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RE: Question About Lead Training - Sanhestar - 07-26-2016
Positive reinforcement is NOT bribing with treats. And if you reach a point in the training at which a positively trained animal decides to whack you with the horns instead of replying with the appropriate behaviour a lot of things have gone wrong before.
Let's look at your example of worm medicine.
The commom approach is to apply a necessary amount of force to get the worm medicine into the goat. There is little to no preparation to the first worming and the worming itself will be more or less traumatizing because of a) the force applied to restrain the goat and b) the taste of the medicine or in case of injection the pain of the injection itself and maybe the painreaction to the wormer if you use ivermectin.
The approach with positive reinforced training would start much earlier.
With teaching the animal to stand quietly
Teaching to touch a syringe or drencher
Teaching to allow the syringe or drencher being placed into it's mouth while still standing quietly. This process has to be slice into the smallest possible increments, so small that at NO point the animal feels the need to resist. There will be NO forcing the drencher into the mouth.
With that approach one can teach the animal to actively accept the drencher/syringe, much like a bottle of milk.
Then the drencher is filled with a tasty substance and the animal can taste that substance.
On worming day the medicine will be in the drencher and the animal might react to the change in taste. But because the behaviour itself has by now a long history of earning treats for complying, this one time of a bad taste will not erase the many good times where taking the drencher in the mouth was followed by click and treat. And because this time the bad taste is also followed by click and treat, the experience is not repulsive.
This video should show the power of this type of medical training
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSUACcbHYRo&index=1&list=PL-goPY97XQ8KkG3RpdZ0gWT4xwStTscMw
And this shows how to prepare worming a horse
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2y6JIuOxNm0&index=10&list=PL-goPY97XQ8KkG3RpdZ0gWT4xwStTscMw
Everybody who is criticising positive reinforcement is hung up on the "bribe" of a candy. Positive reinforcement works with treats but the treats can also be a good scratch or a game of tug or a good run. Admittedly, training ruminants and horses one is much more limited in what treats will be acceptable to the animal and a dog-trainer has much more tools (games, toys, etc.) to reward wanted behaviour.
What makes positive reinforcement so powerfull is the choice and the communication. You yourself say that the dessert bribe didn't compell you to eat your meal.
What would have made you eat your meal? Or even more important: why were you a picky eater? What was in the meals that made you refuse them? What happened during meal times that made your stomach close-up? There are several other things one can look at to find out why the dessert didn't have enough value for you to go through the unpleasant experience of eating the meal. Making the connection to animal training: if a food bribe doesn't hold enough weight for the animal to show a behaviour I want I have to look at the causes why:
- is the food not valueable enough?
- is the food not tasty/spoiled/unnatural (you won't be able to bribe a goat with a piece of meat nor a tiger with a carrot)?
- has the animal stress and can't take food?
- is the animal not hungry enough (very rare in goats and horses)?
- is taking the food/chewing the food painful?
- is there another component in the animals live that has higher value that I can offer - social animals like to play. An animal that has been confined to a small area for a longer period of time might want to have a good run instead of a morsel of food.
The art of positive reinforcement is to find such reinforcers that make a behaviour worth showing it.
Yes, having to eat the cold meal didn't make you afraid of food but it made you afraid enough to eat what was placed in front of you. So the fear made you distrust your own body/judgement. I have had that type of "education" visited on me, too. I was so afraid of my grandmother on the subject of not eating what was placed in front of me that I did not tell her that she had mistakenly used salt instead of sugar in my cocoa after the kitchen was renovated and tried to down that salted cocoa for hours (four cups of salt instead of sugar!). She finally tried the cocoa because she became suspicious that something was wrong and asked me why I didn't tell her. Well, I couldn't, I was too afraid that she would get angry!
