horse might consider other creatures on his back to be quite aversive.

So we train. There are many, many, many steps I take to help the horse be comfortable with having first my hand, then a brush, then a pad, then a blanket, then a saddle on her back before I stand above her on a mounting block and lean over, lean on, put a leg over, rest on and finally sit on a horse. 

If one doesn't believe in desensitizing or counter conditioning a horse to inherently aversive stimuli, how does one ever get to the point of riding a horse? 

Note! Desensitization as I refer to it means working under threshold; one exposes a horse to potentially aversive stimuli in an incremental progression so they are not stressed. "Sacking out" in a traditional method is not desensitization; it's called flooding. 

Counter conditioning is when you take a stimulus which was formerly aversive and change the response to a pleasant one. An example would be the halter which was initially aversive to a young foal can be conditioned to be a sign of an enjoyable training session with treats. (some say that the item must formerly have been conditioned to be aversive. I'm not clear on that.)

And this brings us to cordeos vs. bridles vs. bits.  If we put a rope around a horse's neck and a halter on her head, why not put a bridle on her head? I am going to assume we all know the proper fit for said pieces of equipment, including the sensitive areas (where the nerves run) of the face and that we are not using nosebands to tie the mouth shut, etc. I'm also going to assume that we all know that some of the bitless bridles are much, much harsher than a snaffle bit. Poll pressure and nose pressure can be quite aversive to horses and many of the bitless bridles are designed to exert a lot of pressure on these areas with very little pressure applied to the reins. Novices beware. I've also heard that some of the pretty little neck ropes include barbs. Nuff said. Looks can be deceiving. Oh and that a properly fitted bit hangs in the horses mouth, not resting on the bars. It should not interfere with chewing or physiology of the teeth, bars and tongue. 

If the above are true, can we not help a horse be as comfortable with a bit as with a blanket? If we train the contact cue from a bit/rein combination with positive reinforcement, can it not be an effective and kind way to communicate with the horse? A bit offers subtlety of communication that can be difficult to achieve with a loose fitting halter or bitless bridle. Loose fitting means it can move around. That can be more aversive to a horse than a securely fitted bridle which stays out of eyes and minimizes chafing from the movement. 

I think the final question which remains is why? Why do we use any of this? Why do we have a domesticated horse (or 2 or 6) in our lives? Why do we want to train them at all as opposed to having pasture pets? Why on earth do we want to sit on their backs?

In the Introduction to Animal Training, by Ken Ramirez, he states:

As teachers or trainers, we must know why we are training...important reasons for training are those that directly benefit the animal being trained. 

He lists the primary reasons for training an animal are to benefit its physical exercise, mental stimulation, and cooperative behavior (husbandry skills to keep the animal healthy). I think if we start there, we can also end there. 

Jackpots and High Value Reinforcers: Riding the Swing of the Pendulum

When I first started clicker training over 15 years ago, jackpots were somewhat popular. Examples of jackpots were a larger number of treats or a special treat. Since my standard treat was 2 hay stretcher pellets, the jackpots I used were a full handful of pellets, a couple peppermint horse treats or a human peppermint candy. My horses really like the peppermint horse treats and loved the candy. Sometimes I also used cut up carrots or apples, but I liked being able to keep the peppermints on hand when the carrots and apples didn’t keep well in my pocket. 

The way I understood their use was that when the horse offered extra effort, you could give a jackpot to communicate that was a really good try. Over time, however, jackpots fell out of favor. A study done with dogs and conducted by Dr. Jesus Rosales Ruiz and his grad students indicated that jackpots interrupted the flow of training, thereby actually slowing training, rather than aiding it. I could understand how this could be, as my horses savored the peppermints to say nothing of the time it took me to unwrap the candies. I felt badly fading them out at first, but over time, found that my horses worked just fine for the hay stretcher pellets alone. I stopped using the peppermints...well, except for one particular learner on which they continue to be very effective, that being my husband.

