I recently brought Carson outside to sit on a perch in the Museum's backyard for a training session. After a frustrating fifteen minutes, I came back into the office and Mollie asked how it went.
"Carson is crazy! She thinks she's starving. She was kind of a jerk."
Mollie asked, "how so? What did she do?"
And I realized that Mollie's question was exactly how I should have examined the training session in the first place. My initial answer was full of adjectives and no information. Those labels (crazy, jerk) describe how Carson made me feel, not what behavior she was actually demonstrating. So I took a step back and operationalized the behavior to answer Mollie's question:
"She footed the glove tightly when I asked her to step up and she wouldn't let go. One time she hopped on so quickly that one foot was perched on my elbow, off the glove. And she repeatedly leaped to grab food with her talons."
Labeling Carson as "crazy" puts all of the blame on her as if she was intentionally trying to annoy me. I might accept that "that's just how she is" and nothing would change.
But gripping the glove tightly? That's a behavior we can work together to change. Stepping onto my elbow? I need to be more conscious of how I present the glove next time. And leaping at the food? That's an indication that she's hungry and might need her diet bumped up.
You can't (and won't try to) fix "crazy." But observable behaviors can always be changed to improve both the animal and trainer's lives.
I have previously written about how important it is to consider emotions when training animals (here and here). But you don't want to take it too far and rely too heavily on emotions. Even positive emotions, like happy or playful, are labels that can blind us to what is really happening. The best trainers are able to utilize both perspectives by analyzing the observable behavior combined with the emotions behind it. Together these approaches will give a more holistic understanding of our animals.
Comments