To train any animal you need; planning, patience and great timing. Developing timing is about developing the ability to watch and 'predict' what is going to happen next without prompting the animal.  Let the animal work out what to do and time your rewards well.

To develop that all important predictive timing, you can simply practice with your regular training subject and eventually your problems will show up, unfortunately in your animal.  Alternately, you can accelerate your learning cycles (or tune up your existing skills) by using animals with particular training challenges that don't threaten your wellbeing if it goes a bit astray. 

The classic clicker training subjects are chickens.  The Bailey-Brelands were big advocates for training chickens to hone your clicker training skills.  This isn't because chickens are bird brains but because of their fast, jerky somewhat unpredictable movements.  Chickens (and other birds) make excellent subjects for training clicker trainers.  They have the ability to test basic skills and also to reward the skilled trainer with outstanding performances.   Chickens, or indeed any bird, will develop the three keystone qualities in abundance.

Using birds as subjects also brings in a whole swag of other skills that may be required during training sessions.  

• How will you approach your subject in order to associate the clicker in the first place?
• How many options do you have for this step?
• How will you handle training if there is more than one subject?  
  • Will you train them with different signals?
  • Will you indicate which one you are training in some other way? 
  • Do you know which methods will be successful or not?

Initial steps for chickens will include such basics as being approached by or approaching the trainer, dealing with the problems of new sounds (the clicker itself), training environments and food handling (how to deliver food to subjects that are likely to dart off).  Having dealt with these issues in a safe environment, makes you much more aware of all the things that you may have to face with larger (potentially more dangerous) animals.

Once these initial steps are overcome all the usual training issues, plus the chickens fast paced unpredictable actions are still to come.  Teaching basic behaviours, generalising behaviour and improving performance or duration are all skills that are applied to training every animal. 

Margo and Jerry learn to target. 

© Horse Play 2006