Several years later, I took Susan Garrett’s Recallers course for dogs. I did the course both with a horse and dogs. Susan

speedy recalls: a result of high value reinforcers and slow progression

stresses knowing what your dogs consider to be high value reinforcers and using them carefully, but definitely using them. So back I went into experimentation mode. Susan’s course helped me understand a different way of using them. Rather than using them to point out good effort in shaping, she used higher value treats as a balance to distractions. The world is a fascinating place to dogs and in order to gain and keep the dog’s attention, we used cheese, hot dogs, tuna fudge and other delectable items to reinforce the dog for doing what we asked, as opposed to sniffing in the grass or leaving to say hi to the neighbor.

This is when I developed my own foundational concept that while for dogs, distractions are usually things they want to get TO; for horses, distractions are usually things they want to get AWAY FROM. Yes, this is a generalization; dogs have fears and horses have interests. Professional dog trainers certainly see our share of reactive dogs in one end of the spectrum or another. Probably ponies are most notorious for being distracted by wanting to get TO something (GRASS!). But as a whole, horses’ problems with distractability include the wind, the leaf blowing, the scary plastic bag: all things which may result in spooking and leaving the premises. This was the reason, I thought, that high value treats won’t work for horses’ distractions. If I want to work with my dog’s distraction, all I have to do is become more interesting than the distraction. But for a horse, it doesn’t matter how good a treat I have. If that horse is afraid, he’s not going to be dissuaded by something tasty. I love chocolate and you can certainly use it to train me, and you can use it to reinforce me for staying away from the computer. But if I think I’m about to be chased by a bear, you aren’t going to get me to stand around just because you’ve got chocolate. (note: so instead of using high value reinforcers, one needs to be more skilled at breaking things down, reading the horse's emotional responses, and becoming more trustworthy than the "distraction" is scary)

So I continued to use high value reinforcers for dogs, but not for horses. 

This brings me to the present when I am starting to hear criticism of using high value treats for distracted dogs and I am considering using high value treats with horses again. 

The criticism I hear in the dog world, and so far it’s been second hand, sounds like what I would call inappropriate use because people are using them in situations that are more horse-like! If you have a reactive dog, and a strong stimulus is present, pulling out liverwurst and waving it in front of your dog’s nose to keep his attention is not addressing the problem of reactivity. Maybe your dog responds and maybe he doesn’t but in my view, the issue isn’t being properly addressed. It’s as if you were using peppermints and apples to get a horse past something scary. It might work, but unless it was a very minor stimulus, you likely haven’t changed the way the animal feels and you may need to do it each time to get that horse past the scary thing.

The way I use high value treats with dogs is to begin training where the dog can be successful and I use the lowest value treat available which the dog will respond to. This varies with the individual. Some dogs, represented as “not food motivated”, can only be enticed with the finest of cheeses at first. But as Ken Ramirez says, “if your dog isn’t food motivated, then he’s dead!”. In time, by building a relationship and understanding, those fussy individuals can be trained with plain kibble. 

But once behaviors such as attention, loose leash walking and sits, for example, have been taught in a quiet home environment, we need to slowly introduce distractions. That’s when I pull out a higher value reinforcer. Following Susan Garrett’s guidelines, I rank the distractions for the dog in addition to ranking food (and activity!) reinforcers. Then I balance them. For one dog, a tennis ball on the floor might cause mayhem, so I wouldn’t use that as an initial distraction. For other dogs that ball might be interesting but not highly distracting. If they showed interest in it by looking at it, and then looking at me, I’d reinforce with some cheese. In my mind, the dog says, “ooh, she’s much more interesting than that silly ball”, and we continue to work together. Then I transition back to kibble, even in the presence of the ball. And I find a slightly more distracting item, such as someone slowly rolling the ball back and forth as we walk by. Movement is always more interesting so the dog might look at the rolling ball, but then remember how interesting I am so look at me and stay close on the leash. Out comes the cheese again. Through this slow and steady progress up to more and more distracting things, I teach the dog that I am ALWAYS more interesting than whatever else he might see. Through this process, the dog actually becomes desensitized to distractions in his environment. Personally, I'm not a fan of a dog who stares at me obsessively, but checking in with me and being able to respond to simple requests in the presence of distractions is a goal. Only when the dog is this responsive, even working with kibble, is he ready for me to raise the bar again, when I pull out something special to maintain my special status. 

