No Force No Fear Wild Burro and Donkey Training - Ivan VIDEO #4

Описание: In the first clip of this video, we had just started working on increasing the duration of holding the foot up. It's one thing for the donkey to pick the foot up, another to hold it up for a length of time long enough to allow trimming. How do we teach duration? Just like shaping any other facet of a behavior such as height, intensity, loudness, latency, etc. you change the criteria for reinforcement a bit at a time, moving ever closer to your goal. How big a jump you ask for from one approximation to the next is entirely up to the learner. You don't want to make the steps so big that the learner isn't successful; the donkey could get frustrated as his rate of reinforcement drops. We want success and therefore a high rate of reinforcement. But you also don't want to make the steps (approximations) so small that you slow your learner down. How do you know how big or small? Watch your donkey - she will tell you!
      Note that Ivan takes a step back with the left front as I cue and approach the leg. Gotta make a quick decision immediately how to best proceed - I had a feeling Ivan would be ok if I just cued again and he was.
      I'm willing to bet that when Ivan had a front foot tied up during trims in the past he learned to kick with the hind on the same side in his attempts to escape. You can see him do a tiny kick in these video clips as the front leg is held up a bit longer and also when I start to add touching the bottom of his foot. We worked on duration first, and then I started adding touching the bottom of the hoof. Bringing a second hand towards the raised foot clearly elicited a bit of fear but I opted to ignore the little lift of the hind foot and keep my touch very brief until Ivan was calm about it Then I slowly increased the amount of time I rubbed on the foot.
     When you start working on a new dimension of a behavior, you can relax the other criteria worked on prior. For example, I wouldn't expect Ivan to go a long duration with the foot up when I start teaching touch to the bottom.
      After this session, on another day, Ivan and I worked together with no fence between us. He did great and in no time we were trimming. Normally with a wild burro, there are a lot more steps such as introducing tools and getting the burro used to the sight, smells, and sounds of the tools. Ivan was plenty familiar with the tools already so we could skip ahead pretty quickly. The last video of Ivan's front foot learning is a session of trimming with no restraint, loose outside the training pen.