Before we move on with secondary reinforcers – Are you making any of these mistakes?

In this written part of the lesson I want to focus on what food you are going to use. We are going to consider two important points here;

• The first thing we need to think about, is the fact that all animals are individuals. Individual variation therefore, means that some animals are going to value food more than others. If your animal is not highly food motivated you might have to replace food with something else for the remainder of this course. For example, a favorite toy.
• The other thing to think about here is what food items you are using. For example, lets say a pet dog has access to a large quantity of biscuits all day long. Imagine that dog’s owner then tried to use the same biscuits as reinforcement for that dog. They might discover the dog is not highly motivated by them. This dogs owner would need to examine the diet. They could possibly use a treat, as long as the treat was part of a complete and balanced diet. Additionally they could look at other aspects of how they manage the diet.

I am cautious to go into much detail here, because it is challenging to make diet recommendations through this medium. I don’t want to suggest anything that could be misinterpreted and consequently be unhealthy for an animal. You and your individual circumstances will dictate what food you use. Try and find something that is motivating for your animal and that fits into a well balanced and healthy diet. As I mentioned in a previous lecture, stop if you are unsure. Then seek out the help of a professional or veterinarian before continuing.

Additionally weighing your animal should be a relatively consistent event. If you don’t own a good pair of scales then see if your vet has a pair that you could use. Often you will find that they have a big pair of scales in their waiting area. You can pop in to your vet when you drive past and place your animal on the scales there. You need to be conscious of how changes in diet are affecting your animals weight. Also, If your training a pet animal at home (especially a cat or a dog) then their food packets frequently feature a rough feeding guide. Once again, if you are unsure, please seek out the advice of a professional/veterinarian.

What if your animal does not hand feed?

The principles of clicker training can work with any animal. However, at this stage I want to point out that some animals might not be hand feeding. Also, some people might not be comfortable hand feeding. Do you fall into one of these categories? If so, that’s okay. I want you to start thinking about how you might set up your animal’s environment differently. Maybe you could arrange it so you could consistently and easily deliver food to a specific location. If you can manage something like this then you can still pair the delivery of food with the sound of the clicker. Maybe you could do something similar to what you saw in this lessons video. Here I was clicking and then throwing the Kitten’s food in a bowl. I just set the training up like that as an example. Most people can hand fed their cat. This may be more relevant for animals in zoological settings. For example, lions, tigers or elephants. In situations like this closed contact training is recommended.

Some animals can’t be fed due to undesirable aggressive behavior towards hands. For example, later on in this course you will see a possum being trained to voluntarily enter a crate. In this particular example, the possum did not hand feed. We therefore put his food in milk bottle lids and feed him by placing the milk lids on wooden shelves. I did not work with that possum long enough to train hand feeding. Although with positive reinforcement this would have been possible. We can achieve this via a process called shaping. You will learn more about this process later on in this course.

NOTE: please treat your training situation as unique, and always exercise good judgement.

How to create secondary reinforcers for your animals.

Before we more on lets just go through a check list and make sure that the food item you are using fits a few criteria.

• Is it part of a healthy and well balanced diet?
• Ideally you want to do at least two short training sessions a day. These can range from 1-5 minutes. Short training sessions are ideal. The quantity of the food item needs to last throughout these sessions.
• It needs to be in small bite sized chunks. You want your animal to take the food, consume it quickly and then present for the next piece.
• Ideally it is something the animal desires, something that is not freely available in its environment and something it will consistently come and engage in training for.
• Feel free to use multiple food items as long as they all fit the above criteria.
• If you’re unsure seek out the advice of a professional or veterinarian.

For everyone else that has a food item ready to go, great. Let’s move on. In this lesson I encourage you to start practicing your timing. We are getting ready to start pairing your clicker with your food item. As just mentioned your timing is very important here. What I want you to do is pick up your clicker. Then practice clicking and then immediately offering food (like in the video). It’s important that the click comes first. Also that the hand that delivers the food stays still until after the click is sounded. If this is timed incorrectly the animal might start watching for “hand movement” instead of listening for the sound of the clicker.

So far we have learned about what reinforcement is, primary and secondary reinforcers and how to pair them. Before you go on to the next lesson make sure you practice your timing. If you feel ready you can even start practicing with your animal. In the next lesson we are going to have a look at training a duration with your clicker. We will also examine how to make sure your clicker’s reinforcing value is established. I hope you have enjoyed this lesson on pairing secondary reinforcers and I will see you in lesson five.