So why would I ever need anything even higher value? Well, life and the environment can only be controlled to a certain point. Once we step outside of the home environment, we are subject to unplanned distractions. I want to have a really, really good base before I risk outings with potential for the unexpected. When that Rottweiler comes around the corner unexpectedly and barks, or when the UPS man suddenly comes screaming in the driveway, or when that rabbit streaks across the road in front of us, those are times I want something incredibly valuable on me so I can reinforce good responses. I’m not using them to prevent my dog from looking. I’m using them because our incredible history has allowed the dog to respond to me even in the face of a barking Rottweiler, a UPS truck or a bunny and I want to have something that demonstrates how amazing that response was! 

Using high value reinforcers in this way is not interrupting a shaping session and it’s not using the food to distract the dog from something. The way I see it, it’s simply reinforcing behavior I want to see repeated and using a reinforcer worthy of the effort of the behavior. 

So, back to horses, why would I start using high value reinforcers again with horses? Part of my thinking comes from my experiences at NEI (see here for more on that), and partly from one memorable experience with an equine and a high value reinforcer.

When we were at NEI, our instructors stressed the importance of being aware of where the animal was when we reinforced. Now both dog and horse trainers know how to feed for position and to set up for the next rep. But the birds were excellent trainers on more careful thought of this...of being aware of where the history of reinforcement was delivered. If you reinforced a bird on a small board “station” on a perch for just one session, that bird would go directly to that station the next time he was out. If that’s what you want from that bird, that’s great, but if you want flexibility in the behaviors, it’s not so great to have him glued to that station. 

An example of this was one of my training sessions with the corvid. I was to train him to fly from one perch at the front of the cage (I’ll call this perch A), to another perch at the back of the cage (perch B). Through the use of prompting, it was pretty easy to get the bird to fly to that perch and put it on cue. But one time I marked his landing on B, and in bird speed, he hopped immediately back to perch A and then to a third perch which was right in front of me...and I fed him there. Big mistake. Even though I had marked the landing on perch B, the next several times I prompted him to perch B, he instead flew to the perch where I had fed him...once.

Now I do think there were some other factors, namely that the trainers at NEI rarely used verbal markers. Because the birds are almost always looking at them when they train (as opposed to horses and dogs when we want them going away from us or not looking at us at times), the NEI trainers simply feed when the bird does the correct behavior. So even though we conditioned the word “good!” in our early training with the birds, I don’t think it had the power that a click has on my dogs and horses. If my animals hear a click, you can be sure they will repeat that behavior, regardless of where I fed for it . That’s why I can click for a dog sitting and then toss the treat to reset. The dog will return to me to sit (which was where I clicked), not go sit where the food was tossed. 

But in other situations, it does make a difference. Feeding where the perfect horse would be is an example. If we click when the horse is in the correct position next to us, but then feed close to our bodies, that horse’s head is going to be more likely to be too close next time. Yes, it may be what happens between the click and the feeding, but that’s what happened with the bird as well and it affected his future behavior, not just his treat taking behavior. 

In any case, this has made me more aware of what places I may be building up a history of reinforcement for. The story it made me think of was when I first taught Rumer to load into a trailer. At the time, I was still using peppermints as jackpots. In this case, she had never seen the trailer before but had a good history of being reinforced for approaching and touching items which might at first have seemed scary. 

Rumer's comfort with the trailer is maintained by careful driving and not trucking her before she was ready

I used hay stretcher pellets for reinforcing each step up the ramp, allowing her to back off when she wanted. But the next time in, she didn’t get treats at the bottom of the ramp, only when she had progressed beyond the previous attempts. I was building a history of more reinforcement inside. When she got all the way into the trailer, I pulled out a peppermint candy and gave it to her. There was no interruption of shaping; she was where I wanted her to be. Then I asked her to back off (there were many steps through this process which I’m glossing over) and we walked around in a little circle and approached the ramp again. Well that little pony just about dragged me onto the trailer. It was as if she was saying “The good treats are inside!”. All the way in she went, and she did indeed, get a peppermint candy once inside. 

So in that case, it was pretty obvious that place equaled high value reinforcer, and that in time, the value of the reinforcer could transfer so that it was a high value place. Now obviously, just getting in the trailer is only the very first step. She still needed to learn about the butt bar, the ramp, the trailer moving, longer trips, etc. But her enthusiasm of going all the way inside has stuck with me and seems to be a good reason to consider what and where we are giving treats.

