Animal training

Service animals

Service animals, such as assistance dogs, Capuchin monkeys and miniature horses, are trained to utilize their sensory and social skills to bond with a human and help that person to offset a disability in daily life. The use of service animals, especially dogs, is an ever-growing field, with a wide range of special adaptations. In the United States, selected inmates in prisons are used to train service dogs. In addition to adding to the short supply of service animals, such programs have produced benefits in improved socialization skills and behavior of inmates.

For hundreds of years elephants have been trained to work in activities such as logging and in warfare. Captive elephants can be trained to remember tone, melody, and recognise more than 20 words.

Entertainment

Organizations such as the American Humane Society monitor the use of animals such as those used in the entertainment industry, but they do not monitor their training. It is best known for its end credit disclaimer "No Animals Were Harmed" that appears at the end of the credits of films and shows.

The Patsy Award (Picture Animal Top Star of the Year) was originated by the Hollywood office in 1939 after a horse was killed in an on-set accident during the filming of the Tyrone Power film Jesse James. The award now covers both film and television and is separated into four categories: canine, equine, wild and special.

One animal trainer, Frank Inn, received over 40 Patsy awards. While there is a high demand for mammals for film and television, there is also a demand for other animals. Steven R. Kutcher has filled this niche for insects.

Companion animals

Dogs

Basic obedience training tasks for dogs, include walking on a leash, attention, housebreaking, nonaggression, and socialization with humans or other pets. Dogs are also trained for many other activities, such as dog sports, service dogs, and working dog tasks.

Positive reinforcement for dogs can include primary reinforcers like food or social reinforcers, such as vocal ("good boy") or tactile (stroking) ones. Positive punishment, if used at all, can be physical, such as pulling on a leash or spanking. It may also be vocal, such as saying "bad dog". Bridges to positive reinforcement, include vocal cues, whistling, and dog whistles, as well as clickers used in clicker training, a method popularized by Karen Pryor. Negative reinforcement may also be used. Punishment is also a tool, including withholding of food or physical discipline.

Horses

The primary purpose of training horses is to socialize them around humans, teach them to behave in a manner that makes them safe for humans to handle, and, as adults to carry a rider under saddle or to be driven in order to pull a vehicle. As prey animals, much effort must be put into training horses to overcome its natural flight or fight instinct and accept handling that would not be natural for a wild animal, such as willingly going into a confined space, or having a predator (a human being) sit on its back. As training advances, some horses are prepared for competitive sports, up to the Olympic games, where horses are the only non-human animal athlete that is used at the Olympics. All equestrian disciplines from horse racing to draft horse showing require the horse to have specialized training.

Unlike dogs, horses are not motivated as strongly by positive reinforcement rewards as they are motivated by other operant conditioning methods such as the release of pressure as a reward for the correct behavior, called negative reinforcement. Positive reinforcement techniques such as petting, kind words, rewarding of treats, and clicker training have some benefit, but not to the degree seen in dogs and other predator species. Punishment of horses is effective only to a very limited degree, usually a sharp command or brief physical punishment given within a few seconds of a disobedient act. Horses do not correlate punishment to a specific behavior unless it occurs immediately. They do, however, have a remarkably long memory, and once a task is learned, it will be retained for a very long time. For this reason, poor training or allowing bad habits to be learned can be very difficult to remedy at a later date.

Birds

Typical training tasks for companion birds include perching, non-aggression, halting feather-picking, controlling excessive vocalizations, socialization with household members and other pets, and socialization with strangers. The large parrot species frequently have lifespans that exceed that of their human owners, and they are closely bonded to their owners. Some birds of prey are trained to hunt, an ancient art known as falconry or hawking. In China the practice of training cormorants to catch fish has gone on for over 1,200 years.

Chickens

Training chickens has become a way for trainers of other animals (primarily dogs) to perfect their training technique. Bob Bailey, formerly of Animal Behavior Enterprises and the IQ Zoo, teaches chicken training seminars where trainers teach poultry to discriminate between shapes, to navigate an obstacle course and to chain behaviors together. Chicken training is done using operant conditioning, using a clicker and chicken feed for reinforcement. The first chicken workshops were given by Keller and Marian Breland in 1947–1948 to a group of animal feed salesmen from General Mills, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Trained chickens may be confined to a display (Bird Brain) where they play Tic-Tac-Toe against humans for a fee, invented by Bob Bailey and Grant Evans, of Animal Behavior Enterprises. The moves were chosen by computer and indicated to the chicken by a light invisible to the human player.

Fish and molluscs

Fish can also be trained. For example, goldfish may swim toward their owners and follow them as they walk through the room, but will not follow anyone else. The fish may swim up and down, signalling the owner to turn on its aquarium light when it is off, and it will skim the surface until its owner feeds it. Fish have also been taught to perform more complicated tasks, such as fetching rings, swimming through hoops and tubes, doing the limbo and pushing a miniature soccer ball into a net. Fish have been taught to distinguish and respond differently to slight differences in human faces displayed on a screen (archerfish) or styles of music (goldfish and koi).

