This is true in business and when Training Animals. Measuring behaviour when Training Animals is a concept many people initially struggle with. To make it easier to understand it’s beneficial to examine how we as humans communicate to each other. When talking about Animal Training it’s highly beneficial to develop a common language.
I generally encourage not using labels when training animals (e.g. Happy, Angry, Sad, Aggressive). Instead of using labels I suggest describing what you can see and hear your animal doing. For Example, rather then saying the dog was happy. Or the dog was excited. Or the dog was aggressive. We could say, the dog ran up to me. Tail wagging. Ears up and forward facing. And tongue hanging out to the left of his mouth. By eliminating labels we also eliminate differences between people’s opinions on behaviour.
People can disagree wether an animal is happy or sad. People can not disagree however that the bird has dilated pupils, raised feathers and is leaning to the left.
There are three labels I use when working with behaviour. These three labels are Desirable, Undesirable and Acceptable.
We start of by defining what specific behaviours look like. We describe the behaviour in relation to what we can see and hear. For example, one of the behaviours in this lesson’s video is “standing up and huffing/hissing. “ Then we can assign individual behaviours to one of the three labels categories.
Let’s use the “standing up and huffing/hissing” behaviour as an Example. In the video we decided as a team that this behaviour was “Undesirable.” This technique works well in a team environment. Each individual animal ends up with a list of behaviours. Each behaviour falls into one of these three categories. We then measure behaviour by the frequency it occurs. As a team we work to maximise desirable behaviours. We work to minimize undesirable ones. This helps us set goals. Measuring behaviour becomes straightforward. Ultimately we are much more easily able to measure our success.
Watch this lesson’s video. With an Australian Brush Tail Possum as an example, you can see how we implemented the above.