Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Rewarding penguins

Perched on a sunny rock in the middle of the penguin exhibit, I watched as the penguin trainer next to me quietly vibrated with happiness. She was overjoyed because a shy young penguin, who had never liked her much despite bonding well with some of the male trainers, had climbed into her lap. Being an animal trainer, of course, she wasn’t going to let the opportunity slide to reinforce this behavior so it would occur more often in the future. She was gently rubbing the penguin on his chest. This startled me: dog trainers insist that the best reward is food. Why was she using physical contact, something that is considered insufficient reward in most other species?

The answer lies just in the practicality of feeding these birds. Unlike sea lions, who go through several buckets packed with fish a day, the little African penguins this trainer works with may eat as few as two herring a day. That’s just two chances to reinforce behavior. I asked why they didn’t cut the fish up into tiny little pieces instead of offering them whole, but watching feeding time made that more clear: feeding a penguin is a careful dance of getting the food down their throat (they often refuse, and what was the favorite kind of fish yesterday may have fallen competely out of favor today) and keeping the trainer’s fingers from getting munched in the process. All the penguin trainers had nets of scars on their hands from interactions with these birds, and were very blasé about being bitten; I was bitten three times in the calves during my short six hours with the birds. (Once was my fault for getting too close to a chick when her mom was nearby, but I can’t quite see how I could have avoided the other two times.) Throwing little pieces of fish is impractical, not to mention difficult in a flock of 27 birds.

So the trainers gradually condition the penguins to like being petted, so they can feel that they are being preened as another bird would do it. Where food is considered a “primary reinforcer” (something the animal requires to live), preening is a “secondary reinforcer” (something the animal has been conditioned to like). In the penguin trainer community, however, there is debate about whether preening could actually be considered a primary reinforcer, as arguably keeping oneself clean of parasites is essential for life.

Either way, an hour spent on a rock surrounded by 27 penguins is an hour well spent.

6 comments:

  1. When I did my zoo rotation, I hated going with the penguins... they would go after you head and beak first, straight to the kneecaps!!
    They hated us vets... we treated some of the penguins feet, and it was reaaaalllyyy difficult.

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    1. This group of penguins was trained to present their feet when their handlers held them, for treatment. It looked like it worked very well! I saw a vet treating some of them and they were not aggressive. At a guess, the zoo you did your rotation in didn't condition them to be used to vets and common medical treatments?

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  2. Good dog trainers do use petting. Unfortunately, if you associate too much with trainers that focus on operant conditioning, you'll get as mechanical in your training as they are. There are serious problems with operant conditioning as a theory, and in practice. It is sterile, and you already can see that. There is more going on in learning than what operant conditioning proposes.

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    1. I agree that the best trainers use more than one method and that they adapt the method to the situation!

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    2. Consider that working dogs in all the traditional careers -- hunting, police work, SAR, stockwork -- are just not rewarded with food. You may nowadays see some use of food during the teaching phase of obedience for such dogs, but it's not relevant to the core work.

      Food is a weak motivator compared to the opportunity to engage with the work and a human master. Including, during break time, that maligned "physical contact."

      The "dog trainers" who believe that cookies are the "best" reward reveal their astounding ignorance of both canine ethology and the traditional wisdom of effective training, and their low opinion of what dogs are capable of.

      A lopsided devotion to just part of the already impoverished behaviorist quadrology is not the field sign of an accomplished dog trainer.

      The penguin trainers did not condition the penguins to enjoy preening. They habituated them to accept what was already inherently enjoyable from an unorthodox source.

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    3. It's probably not really worthwhile for me to engage in the already well-covered (on other blogs) debate about training methods in the comments of this blog. For those people who are curious about my position on dog training methods, which appears to differ greatly from Heather's, I've posted a lot in the past: http://dogzombie.blogspot.com/search/label/dog%20training

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