Hey all! Have you ever wondered, “How did they get that animal to DO that??” It’s all about contingency management. What’s a contingency, you ask? A contingency is a relationship between a response (or a behavior) and some environmental consequence. (And by consequence, I don’t mean the normal, everyday definition of that word…like when a small child does something wrong and the parents say, “You’re going to get a consequence!” Nope, that has an implication that consequences are always bad.) Read more
Posts tagged: #julie grimes
Training Progress
I posted in March about my progress training the Ring Tailed Lemurs. At that point they were staying in their crate for about 4 minutes on average. I’ve worked up to about 10 minutes, including taking them right outside of the lemur house. Yay! But here is where it gets tricky- we spoke with our vet about giving them one or two treats the morning of their physicals. Since the lemurs have to be sedated, she does not want themRead more
Introducing Myself
Hello, Museum of Life and Science Family! Sherry already did a Spotlight post on me, but I wanted to introduce myself to everyone. I’m Dr. Julie Grimes, the Behavior Management Consultant for the Museum of Life and Science. I have a company (well, it’s really just me and my cell phone, but the IRS keeps insisting it’s really a company) called Animalworks, LLC that provides Behavior Management services to institutions with animals in captivity. I’ve worked with zoos, museums, scienceRead more
Spotlight: Julie Grimes, Behavior Consultant
Meet Dr. Julie Grimes. Julie has a PhD in Behavior and did her thesis work on the principles of animal training. She’s been a Behavior Management Consultant for many years working in the “zoo” world as well as with private individuals and their pets. She is also a faculty member in the Psychology department at Davidson County Community College. We’ve been working with Julie for almost three years. She helped us get our operant conditioning program up and running. At first,Read more
“Target” click
One of my favorite duties as an Animal Keeper is training with the Ring Tailed Lemurs. We train many of the animals at the museum using operant conditioning. When I first started here, I was familiar with training, I used positive reinforcement for several animals at my previous job- a Serval, African Crested Porcupine, Binturong, several birds including large Macaws, a Raven, Crow, Hawks and Owls. African Crested Porcupine Even Rats- But it wasn’t until working here at the Museum that I really got intoRead more