Equiosity

It’s mid-July. School is out which means it is a great time to have a return visit with Lucy Butler. Lucy is a special ed teacher who at the start of the 2021-2022 school year was given the assignment of working with all the students in her high school who had failed ninth grade the previous year. Lucy is also a horse owner. She attended my on-line clinics through the summer of 2021. Over Labor Day weekend she also attended our Science Camp, so she was very excited to apply the concepts of constructional training to her classroom students.

We did an interview with Lucy just as she was finishing up the first half of the school year. She was learning how to celebrate success and her students were thriving. You can listen to that interview in Episode 172 through 174.

At the half way point through the school year some of the students were reassigned to other teachers so a natural experiment was taking place. Some of the students would be going through the whole year with Lucy, others would have her part time, others would not be working with her at all in the second half of the year.

Of course we wanted to hear how the year turned out for her students. In part 1 of our conversation we review with Lucy some of the major lessons from the first half of the year and we learn how her students did through the full arc of the school year. If you have a child in school, you will very much want to listen to this podcast. (And yes, we do manage to connect the dots to horses.)

Last week we began a conversation that was centered around the on-line clinics. Even though the clinics are on-line and you go through them at your own pace, they are designed to be interactive. There are many places in them where people can respond to questions that I use to get a conversation going. And we’ve been having some wonderful exchanges that have created a rich resource for everyone in the courses to enjoy. Dominique has chosen a handful of these conversations to highlight. We talk about practical solutions as well as general principles.

This week’s topics include the use of the grown-ups-are-talking lesson to help develop emotional stability; starter button versus constant on cues; how to use the “yes” of the click in combination with the “yes” from the lead to build greater communication; and what does “No” look like and what do you do when your horse says, “No”?

We are beginning a conversation that is centered around the on-line clinics. Even though the clinics are on-line and you go through them at your own pace, they are designed to be interactive. There are many places in them where people can respond to questions that I use to get a conversation going. And we’ve been having some wonderful exchanges that have created a rich resource for everyone in the courses to enjoy.

Dominique has chosen a handful of these conversations to highlight. We begin with a comment from one of my posts: the conversation is not a burden. What does that mean? Then we look at the magnetic attraction of mats and how to keep that in balance with other behaviors you may want. Keeping behaviors in balance takes us to backing. And backing takes us to us to everything. To find out what that means listen to this week’s episode.

Episode 191 Michaela Hempen Part 2: Animal Welfare: Behavior Analysts Wanted!

In part 1 Dr Michaela Hempen introduced us to her day job. Michaela works for the European Food Safety Agency. This is a scientific agency provides risk assessments to give the European Commission or European member states the scientific basis for legislation. The EFSA looks at anything related to food safety, that includes animal health. The European Parliament has requested a scientific assessment of what the risks are for farm animals. These assessments will be the basis for legislation. The European Commission will be revising all farm animal welfare legislation, and part of this will be based on scientific assessments of their welfare. Michaela has become involved in this project which means she has been on a steep learning curve to familiarize herself with the field of animal welfare.

In part 1 we talked about preference tests. How do you measure what animals want? Part 2 begins with a discussion of stress and then Michaela talks about an important call for tender which her agency has put out. They want welfare scientists to design the road map for future risk assessments of animal welfare. They are looking for new ways of assessing welfare. The teams must include a behavior analyst, so we’re hoping this podcast will help get this information out to people in that field.

The links to all the references Michaela cited as well as the link to information about the call to tender are in the show notes at equiosity.com

We are joined again by Dr. Michaela Hempen, but this time, Michaela is not talking about Blondie and the cribbing project, but about her day job. Michaela works for the European Food Safety Agency. The EFSA looks at anything related to food safety, including animal health. It provides risk assessments which give the European Commission or European member states the scientific basis for legislation. The European Commission will be revising all farm animal welfare legislation, and part of this will be based on scientific assessments of their welfare. Michaela has become involved in this project which means she has been on a steep learning curve to familiarize herself with the field of animal welfare.

In this podcast we talk about preference tests. Whether it’s a laying hen or a horse how do you measure what animals want?

For a list of the references Michaela refers to in the podcast go to the show notes at equiosity.com.

We begin Part 3 with a discussion my favorite of Mary Hunter’s recent StaleCheerios posts: “Are you clicking for your own behavior or your animal’s behavior?” To find out what that means listen to the podcast.

This is part 2 of our conversation with Mary Hunter. We are continuing to use Mary’s recent StaleCheerios blog posts as the launching point for a series of interesting discussions. Mary’s April post: “Assess your Reinforcement Delivery” gave us a lot to talk about. I especially liked this topic because it let us talk about how much we can influence our horse’s balance through the thoughtful use of food delivery.

We’ve talked about this a lot for horses. In this episode we consider how the details that we focus on for horses might also be relevant to dog training.

We’re beginning a three part conversation with Mary Hunter. Mary has a masters degree in Behavior Analysis from the University of North Texas. She is the president of the Art and Science of Animal Training, the non-profit organization that puts on the Art and Science of Animal Training conference. Together with Dr. Jesus Rosales Ruiz she is the co-author of the PORTL manual. She is the presenter in our Listen and Learn audio course on Applied Behavior Analysis. And she is the author of the Stale Cheerios blog.

The blog went into a temporary hiatus while Mary worked on other projects, including the PORTAL manual. At the start of the year she brought the blog back and her posts have been such gems, I wanted to spend an afternoon talking to her about them. We begin our conversation not with the blog posts but with her masters thesis which was on desperation clicks and the effect they may have on training.

What do you do when your horse or your dog gives you a “no” answer to a request but you really do need a “yes answer” response? That question begins our conversation.

We also talk about piggy backing positive reinforcement training onto the skills and techniques a handler may know from other training methods.

Maple syrup buckets prompt the start of our conversation about environmental changes and the effect they can have on training. We talk about the way in which the a bad scare can begin to contract the conditions in which you feel safe working with your horse. We also describe how you can expand the conditions out again.