Clicker Expo Cincinnati 2016 (part 2)

As I mentioned in my previous post, much of  my time at Clicker Expo was spent on talks which weren't directly about training but there were a few! The first was "The Sound of Silence: Accessing the Power of a Withheld Click" with Michele Pouliot. 

I like the term withheld click because it describes a moment when you could have clicked but didn't. We aren't talking about missed clicks here, but when one intentionally chooses not to click. In the talk she discussed guidelines for how to do this effectively and what to watch out for. 

Various reasons people withhold a click include shaping successive approximations, extinction, differential reinforcement, inducing resurgence and others. Using it inappropriately or without developed skill can certainly lead to problems. 

Withholding a click can lead to frustration if we don't, at the same time, set it up so that the animal makes a good guess as to what we're looking for in more behavior. It can also lead to an animal giving up because nothing seems to be working or they just can't get it right. More intense individuals may start throwing other behaviors at you in an attempt to get you to click something. For these reasons, we need to think carefully about how we are going to do this.

A key aspect to when you can withhold is the history of that behavior. If there is too little history, you have nothing to fall back on if the animal doesn’t understand. If you have spent a lot of time clicking for a behavior, then the animal thinks that behavior is good just as it is and also won’t understand if you stop clicking for it. Michele mentioned that handlers tend to fall into either side of this challenge: raising the criteria too fast, or staying at the same criteria too long. I know which I do and when!

She did say that if you use a well conceived training plan initially, and you want to change an established behavior, you can go back to an earlier stage and reestablish a history of clicks before withholding to ask for variety. 

One thing I see people do fairly frequently is to build duration into a behavior, and then if the behavior falls apart for some reason (possibly due to poor information during the shaping process), they try withholding a click, but the animal simply thinks it’s about duration so they don’t offer any changes. This leads to frustration on the parts of both learner and trainer.

In addition to the animal being sufficiently prepared to benefit from withholding, the trainer must have a plan. She listed four pieces. The first is anticipation of what the change will be (you should have your training session and environment set up so that you are pretty sure that your learner will offer what you want, rather than something in the other direction). You must then be prepared to click that! If you don’t really know what your learner will offer, it’s hard to catch the right effort that first time. You must also be ready to to back to clicking previous criteria if things start to go awry or else your moment of silence will extend into more than a moment and the accompanying frustration or giving up. And finally, know yourself. Is your tendency to ask for too much too soon? Or is it to allow the animal to get stuck by not inviting variety?

Something else she mentioned which I feel requires time for a trainer to develop is how to assess the animal’s response to withheld click. She said there can be “thinking moments” and she looks for the animal to remain engaged mentally, even if physically still. So if you withhold a click and your animal then looks off into the distance or frantically starts trying things, those aren't thinking moments. Then when your animal does offer something and you click it, does he offer that new variety again and does he offer it quickly? If so, he probably made a conscious decision about what to do and understood the new click. If not, it may have been a random movement and the click not understood by the animal. 

Clicker Expo 2016 (Cincinnati)

my own neckpiece for the weekend included several species!

Clicker Expo can be many things to many people. Billed as the world's most innovative training conference, this year included training topics from many species. The main focus of the event is dog training, and dogs are the sole specie one is allowed to actually bring to the event. This year, for the first time, there was also a track devoted strictly to horse training. For horse people among us, this was long awaited and well attended. 
The opening talk by Ken Ramirez was about training butterflies, of all things. Watch the BBC for upcoming video of this amazing project.

Several of the talks which drew me in this year were actually directed at working with people: everything from Sustaining a Competitive Advantage in business (given by Aaron Clayton, president of Karen Pryor Clicker Training) to Critical Client Conversation Skills (given by the always entertaining and enlightening Dr. Susan Friedman of Behavior Works). I also attended one of several TAGteach presentations by Theresa McKeon on how to teach our human learners using the same basic principals we use teaching our animal learners.  Yet another human based talk I attended was "The Future is Now: Creating Powerful Trainer/Vet Client Teams" by Debbie Martin. All these just go to show that we can't help our animal learners without including the people associated with them.

