Systematically adding distractions to help our animals be successful in a variety of contexts & with a variety of external stimuli can be a time consuming endeavour – but the results are TOTALLY worth the effort! Plus it’s a whole lot of fun to build this aspect of our learners behavioural fluency and is something I have been working on recently with Fibi doing – desirable behaviours in her crate.
Desirable behaviour = still vocal chords, sitting or lying down.
Below ⬇️ is some of the training we have done so far.
Firstly you can see us building some duration in the crate in the calm environment of my office. BTW… Fibi knows food is available when the snuffle mat & pet tutor are present. This same crate has also been used by her to sleep for long durations – so different cues in the environment help communicate different reinforcers are on offer.
We then added the office door being open… this instantly increased the stimuli in the environment. Mainly bird sounds.
Next steps was start to do the training in a variety of different rooms!
Then back to the office but with me doing a variety of weird things lol
Then up to our lounge adding my wife, dancing, cats, & vacuums!
And then external sounds. This next video we had bird sounds, dogs barking, neighbours voices and garden power tools all within the space of 60 seconds! WAHAAT!
What about you? How do you add distractions in to your trained behaviours? I would love to know – and you can share wby leaving a comment below
Ryan Cartlidge – Animal Training Academy Founder/Director/Facilitator
Leave a Reply