To practice and strengthen my mechanical skills as a trainer, last week…I trained chickens!
That’s right. I flew to North Carolina to attend a three-day chicken camp at TeamWorks Dog Training. There, my students were Ellen – a white leghorn, and Jane – a Rhode Island red. I was tasked with teaching them using clicker training to do several behaviors: peck a drum five times in a row, discriminate a red squishy toy from other colors, and to weave through three cones.
My partner (who also had two chickens to teach), Beth, trains dogs for cadaver/search and rescue; and is a volunteer deputy in her Mississippi hometown. Together we brainstormed in planning training sessions, gave each other feedback, and assisted each other’s training (like sweeping up crumbs on the table, moving chickens, and moving props). Not only did we laugh a lot, we learned a lot too.
Why train chickens to work on my dog training skills?
There are many reasons. For one, I think getting experience training different species is always helpful. There is something to gain from every opportunity. Every living being, even within the same species – including humans – learns differently. It’s good to challenge myself to figure out how to best help whatever student I am working with, to get what I am trying to instill.
Chickens, like all animals, do what works to get consequences they value. Their perspective is pretty simple. They are not focused on how you are feeling or their relationship with you. They will do behaviors that they learn will get them food. The faster and more times you click for a behavior they did (and then give them food), the more your chicken will stay focused on the lesson and keep trying. If the timing of your click is too late, your chicken will keep trying to do whatever it just did to precede the click. If your chicken is full (which can happen relatively quickly), it has no more interest in working. If your chicken is getting ready to lay an egg (which we were told happens about every 26 hours for hens), then your chicken will stop working. If your chicken was not clicked – and fed – fast enough, it is highly likely that it will pay more attention to the environment than the lesson, maybe even toss something off the table or fly away.
These are a few lessons Jane and Ellen taught me at chicken camp:
Plan ahead. Before we brought our chickens out, we set the timer, cleared the table, and had our treat cups loaded and our props where we wanted them. Even before then, we thought through how initially we would begin teaching. Would it be helpful to use a target? And what would that be? Would it be helpful to hold a prop in a certain way, and how would it be held? These are just some of the different questions we asked ourselves in advance to help us succeed.
Train in short increments. At chicken camp, we were given a timer to set for five minutes and told not to go over that as we needed to be careful to ration our food because their crops would fill. Having this limit meant you were not trying to get to the finished behavior in each round. Your goal was to get as far in the lesson as you could and try to end on a positive note. There were times when I ended the round earlier to regroup and think about another idea for trying to teach something, if Jane or Ellen’s learning curve (of what I was teaching) was not going in a forward direction toward my goal behavior.
A high rate of reinforcement keeps the learner engaged. I often already do this depending on the feedback I get from the dog as to whether it needs more or less information in any given environment or lesson. Chickens will have no problem letting you know if your reinforcement rate is too slow because they will simply stop trying. On the last day of camp, we had some extra time so we began working on teaching our birds to walk around three cones. The process began with us staggering the cones so the path around them was a lot clearer and easier. Then, the idea was to begin moving the cones more and more into a straight line. I was clicking and feeding them at a much higher rate when I was teaching Ellen and Jane to peck a drum and pick out a red squishy toy…and, as a result, I succeeded in teaching my birds to do those things relatively quickly. We ran out of time on Sunday before I succeeded in teaching my birds to walk around three cones lined up in a row. (They did learn to walk around the cones when the cones were staggered. See below.) Additionally, they would stop thinking about walking around a cone and focus on looking at what everyone else in the room was doing. If I had more time, it would have been great to see if I could achieve the goal with a very high rate of clicking/treating for smaller movements when the cones were closer in position to being in a straight line.
Use targeting and prompting to get behavior. Before you can build a reinforcement history for a behavior, you have got to get the behavior so you need to do whatever you need to do to get the behavior initially. There were times early in the lesson when I would pick up and put back down or jiggle something I wanted my chicken to interact with, to get her attention. I use targeting a lot in dog training. Teamwork chickens have been conditioned to be attracted to the color red so I began teaching pecking of the drum by placing red pieces of tape on the yellow surface. Once Jane (I didn’t teach Ellen this) began pecking it, I could systematically start removing some of those red pieces of tape and she would continue to peck the surface. Then I could begin building that behavior from one peck to five pecks using shaping.
Click for behavior and feed for position. I do this a lot already when I am training. Treat placement and delivery are important considerations when teaching behaviors. The click marks the actual behavior that you are looking for. After the click, whether you feed the treat directly to the animal’s mouth (maybe in a certain direction), place it on the ground, toss it, or hold it away from the animal can help make the lesson more salient. When I was teaching my birds to walk around the staggered cones, I would click for their movement in a direction and then hold the feed cup ahead and toward where I wanted them to go.
Practice proofing. In other words, once you have taught a behavior, then teach your student to do that behavior even with different circumstances. In the case of teaching Ellen color discrimination, I first taught her to indicate the red squishy toy when it was on the table by itself. When she was doing this reliably, then we added in the other colored toys. We practiced over and over, rearranging them and then even seeing if she could choose to ignore those other colors if the red toy was not on the table. The more you practice this, the stronger that behavior in different environments.
Yes, I trained chickens…and I am a dog trainer!
