Art and Science of Animal Traning:

Innovations and Refinements

Saturday, February 6th, 2010
8:30 a.m. - 6:00 p.m.

Click here to register

Mark your calendars! ORCA is excited to announce its 2^nd annual Art and Science of Animal Training conference. Last year's conference was a great success, thanks in no small part to our six Great Minds for sharing their wisdom, our volunteers who kept things running smoothly, and of course all of you who attended! If you missed last year's conference, you can read all about it here.

**Special Bonus--Check out this review of our conference by one of the attendees, Mary Hunter!

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This year's title is Innovations and Refinements. The field of animal training is continually changing--just when we think we've finally understood the secret to behavior, we learn something new! Our guests of honor will share with us some of their own innovations in animal training.

Presentations

Dr. Robert Epstein (Keynote)

Engineering Complex and Novel Behavior in Animals

Animal training usually consists of applying positive and negative consequences to behavior, strengthening some behavior and weakening other behavior until you get a desired performance. This is what psychologists call operant conditioning. But rewards and punishments only strengthen or weaken behavior that’s already occurring. You can’t get NEW behavior unless you know how to wait strategically; in a procedure called “shaping,” you wait for a bit of new behavior to occur and then reinforce it, and then you wait again until you get MORE new behavior, and so on. But here's a surprise: When you’re not training—which is most of the time!—you’re really waiting, and while you’re waiting, almost ALL behavior that occurs is new in some sense. Read more.

Bob Bailey

Innovation: A Case History

What is innovation in animal training? During the 1940s Skinner’s behavioral innovation, called operant conditioning, was leaving the psychology laboratory and transforming into a powerful methodology for animal training. His innovation continued commercially with Keller and Marian Breland. They founded Animal Behavior Enterprises (ABE) in 1943 and commercially exploited the new behavioral technology. Read more.

Alexandra Kurland

What Horses Teach Us About Cues: The Loopy Training Strategy

We often think of each training step as a single sentence: Cue=>behavior=>click=>reinforcer. In teaching complex behaviors we need to present this sentence not just once, but many times. In doing so we end up training in repeating loops. You can recognize good clicker training by the presence of clean loops. Mix in poisoned cues and the loops fall apart. Read more.

Kay Laurence

Assessment: Love it or hate it, it makes you grow

Most of us, especially in dog training, evolve through an onslaught of judgement: from whether we should have the dog at all, to whether we are making the right job of training it. This is external, this is not relevant to your relationship with your dog. What is more important is assessing yourself and your own abilities, goals and aspirations and making changes where you identify those changes need to be made. Read more.

Steve Martin

Training Outside the (Skinner) Box

Training is training no matter where it occurs. Whether you train a rat inside a completely controlled environment with no distractions, or train a rat to run a specific path in a show performed in a 5,000 seat amphitheater, you teach that rat to make decisions based on antecedent or consequence experiences. Lab animals perform in controlled environments to limit distractions and establish controlled experiments that provide more consistent data. But, how much is the behavior of the animal inside the experiment chamber influenced by events that occur outside the chamber? Read more.

Ken Ramirez

Wanted: Animal Training Consultant--those good with animals need not apply!

The title is, of course, somewhat facetious! To be a good animal trainer, one does need to understand training and be good with animals. However, sometimes the most important skills needed to solve behavioral problems are not animal training skills. It is people skills, observational skills, and organizational skills that can be the key to finding solutions to behavioral problems. Read more.

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