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.

Learning from marine mammal trainers

I’m in the middle of two weeks out of state shadowing sea lion trainers. (I am planning a detailed post on what that’s been like.) Back home with my dogs this weekend, I find myself enthusiastically applying some new approaches to their training.

• Plan each session ahead of time. The plan can be very brief: in Jenny’s case, “while I’m in the kitchen making dinner, I’m going to work on her recall from the living room and highly reward it,” or “when I go from the living room into the kitchen for a snack I’m going to work on her ’stay’ command.” But think about it ahead of time and know what your plan is rather than leaving yourself to think “here I am in the kitchen with some good doggy snacks to hand; what shall I do with them?”
• Know what you hope to accomplish from each session. “When I practice these stays, I want to be able to get out of sight for less than a second without her breaking her stay.”
• Keep working with your animals even if they are old and already well-trained. Your relationship with them will benefit from it! Jack loves training, and I have been focusing on Jenny and ignoring him.
• Be patient. Progress can take time. Don’t push it.

The sea lion group I worked with this past week was a well-rehearsed team. They worked animals singly or in pairs, depending on how they were housed, but often had five trainers working a session. Teamwork like that isn’t the norm in the dog training world, of course, because we don’t hire large staffs to train our dogs! But I could still take some lessions away.