Clicker Expo also advertises "training skills with cutting edge science" and if you want science, talks by Dr. Jesús Rosales Ruiz are the ones to attend! In the past, his talks have made my head hurt. He has a knack for putting behavior into algebraic equations and I struggled to keep up. This year I felt I was able to keep up with the entire talk, even when attending two of his back to back. "The Quadrant Quandary: Clarity and Perspective on an Icon" was the name of the first. In this talk he shared history of how the terms punishment and reinforcement, both positive and negative, came about. He spoke to whether these terms were defined in relation to process, procedure or stimuli. Looking up process vs procedure took me right down a rabbit hole but I think the point he was trying to make is that we need to be careful when we talk about the trainer "adding" or "removing" something compared to the behavior of the animal causing something to be added or removed. Additionally the notion that something is labeled as "aversive" or "appetitive" is completely dependent on multiple variables such as the learner, the environment, and the history. A longe whip might have an aversive effect on one individual and appetitive on another (such as my horse who loves the opportunity to take it out of my hands and play with it). For these reasons (among others), one needs to be very careful when labeling a trainer based on a photo or a video or a paragraph or an experience. Going back to Susan Friedman, it's best just to drop the labels altogether unless you have a very clear definition understood by all involved.

And that was just the first five slides of his presentation.

The second talk of Dr. Rosales-Ruiz which I attended was titled ""Fast Learner" The interplay between reinforcement rate and criteria". Again, he took some standard catch phrases and helped to me see them a little more carefully. "Raise the rate of reinforcement" is a common solution I give when people are having trouble training. It's a simple mantra, and often pertinent to people I am coaching who are new to training. But it is possible to bore a learner, to build in superstitious behaviors and to just get stuck by going too slowly. The takeaway here for me is to carefully assess criteria I am after and observe what is offered.   

More tomorrow. 

Breakthrough

On our first evening at NEI, we went around the room with introductions. Steve asked us to briefly introduce ourselves with name, where we were from and what our goal was for the week. He also added the fun option of naming the superpower we would choose if we could have one or telling about our favorite scar. I cringed a little at the scar because I have a big one but I never would have called it a favorite. However, when I heard that Steve refers to scars as “badges of insensitivity”, I knew it was appropriate. My own scar is from being kicked by a horse and it certainly was due to insensitivity on my part. It wasn’t a training incident or some cowboy move I tried to pull, simply a situation that arose while doing chores at a job I had fresh out of college. I also heard a great story about one of Susan Friedman’s scars, though it had nothing to do with animal training.

I said my hope for the week was that working with a new and completely unfamiliar specie would help me think outside the box. When I went through the Karen Pryor Academy Certified Training Partner program, working that extensively with dogs really helped open my horizons to new ways to approach horse training. I was ready (or thought I was) to shake that up again.  

So when I found myself with a bird acting like a horse afraid to go near a trailer, I wanted to try the same methods. But Wouter knew I was there to learn something new and he gently redirected me, time and time again, to looking at things differently. I wanted to get the bird comfortable and relaxed; he wanted me to ignore that and focus on the behavior. An internal struggle ensued (in my head). I described it afterwards as having spent the first 2 1/2 days trying to put the bird in MY box, rather than being willing to step outside my box. I had little comparisons for everything from the cages being stalls and pastures to approaching that towel being just like putting a horse on a trailer. I have spent a lot of time in recent years taking the emotional signals of animals very seriously. After all, that was one of my favorite quotes of Susan’s: “Effectiveness is Not Enough”. Just because you can get the horse on the trailer or over the jump doesn’t mean it’s good training. I had new criteria and that was having the animal be comfortable and a willing partner through all training. It’s what choice was all about.

So when Wouter would point out the bird’s emotional signals and his “hesitancy” but at the same time kept me focusing “only on the behavior”, I was lost at sea. I struggled through that afternoon and it was late, late that night that I pulled out pen and notebook in my hotel room and the puzzle pieces started to fall into place. It all came back to the ABCs. 

antecedent -> behavior -> consequence

I’ve known the process for years, but being immersed, as we were, in Susan’s thorough coverage of boiling down complicated behaviors into the simplest form possible, I was able to shift gears. 