As you also have brought up the issue of children and dentists I will share a story from my childhood:
My first visit to a dentist scared me to hell and I wouldn't open my mouth to have my teeth inspected ever again. At least not for THAT dentist who was an older, impatient man who told me "to sit still and suck it up". I have a defect in my teeth, maybe genetic, maybe because I was treated with antibiotics for an infection of the gut and at that time (1960s) little was know that certain antibiotics would damage the enamel of the teeth. Anyway, my milk teeth came out already rotting and getting fillings and having tooth aches was a constant pain that I remember still.
Luckily my mother decided to switch dentists and found a female dentist which took time to let me explore the room, the chair, drills, tubes, etc. and explained what everything does. Being able to explore a thing that frightens us is a powerfull tool against that fear.
After that we made a pact that she honoured up to the day when she retired (I was a young women by then). As I was as afraid of needles in my mouth (this was planted from my mothers aversion/fear of local anesthetic in the mouth) I would refuse any injections that could dull the pain of drilling. You can believe me that having so rotten teeth that even with thorough brushing every 6 months I had to have at least one new filling is no way to make dentist visits attractive.
And I dreaded them. But I would go and I would go up on the chair and sit still for the drilling even though I didn't like it because of that bargain:
The dentist would locate the hole. If it was small enough and I had a bad day, she would leave it till the next visit. If it needed filling she would start drilling and whenever I felt that she touched the nerve with the drill I was allowed to raise my hand and she would switch the placement of the drill. When the time came that she needed to go deep towards the nerve she would tell me so and I could prepare for the pain and breathe through it. It was my choice wether or not I would raise my hand and as I got older I could make a game out of how much pain I could stand/how faster the drilling would be over when I kept my hand down.
It was the choice/the active role she gave me, not the treat offered afterwards (picking through small toys) that made me stay in the chair/go back to her practise.
No other dentist has ever offered my that choice again and I have only been to dentists for years now for emergency treatments. Their attitude towards my fears don't encourage me to visit them agaim.
I agree that using positive reinforcement can take longer but I disagree that the outcome is less satisfying.
Again I refer to the video material available on Panda, one of few guide HORSES for a blind woman. Panda hast been trained exclusively with positive reinforcement and is a superb guide, working in her 13th year now when guide dogs who aren't trained with positive reinforcement often have to retire long before they turn 10.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3a47ToWtrfY
The backing up when the car approaches is initiated by Pandy and not by her owner. Pandy has been taught to back up when a car approaches even when she has been given the command to walk on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLdO2cBAusw
Why use zoos all over the world and in the US positive reinforcement to train dangerous animals to accept medical procedures if it's so high risk? There are reports about dangerous elephant bulls that have learned with positive reinforcement to offer their feet for trimming and the ear for blood-drawing. Tigers will allow medical procedures for a click and a treat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJPT_axKI5U&index=3&list=PL-goPY97XQ8KkG3RpdZ0gWT4xwStTscMw
Medical training with Orang Utans. Check the other videos in that playlist, if you like.
And I'm honest enough to write, that the dangerous animals are handled with a barrier between trainer and animal, even with the positive reinforced training. Because safety allways comes first in that kind of training. And because if you don't have to be afraid of an animal attacking you while training your can ignore the unwanted behaviour and only reward the wanted behaviour. So there is no need to place fear into the animal in the first place.
And yes, starting a horse in positive reinforcement of most often done in so-called protective contact - with a barrier between horse and trainer. This will reduce the risk of unwanted behaviour cropping up and the need to adress said behaviour.
