Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Positive Reinforcement Frontiers with Zoo Animals

For this post, I take you to a recent entry on one of the blogs in my Links page:  Mary Hunter's at stalecheerios.com.   Mary covers positive reinforcement training, and she helped advise an artist on the development of a poster featuring "twelve great examples of wild animals who have been trained to do extraordinary tasks without any use of force or punishment."  The first one certainly grabbed my attention:  training a whale to pee in a cup.  Way cool!  Some feats are covered in my own chapter on animal applications, such as birds that spy and animals that willingly weigh themselves on scales, or allow blood samples to be taken.  Here's the link.  It's a great poster!  (Note:  I have no connection with the artist.)  Don't miss the fish that plays soccer.


6 comments:

  1. Hi Susan,

    I'm glad you liked the poster! I thought it was very cool when she first showed it to me. And thanks for linking to my blog. :)

    I'm glad she included one of the Breland's tic tac toe chickens on the poster. I think one of those chickens was even able to beat Skinner at tic tac toe.

    cheers,

    Mary

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  2. She really covered a big range of the highlights of positive reinforcement for animals in a small space. I'm glad you posted this on your blog!

    Best, Susan

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  3. Thank you for posting this! I love reading blogs, because you find one blog you are interested and the probability of finding other interesting blogs is very high. I loved the poster on Mary's blog. Now I have another blog to add to my daily rss feed!

    Training a whale to pee into a cup? I HAVE to find additional information about that! Fascinating!

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  4. Hi Susan, I am the artist, and thank you for linking to my poster! I feel very honored. Thank you also for your wonderful book! I love it. - Lili

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  5. I'm delighted to hear this, Lili! Thanks again for creating a wonderfully informative and clever work of art.

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  6. Positive reinforcement for animals is an important topic to address and you have addressed it in a really impressive manner i liked it alot.

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