Renewal of Intention
There are 58 equids in my back yard at the moment. I can only train about 8 per day and take care of the rest, but some months from now, I will appreciate being able to look back and see how things were. What we will remember for a long time is the rains that have plagued our training this summer. Floods and rains. Muck. Slop and wetness. The world is soggy.
Lynna Feng just left a few days ago and her blog inspired me to reactivate this one. She is a dog trainer who stepped over to the equine side of life for 2 months at Mustang Camp. She works for Dr. Sophia Yin, a veterinary behaviorist whom I admire. Lynna helped me refine my training process, tidying up all the criteria for completion and defining the measurements to make at each stage of the process.
The data collection and recording focuses on the effectiveness of intervention. It is a different way of looking at training for some people, but typical of a behaviorist frame of reference. Basically the animal is measured to perform a behavior of interest at some rate and after intervention (aka training), it performs the behavior at some different rate. (Rate might also be speed, frequency, duration, etc.) So we make some measurement of the behavior before training, then measure it again after training. If it is a desirable behavior, hopefully the animal will be more likely to do it; and if it is undesirable, the animal will be less likely to perform the behavior. The training record also includes a description of the training, the time we spent training, and our subjective rating of how well it went. All of the data is put into a computer and it sits up in google space as a spreadsheet.
The Animal of the Day for today is Sugarfoot. I always try to pick out an animal whose performance was above average and think about what made the animal do so well. Sugarfoot helped Gina learn how to train the "Walk, Whoa, Back" exercise. He hasn't been asked to do much for a few months, but he was willing and very polite with the neophyte trainer. He was recently kicked out of the Home Team by the zebra who took the mares and sent his potential rivals (Sugarfoot and Roany) packing. Sugarfoot loves being in the horse trailer so he has been clunking around inside of it kind of lonely perhaps. He seemed to really enjoy the opportunity for a training session.
Lynna Feng just left a few days ago and her blog inspired me to reactivate this one. She is a dog trainer who stepped over to the equine side of life for 2 months at Mustang Camp. She works for Dr. Sophia Yin, a veterinary behaviorist whom I admire. Lynna helped me refine my training process, tidying up all the criteria for completion and defining the measurements to make at each stage of the process.
The data collection and recording focuses on the effectiveness of intervention. It is a different way of looking at training for some people, but typical of a behaviorist frame of reference. Basically the animal is measured to perform a behavior of interest at some rate and after intervention (aka training), it performs the behavior at some different rate. (Rate might also be speed, frequency, duration, etc.) So we make some measurement of the behavior before training, then measure it again after training. If it is a desirable behavior, hopefully the animal will be more likely to do it; and if it is undesirable, the animal will be less likely to perform the behavior. The training record also includes a description of the training, the time we spent training, and our subjective rating of how well it went. All of the data is put into a computer and it sits up in google space as a spreadsheet.
The Animal of the Day for today is Sugarfoot. I always try to pick out an animal whose performance was above average and think about what made the animal do so well. Sugarfoot helped Gina learn how to train the "Walk, Whoa, Back" exercise. He hasn't been asked to do much for a few months, but he was willing and very polite with the neophyte trainer. He was recently kicked out of the Home Team by the zebra who took the mares and sent his potential rivals (Sugarfoot and Roany) packing. Sugarfoot loves being in the horse trailer so he has been clunking around inside of it kind of lonely perhaps. He seemed to really enjoy the opportunity for a training session.
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