This gives a good insight how to start a horse with clicker, just make sure (as the blog is a bit out of order) to start at the first session on day one (scroll down)
https://theclickercenterblog.com/2015/11/22/an-introduction-to-clicker-training-day-2/
RE: Question About Lead Training - AcanthaRose - 08-09-2016
Thanks everyone for your great input! I have been busy continuing to work with the goats, and they are improving. When I got Elsie this past March, she was very shy and had basically no training. Now she is responding to the clicker as a reward system and is definitely much more tolerant of various "scary" things, though that tolerance is still a work in progress. It took her a while to understand what the clicker meant, but now that she does, I have been able to teach her to target to my hand. She is very good at this when we are at home, but we still need to work on it when there is something distracting in the vicinity. We recently took her and Liesel (her kid) on a backpacking trip, and both of them did very well on and off leash. Elsie even carried a little weight in panniers, and has been getting used to maneuvering around obstacles with them. Elsie is also doing better at speeding up when I tug on the leash, and at giving in to pressure in general. I think the willow switch technique was helpful with this a the beginning (though now Elsie has progressed beyond that), along with the clicker+treats which I am continuing to use and which she now understands better than she did at the begining. Also, both goats are now responding well to the "wait" command, because they know it means treats for them if they stop. I now need to work on lengthening the time I ask them to stand still. Liesel, being more advanced with her clicker training, also knows to stand in one place while I walk away when I give the "stay" command. I am still working to lengthen the time and distance from me that she will continue to obey. Have any of you trained a goat to stay in one spot without being tied up? She is getting pretty good at it, but if I walk behind something she will come find me.
RE: Question About Lead Training - Sanhestar - 08-09-2016
I have tried to teach that particular behaviour several times but have found that goats have serious abandonment issues once the have bonded to their humans.
I would add a ground target (small mat or even teach her to target to the rope lying on the ground) to make this easier to understand. And you will have to reinforce heavily the standing alone and increase distance and duration in very, very small increments.
RE: Question About Lead Training - Nanno - 08-10-2016
I'm happy to hear about your training success! I agree with Sabine that a mat or rope on the ground is good target to teach your goat to ground tie. I started with both actually. Another good visual aid is something like a hula hoop that you can stand your goat's front feet in. When we began I had my goat stand on a rubber mat and I dropped his lead rope on the ground. I use the command "whoa" instead of "stay" because it means the same thing--all feet still. I like to reduce the number of words my goats have to learn because I don't think they are as good with voice commands as they are with hand signals, body language, and other physical signs (such as a dropped lead rope). This makes sense given their own limited vocalizations and prolific use of body language to communicate with each other.
I admit I have not worked on the whoa (stay) command very much, but I've had pretty decent success considering. I've got my goats standing still while I walk 20-30 feet away and feed cookies to the others, and they'll usually stand still for a few seconds while I disappear around a corner or into the house to grab something. I'd never trust them to stay there for long though, and so far we've only done it in contained settings where I know the other goats can't harass them while we work. Old cowboy wisdom says "a ground-tied horse is a loose horse" and the same goes for a goat. But they can learn to stay put for a few minutes while you walk away because I've seen it done very well in the circus, and my own goats aren't too bad at it.
I first started with a mat but we don't need it any more. I also drop their lead rope on the ground and say "Whoa". You've already got your goat standing still for a bit and that was no problem for me either. My trouble started when I fed treats to other goats or disappeared round a corner. I solved this by striking a whip on the ground and saying "Whoa!" when the goat moved from his spot. The whip got his attention and usually made him stop. If he kept coming, I went toward him with the whip and slapped it on the ground until he backed up to his original spot. Then I rewarded and began again. It didn't take my boys long to figure out that they were not going to be rewarded for coming to me without permission, but that they would get a reward if they stayed put.
One thing that was hard for my goat Sputnik was allowing me to walk around him while he was ground tied. He likes to face me at all times, but this can make it difficult to adjust a harness or saddle, so I wanted him to learn how to stand while I walked around him. This took patience on my part and walking only a little ways toward his side and back and rewarding when he stood still. If he moved out of position I would use a verbal reprimand (I say "ah-ah" in a harsh tone) and move him back and reward before starting again. It took about a week for him to figure it out. I haven't practiced this specific exercise in some time because I haven't had trouble harnessing or saddling him any more so I haven't thought of it. But I'm guessing he'd be pretty good nowadays even without practice. Now I'm curious and I may have to try it tomorrow!