Previously, I had lumped physical behavior with emotional signals into the B of behavior. “Can you approach this scary tarp while keeping your head at wither’s height”. If so, then I determined that to mean the horse was “relaxed” enough to ask him to go a bit further. Wouter had me ignore the emotional signals as part of my criteria. If the bird moved, criteria was met, even if he then hastily retreated. The emotional signals the bird showed became, as I quoted Steve in a previous post, antecedents for the next behavior. It was part of the motivating operations. So I asked for less the next time, even if it meant we did not get as far. This was different from staying at one stage repeatedly until the animal’s emotional signals were showing comfort. I chalk this up to the capability of a horse being able to consume reinforcers for a long period of time compared to a bird who fills up in a matter of minutes. I’m not sure if that’s a fair analysis of the situation or not. I wanted to ask the bird to go to a certain point, reinforce, and then ask him to go back to a comfortable spot and do lots of easy behaviors to increase the ROR before asking him to approach the towel again. I’ve had great success with this tactic with horses. Wouter stressed that to do that would make the reinforcement history very strong at the starting point and that’s not where we wanted the reinforcement history to be. We wanted it closer to the towel. Either way, I had committed to letting go of what I wanted to do at this point and learning a new way. 

I targeted the bird toward the towel and watched the size and speed of the steps. If they were quick and large, I’d reinforce and ask for more. If they were small steps or latency between steps, I’d reinforce but not expect as much on my next request. There were many times when he’d get his reinforcer and then retreat. Previously I would have seen this as a failure in my training plan because I didn’t have the animal relaxed enough to stay. But I stayed with the new plan and we started making progress toward the towel. 

Wouter had a saying “the success is in the back end” which does correlate nicely with my horse training experience. The point is to observe where the animal retreats to, or is comfortable retreating to. Initially, this bird would hustle all the way back to the far end of the perch. As we progressed, he might still retreat quickly after getting his reinforcer but each time, he retreated less until he was retreating to points which had initially been difficult for him to even get to. 

The perch was a natural tree limb so I used the various knots and twists in it to mark how far we’d made it. Both the bird and I exhibited superstitious behaviors. There was one knot which seemed to function as a bit of a wall he had trouble passing (my superstitious assumption). When he did finally pass it, he did so by crossing his right foot over his left very slowly, rather than shuffling sideways. I immediately marked it, reinforced, and he shuffled his way quickly back down the perch. We did that again. Again, he changed his foot pattern when he got to that knot and again I reinforced because he made it past the knot. For the rest of our training days, he changed his foot pattern there, whether because it was easier or felt safer; or because I had reinforced it, I’ll never know.  

Carefully watching his feet- that is a good sized step!

This photo shows how close the bird was able to get to the towel at the end of several training sessions. At this point, both Wouter and I noticed that the bird seemed to shy away from my hand as I reached up to give the treat. I tried to move slowly and he hadn’t shown any concern previously so it was a puzzle until we both realized that it was my hand passing the towel that made him pull back. He was so worried (there I go again, talking about emotions), that my hand near the towel made him even more concerned. I tried touching the towel and then feeding but it was close to the end of the session so I only did a few reps.

The final morning we swapped the towel out for a washcloth to see if the smaller size would make a difference but it didn’t. I picked up the washcloth and tucked it into my sleeve with only a tiny piece (less than an inch) protruding in an effort to desensitize him. But when my hand approached to treat, he scampered away rather than taking it. I asked Wouter if he’d have that reaction if I just had a white shirt poking out of my sweatshirt and he said no. The bird had watched me tuck the washcloth up there, and he was not about to be tricked. 

The final afternoon we were all free to wander and watch each other train. Since the towel had been placed on the perch near the front of the cage, I did not feel that we would make any progress with all the activity near the towel (people walking back and forth). At that point, I took Wouter up on the offer to do some nail/claw trimming with the Dremel. Both the bird and I redeemed ourselves by progressing rapidly in this behavior. I started by capturing his foot on the wire, used the running Dremel as the cue for him to put his foot there and proceeded to buff each toe on the left foot, then the right. I’m sure he’d had it done before but Wouter said the Dremel as cue was probably new. In any case, it was a nice place to end our training. 

