The bears and lemurs have stumps to learn to station with and the little goats have spools!
Even Lightning, the donkey, gets into station training. Teaching “station” or “place” is a great way to get an animal to give you some breathing room when you’re training multiple animals at once.
Love this!
This looks photo shopped to me! 🙂
Amazing!! More info on how you get the little goats and Lightening to do this…. please.
Know trust in the keepers must be very important.
Hi DJ,
Training the donkey and goats to step up onto spools just takes a lot of patience and a really good idea of what the final behavior looks like. Goats are natural climbers, so teaching them to step up onto something doesn’t take as long to teach as some other behaviors. It started with a click and a treat when they interacted with the spools and then it progressed into a click/treat when they put a foot onto it, then 2 feet, then all 4 feet, and then finally, all 4 feet on the spool and staying up there until they’re released.
Lightning learned to step up in pretty much the same way. He had the advantage of already having learned a behavior to put his feet on an object when asked to, so he got right on the spools in less than 5 minutes.