Chicken clicker training - level three

by Lorraine Mon Jul 13, 2015 6:47 am

I've just spent a lovely weekend training chickens again, with a super bunch of people and a very special trainer, Chirag Patel. This time we had two different tasks again. My first hen was Nicky (little devil), I had to teach her to do the weave poles (not weaving on a loom as my friend thought when I told her on the phone). It's so hard not to move your body to will the hens to do what you want them to; they pick up on every little thing!

Here's Nicky being put through her paces:

[URL="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4c340QUOOIw"]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4c340QUOOIw[/URL]

My second hen was Angel. She had to learn to peck a given colour square from three choices, even if they're being moved around, but only when given a cue of the laser pen being turned on. She learnt her colours well, but struggled a bit with withholding the peck when the laser wasn't on. The slight twist in the tale was that we weren't allowed to train our own chickens. We were given one minute to tell our partner what to do, and our partner was allowed one minute to do what we told them. At the end of the session we were assessed on how well our own chicken performed the task when we did the hen ourselves (ie a new trainer to the bird).

Here's Angel when I had my assessment:

[URL="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6NRxV5rBsg"]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6NRxV5rBsg[/URL]