Rewards, Welfare and the Animal's Perspective in Training
Taking the animal’s perspective, and other highlights from the Train for Rewards blog party. Recently, 28 other blogs joined me in the Train for Rewards blog party to celebrate what we can do with reward-based training of our companion animals, and to encourage people to give it a try. There were some truly brilliant posts. Thank you to everyone who took part and helped to make it such a success for the second year in a row. It’s no surprise that most posts were about dog training, but cat training and the training of a pet pig also featured this year. And there were some common themes. Animal welfare The benefits to animal welfare when we use reward-based training methods instead of aversive techniques was a common theme. Changes in how we think about animal welfare – to include positive experiences instead of just trying to reduce the bad – have implications for how we train animals, Kat Littlewood writes . She says, “positive reinforcement is a ‘modern’ approach to learning and tr...