NEI Training Projects

We were told we could pick any behavior to train for the remainder of the week. That was a bit of a challenge since I had no idea what one could train a bird to do! I decided to train a husbandry behavior and asked about nail trimming (I still don’t know if those are nails or claws or what on a bird). Wouter said that was pretty easy and suggested I do “toweling” and then maybe some nail trimming too. One of my teammates, Meg, who is a dog trainer, chose crate training. Birds are transported in crates just like dogs when they have to be moved, so it made sense to train a bird to be comfortable in one. My other two teammates, Tricia and Blake, both chose tricks. Tricia wanted to do something fun and also wanted help with her timing. She actually played with a couple fun behaviors over the week. Blake is a fish trainer at Disney and had been working on training a ray to swim out to a marker and back to him. He wanted a little help working through that process so he trained his bird to climb a rope up…and then come back down. The coming back down was the challenging part because birds like going up, and they want to keep going up to where there are some lovely high perches way up in the tops of the flights. So Blake got a lot of work with markers too, since that was how he  indicated to the bird “that’s far enough, now come back for your treat!”.

This shows the beginning of Blake's training for climbing the rope. You can see the bird trying to figure out how to climb this new thing (they climb up the cages and on the perches all the times) and how to find his balance by using his wings. Blake is marking and reinforcing the very first attempts as Wouter coaches.

I was lucky to get this early video and then on the last afternoon, I got another of the project as he was finishing it up. It's a great example of before and after of a nice training job.

So for those of us who had no idea what toweling is: birds are sometimes wrapped in towels for certain procedures to restrain them and protect the people working with them. Just as we teach horses and dogs to be comfortable with husbandry practices, birds can be trained to be more comfortable with the toweling procedure. A bird who has had an unpleasant experience with being wrapped up will be that much more uncomfortable and potentially difficult to work with in the future. To quote Steve Martin, “past consequences become current antecedents”.  Just how uncomfortable the towel could be was about to become very apparent to me. 

There are several methods trainers use to acclimate a bird to the toweling procedure. One which I saw done very successfully in the flight next to us, consisted of training a bird to go through a large (6-8”?) PVC pipe, maybe a foot long, by targeting him through gradually. When he was comfortable with that, a towel was laid over the pipe, just as environment. The next step was to have the towel hanging over the end of the pipe a little so the bird brushed it as he exited the pipe. This was gradually increased until the final behavior which I saw was a bird entering the pipe at one end and pushing his way out through towel which extended about foot beyond the end of the pipe. No human to bird contact was made the entire time so the bird was choosing to do this all on his own and becoming comfortable with the towel contact, the lack of visibility and the feeling of minor confinement.

There are times in our animal’s lives when we need to do something uncomfortable and we don’t have time to do the training ahead of time. I can tell a story to myself about how this must have been the case with the bird I worked with because we didn’t get anywhere near that progress. “Does why matter?” in relation to why an animal exhibits a particular behavior is a question that has dogged me for many years and I swing back and forth on the pendulum to answer it. Sometimes we don’t know our animals’ pasts, sometimes we do. How much does that matter in our training? Certainly if it helps pinpoint a particularly troublesome stimulus in an environment, we can focus in on desensitization with that stimulus. But during the week at NEI, Wouter repeatedly said to us, “doesn’t matter, this is about behavior”. Any time we slipped up and mentioned an emotion or a guess as to why a bird was doing something, the response was “doesn’t matter, focus on the behavior”. 

After initially observing the bird I was working with fly away rather than be on the table with the towel, we moved to a location with a high history of reinforcement: the long perch we’d worked on the previous day. The behavior I observed here was a hesitancy on the bird’s part to be within 8 feet of the towel, which we had folded narrowly on the far end to minimize the apparent size of it. I define hesitancy by comparing his response when I asked him to target toward my hand without the towel present to his behavior when I asked him to target toward my hand (between him and the towel) with the towel present. I could measure his hesitancy in both the size of the steps he took and the speed with which he took them. Without the towel, he would approach my target hand with steps measuring an inch or more each and in a steady rhythm of about 2 steps per second (I did not actually take this data; these are estimates). When the towel was present, his steps, when he took them at all, were about a quarter of an inch in size, barely enough room to put the next foot down and sometimes he only took one step before stopping or rapidly retreating.  

In our projects, we were always given choices along with great coaching. Wouter said I could try something else but this felt like something I should be able to accomplish. It didn’t seem any different than trying to get a horse into a trailer or to approach a scary object. I felt like I had the skills to achieve this and I said I didn’t care about the conclusion of the project (getting him under a towel); I wanted to work through it. 

