While our birds are having a well deserved rest over the winter months, Keepers Beckie, Jennie and Nick, as well as falconer Dolly attended an informative Animal Training workshop to further their understanding on the principles used when working with animals.
Photo by Shaping Behaviour
Jennie said “The one day course was fascinating and opened my eyes to different types of positive reinforcement training for animals/birds. Very informative watching live training demos and interactive learning that was great fun. overall a very positive day learning new skills and meeting like minded people.”
Dolly expanded “We had an informative talk on cooperative care; training voluntary behaviours which can assist in an animals everyday care and husbandry in order to improve their welfare. For example, training an animal to present part of their body for health checks or injections, rather than have to catch them up involuntarily which could potentially cause them stress or harm.”
A highlight of the day for all was watching some live animal training demonstrations; one showed progression in training of a Blue & Gold Macaw to tilt his head and receive an eye drop. Another demonstrated a completed behaviour of a pair of Galahs lapping the indoor arena, with a breakdown and demonstration of how this behaviour was trained.
Some interactive training games among the group highlighted some of the challenges faced when training an animal (or group of animals!) and how they can be managed & overcome. These also enabled our team to meet, learn from, and share ideas with animal keepers & trainers from other collections across the country.
Dolly concluded “I left the workshop with plenty of ideas of behaviours to begin training our birds and animals, and new training techniques to try, in order to achieve them.”
We would like to express our thanks to Banham Zoo for hosting this informative day and to Nicky Plaskitt of Shaping Behaviour for sharing her knowledge and experience with everyone.
We look forward to sharing any training progress with our followers in due course.