Molluscs, with totally different brain designs, have been taught to distinguish and respond to geometric symbols (cuttlefish and octopus), and have been taught that food behind a clear barrier cannot be eaten (squid).

Wild animals

Zoological parks

Animals in public display are sometimes trained for educational, entertainment, management, and husbandry behaviors. Educational behaviors may include species-typical behaviors under stimulus control such as vocalizations. Entertainment may include display behaviors to show the animal, or simply arbitrary behaviors. Management includes movement, such as following the trainer, entering crates, or moving from pen to pen, or tank-to-tank through gates. Husbandry behaviors facilitate veterinary care. It can include desensitization to various physical examinations or procedures, such as:

• Cleaning
• Nail clipping or stepping onto a scale voluntarily
• The collection of samples (e.g. biopsy, urine)

Such voluntary training is important for minimizing the frequency with which zoo collection animals must be anesthetized or physically restrained.

Marine mammal parks

Many marine mammals are trained for entertainment such as bottlenose dolphins, killer whales, belugas, sea lions, and others.

In a public display situation, the audience's attention is focused on the animal, rather than the trainer; therefore the discriminative stimulus is generally gestural (a hand sign) and sparse in nature. Unobtrusive dog whistles are used as bridges, and positive reinforcers are either primary (food) or tactile (rub downs), and not vocal. However, pinnipeds and mustelids (sea lions, seals, walruses, and otters) can hear in our frequency, so most of the time they will receive vocal reinforcers during shows and performances. The shows are turned into more of a play production because of this, instead of just a run through of behaviors like cetaceans generally do in their shows. Guests can often hear these vocal reinforcers when attending a SeaWorld show. During the Clyde and Seamore show, the trainers may say something like: "Good grief, Clyde!" or "Good job, Seamore". The trainers substitute the word "good" in the place of food or rubdowns when teaching a specific behavior to the animals so that the animals no longer need constant feeding as praise for achieving the appropriate behavior.

Field research

On an experimental basis, wildlife researchers have employed animal trainers in their interactions with animals in the field.

List of notable animal trainers

Known for their influence on the circus:

• Sylvia Rideoutt Bishop (1920–2004), first female African American horse trainer.
• Dolores Vallecita (1877–1925), American vaudeville entertainer, and circus animal trainer.
• Hanno Coldam (1932–1992) Chief Animal Trainer with the State Circus of East Germany 1960–1990.
• Brothers Vladimir Durov (1863–1916) and Anatoly Durov (1887–1928) Russian circus animal trainers and founders of the Durov Animal Theater in Moscow.
• Carl Hagenbeck (1844–1913) a merchant of wild animals who introduced "natural" animal enclosures.
• Gunther Gebel-Williams (1934–2001) trained animals for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.
• Martin Lacey, (born 1947), animal trainer, owner of the Great British Circus, trained most of the tigers used in the ESSO TV advertisements in the 1970s.
• Martin Lacey Jr., (born 1977), son of Martin, an animal trainer and performer with Circus Krone in Munich.

Known for scientific research:

• Ivan Pavlov (1849–1946) studied the psychology of animal training and described the phenomenon of classical conditioning.

Known for earliest commercial application of Skinner's operant conditioning:

• Keller and Marian Breland, Animal Behavior Enterprises

Known for work in television and film:

• Nell Shipman (1892–1970) a Canadian film maker in early Hollywood.
• Frank Inn (1916–2002) trained dogs used in the Benji series.
• Brothers Frank Weatherwax and Rudd Weatherwax trained the collie Pal, which portrayed the first Lassie.
• Ralph Helfer
• Richard (Ric) O'Barry trained dolphins for the original 1960s Flipper television series, now opposes dolphin captivity
• Boone Narr, one of the most celebrated Hollywood animal trainers.
• Sled Reynolds, trained for Benji the Hunted, Dances with Wolves and Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book

Other:

• Warren Eckstein, animal trainer, author and radio personality.
• Dr. Ian Dunbar, veterinarian, animal behaviorist, and dog trainer.
• Victoria Stilwell, dog trainer, author and television presenter.
• Steve Austin dog trainer (particularly detection dogs), and television personality.
• Brandon McMillan (animal trainer), movie animal trainer, author, executive producer and dog trainer featured in the CBS television series Lucky Dog.
• César Felipe Millán Favela, dog trainer known for his Emmy-nominated television series Dog Whisperer with Cesar Millan.
• Dave Salmoni, animal trainer, entertainer, and producer.
• Akbar the Great, third ruler of the Mughal Dynasty in India, reputedly kept thousands of hunting cheetahs during his reign and trained many himself.
• Dawn Brancheau, (1969–2010) a Shamu trainer at SeaWorld Orlando. The film Blackfish focuses on orcas in captivity and specifically Tilikum, an orca that has been involved in three deaths.