Next up: Breakthrough

NEI Workshop: Introductory Training

On the first day of the workshop, we were told to capture or shape three behaviors on our Macaw. This helped those of us who had minimal or no experience with birds get a feel for their offered behaviors, their style and speed of learning, learn a little about our individual bird and see what it felt like to feed a treat to a bird! I had zero experience with birds except for farm chickens. I was in awe. 

These first sessions were done in protected contact (meaning the bird was in a cage and we were outside it and feeding treats through the wire). I came to think of the enclosures the Macaws were in as comparable to horse keeping. There was a large “flight” they all shared, probably 20’ x 80’ and also 20’ or 30’ high. I thought of these as horse pastures. There were four or five birds “turned out” together when we weren’t training them.

Using his foot to hold the seed while eating

Inside that flight, there were a couple smaller cages probably 5’ by 5’ and 12’ high which were kind of like run in sheds. 2 or 3  birds were put in each to be out of the way when we were training. There was also a smaller cage on wheels, more stall sized, where the bird I worked with was put when others were training because “he didn’t play well with others”. He was out with all of them when we weren’t training, but the smaller confines must have brought out the same sort of behavior that one sees when horses are bunched together in a small area.

After that first protected contact session, we needed some more basics. Because we had not yet learned how to “lead” a bird (again, I revert to horse terminology), when we were ready to train out of protected contact, Wouter (pronounced Vowter) brought each bird out for us. The first afternoon he placed the birds onto a perch which was about eye level in the corner of the flight. The birds had the option to fly off into their “pasture” so it was only because they chose to stay that allowed us to work with them (and there were the occasional fly offs but not often and they came back pretty easily). We taught them to turn around on this perch and also to station on a piece of wood nailed to the perch. That became a high value place to be for the rest of the week. 

The next morning we learned how to cue the bird to fly to our hand and how to return them to the perch in a manner that they felt safe and comfortable. In Susan’s LLA class, she frequently uses the behavior of a bird “stepping up” onto a hand as an example. Last week the clarity of that term hit me. The birds truly do prefer stepping UP to stepping over or down. So when we returned a bird to a perch, we had to place the bird a little lower than the perch for him to be comfortable stepping up onto it, rather than dumping the bird out of our hands. We were taught to have them fly to our hands before stepping onto our hands because it’s easier for the bird.

Stepping up

Having the birds step up was an example of the choice that these birds are given. Traditionally, I guess people kind of press their hands into the birds chest to knock them off their balance so they have to step onto the hand. At NEI, the birds are offered a cue of right hand up which means the bird has a choice. If he chooses to step up, he picks his foot up in, I’m sorry but the cutest little darn posture you could ask for. It reminded me of a toddler reaching up a tiny hand in that trusting way that you will offer yours back to help them. In any case, when they pick up that foot, then you offer your left hand in front of them and they step on (and if you are Wouter, you accompany that offering with “did you call for an Uber?”).  

I had no idea what to expect when this bird flew to me but what I found was that he was very light (compared to a broiler chicken!) and the little feet are very gentle.  There were more mechanics to learn so we could turn this bird who was now facing us around so he could step back up onto the perch. All this needed to be done smoothly to keep the bird comfortable or he’d take to his wings. 

There was, of course, relationship to build. When I think of building a relationship with an animal, I tend to think of long term such as months at least. Here we were asking the birds to trust us in just a matter of days. I’m not a fan of flying myself, so it would have taken me a lot longer to trust someone if I was going to fly over and land on their hand. It also made me think about what we offer to an animal that we are asking to trust us. Certainly my teammates and I had the best of intentions for these birds. But we needed to quickly build our skills so we could offer clear communication in addition to our good intentions. This was obvious when comparing us to Wouter. He no longer worked at NEI and did not necessarily know these individual birds, but they responded to his cues quickly and comfortably. He had the body language, if you will, that they understood. I think that’s an important point to think about regardless of the animals we work with. So many people have great intentions with their animals but they just don’t have the education to understand that the human way they are communicating with them is not received with the emotion that it is given. Something as simple as stroking or patting may be done to an animal to convey appreciation or love, and yet it could be very aversive to the animal.

Next up: Training Projects